Live data from Hacker News

SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

rockpapershotgun.com

31–40 of 252 posts

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#33

I was a little surprised that they actually released an Apple Silicon version for it just a few months ago ( https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H... ) in spite of its age.

I think that's because surprisingly, it's still a marketable/profitable game. If only it weren't, then maybe it would eventually be open sourced. Only flaw I find is that due to it's age, it wasn't really designed with maximum concurrency in mind, and doesn't utilize the full capabilities of modern hardware, so the simulation slows to a crawl after a certain size.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#34
post #3

I think SimCity 4 is the best city simulator game. Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter ; however.

Cities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.

What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town.

I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.

What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town. I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections.

I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.

What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town. I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

Imagine a city builder where you can't convincingly recreate the rebuilding of Tokyo after WWII

This message brought to you by the "BreadTube[0] but its for cars[1]" gang

[0] A segment of very left-wing, libertarian-leaning YouTubers named after The Conquest of Bread.

[1] AKA Adam Something, Not Just Bikes, and a few other channels

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#39
post #3

I think SimCity 4 is the best city simulator game. Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter ; however.

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean with painter?

At a certain point in Cities Skylines you stop having any real challenge to make money or to keep your city running, so it becomes pretty much a sandbox. You can make the city look pretty much however you like instead of being bound by the needs of the city. In effect, you can just paint whatever kind of city you like onto the terrain. There's still a little challenge to deal with transportation but its fairly trivial to solve when you have effectively unlimited money in the game.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#40
post #5

I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare. Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it adde…

The ability to import a SimCity 2000 map in to SimCopter was amazing for the time, imo. I remember flying around cities I had worked really hard on thinking how the cross over between the two games was really cool.
Post reply on HN