Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

rockpapershotgun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 252 posts

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#51

Post by kmeisthax »

Dalewyn wrote: post #21
NBJack wrote: post #17

This is a stretch. 4 was alright, but it also marked the death of the series. 3 was great, 2 was legendary. There's a great reason Cities: Skylines became the spiritual successor.

Simcity 4 was the high point, it was its putrid and inbred successor that killed off the franchise.

"Putrid and inbred" correctly describes the DRM scheme. The game underneath that crud was trying to go way more in-depth by building a sim game out of an RTS engine. They wanted to, say, have Sims in your SimCity actually drive to work and back and get stuck in traffic jams. Problem is, the average computer in 2013 couldn't actually handle simulating that many units. This isn't inbreeding, this is being overambitious. Shooting for the moon, and landing not in the stars, but in the Salton Sea[0].

[0] I have no clue if any viable launch trajectories from Cape Canaveral support such an emergency landing.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#53

Post by bombcar »

Rury wrote: post #33
crashingintoyou wrote: post #20

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.

It's even more amazing because EA didn't do the port, Aspyr did, and they're still around to do an Apple Silicon port.

I wonder how it affects mods, I might have to dive back in ...

I also note it's on the Mac App Store so that's probably why they're upgrading it.

Still, worth the buy at Steam for $2.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#54

Post by bombcar »

carabiner wrote: post #42
bombcar wrote: post #3

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

All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.

IIRC there was a soviet sity simulator that had some of that; but the games usually just wash it away with "cost to bulldoze".

It would be fun to have a game where you have about as much control as a "real" city and mainly what you do is pull levers behind the scenes to get people to do what you want.

SimCity meets Dwarf Fortress, perhaps.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#55

Post by wtvanhest »

xixixao wrote: post #44
genocidicbunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 3000 was the best showing, though perhaps that's looking at it back later when performance is not as much of a concern. It felt like an upgraded SimCity 2000, rather than a big change in game mechanics that 4 was.

Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.

Red Alert 2. That was such a fun game. One thing that has been majorly lost in games now is the ability to create levels too. I loved the creation part

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#56

Post by Aeolun »

xixixao wrote: post #44
genocidicbunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 3000 was the best showing, though perhaps that's looking at it back later when performance is not as much of a concern. It felt like an upgraded SimCity 2000, rather than a big change in game mechanics that 4 was.

Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.

When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#57

Post by bombcar »

spideymans wrote: post #34
sidewndr46 wrote: post #23

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.

CS gets way closer to "car free" than anything but the original SimCity (where you could just use rails instead of roads everywhere) - you need to use the Parks and paths and some pretty sneaky design, but you can get upwards of 80% using walking/transit. Takes a lot of work, however, and some mods.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#58

Post by dingusdew »

Aeolun wrote: post #56
xixixao wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.

When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.

This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#59

Post by bombcar »

nextaccountic wrote: post #43
sidewndr46 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a Tropico game, I think it's Tropico 4, that is very realistic in that you don't need to literally make roads and asphalt all the things, and roads don't need to be car-centered; you just make buildings and people will walk, and you add a road network to make things more efficient, but it isn't required Also curved roads and buildings don't need to be right besides the road, etc. Sim City 4 is more like a sub…

I want free-form zoning, where it's not tile based; CS can do something kinda like it but it's still just tiles in the end, with empty space between.

Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#60

Post by bombcar »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #39
jtwaleson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trivia…

Exactly this - the "how do I not keep going bankrupt" part of the game is relatively short (similar to the "how do I not starve the first winter" in Dwarf Fortress) and with a bit of care you have so much money rolling in you can just do whatever you like.
Post reply on HN