111–120 of 252 posts
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.
If SimCity 4 marked the death of the series what was SimCity 2013?
My favorite SimCity 4 bug: There were several minigames where you would drive vehicles around in your city. If you drove a train, you would have to get from one point to another in a certain amount of time. Drive fire trucks to a fire to put it out. Stuff like that. Emergency vehicles had sirens that you could turn on that caused other cars to drive towards the shoulder and stop so you could pass them, which worked g…
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…
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.
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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
Creating a competent and usable level editor that you can publicly release is a lot of work, and unless you can somehow turn it into a major selling point for the game, you will be hard pressed to afford it. Dev time for games is expensive and if you're hacking together levels using a bunch of disparate tools including some third-party ones it might not really be worth it to make a tool that you can release.
Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.
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…
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Would be nice if they’d do the same for civ 6 - it’s burning hot on my MacBook (not sure it would solve the issue but worth a try)
It wouldn't.
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.
hehe, I tried to do that, but with a walking sim: https://rafsters.itch.io/all-hands
(inspired by a meeting being a retrospective to a meeting about a meeting)
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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.
I think we'll come full circle with generative ML tooling as games will have to compete in wider areas than just marketing & graphics.
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It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
But everything is relative. I started gaming in the early 1980s and so those 1990s/early 2000s games had incredible graphics compared to what I was used to. And I'm sure people who grew up earlier on things like 1970s Pong would think my 1980s games had amazing graphics. The argument "Games back then cared about gameplay rather than graphics" ignores that every era has tried to make graphics as good as possible; I'm…
Take clarity in communication. Pong is maximally clear: the background is black, an interactive object is white. Every white object is integral to the game. The further you move away from this ideal towards photorealism, the less clear this distinction becomes. You must add more UI elements on top to compensate for the loss of clarity, creating mounting tension between the functional and the ornate.