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SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

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Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#191

Post by titzer »

jvanderbot wrote: post #174
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.

Homeworld, quake 2, Half-life, counterstrike, starcraft, diablo, 97 to '00. I cannot think of a more revolutionary span of games over 3 years.

Quake II was 1997 and Quake 3 1999 (!). Also, you mention Counterstrike, but the original Half-life and Unreal were pretty revolutionary too.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#192

Post by mrfinn »

kmeisthax wrote: post #51
Dalewyn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overambitiou…

I kinda surprised that no one mentioned this game in this thread before, and the few mentions is to bash it. I enjoyed a lot SimCity 2013, don't know why they create a mess with the version number and DRM was a pain in the back for sure, but the game for me was beyond amazing, effectively it was possible to zoom in and follow any citizen in the daily routine, graphics and music were amazing as well, never seen after that nothing close in this genre.

PS. Ok I saw that the problems were related with a buggy DRM system requiring Internet connection on top of that, I was lucky enough to begin playing when that was allowed to opt out.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#193

Post by hgsgm »

DonHopkins wrote: post #157
chongli wrote: 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…

Absolutely! SimCity 2000 was a masterpiece, striking the perfect balance between the immediate grokability and comprehensible simplicity of the original SimCity "Classic", plus the judicious addition of rich immersive CD-ROM quality graphics and sound. SimCity 2000, much like Hunter S. Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark…

Will Wright designed Sim games, and PP Don Hopkins implemented platform ports.

Who programmed the original games? Is that unimportant? Did Will Wright program?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hopkins

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#194

Post by dr_orpheus »

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.

I think Age of Empires 2 will always be in my top 10 list of favorite games. It's in a similar vein of just upgrading graphics, but I also really enjoyed the spin-offs built on the same game engine: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Age of Mythology.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#195

Post by zamadatix »

When I was growing up I obsessed over this game for a few years. Of course, being very young, I didn't quite understand how the game intended you to launch it... it was a 2 disc install (for the deluxe edition at least) and there was something about the disc order. It was either something like "1 -> 2 -> auto launch on completed install but 1 -> launch after" or the other way around "1 -> 2 -> auto launch on completed install but 2 -> launch from desktop after" or something silly for the DRM.

Regardless, young me decided it would be easier to uninstall the game with "keep saved games" checked and re-install the game every time I wanted to play. And that's precisely what I did, hundreds of times. I'd come home from school, boot up the computer, start the install, go do other things, and then that night play Sim City 4. One day I came home and couldn't find the case the game came with, the case that held the product code. After searching around for a while I couldn't find it, and never did )it likely got tossed cleaning up one day). I figured I might as well try to remember what the key was and typed out: 25MM-TNK4-EH6A-6V6K-KHWN. At this point it's nearing 20 years and it's still living rent free in my head, albeit the last 2 groups may be swapped around... would have to try it to be 100% sure. Not too many months into doing this did I figure out what I was supposed to do with the discs, and then later how much easier it was to play a cracked version of the game in the first place. The rest of my history with the game was trying to fit far too many mods into 512 MB of RAM.

All that history and love for the game aside, I do think either Sim City 4 or Sim City 2000 were the greatest city builders relative to when they came out. On the other hand, I think Cities Skylines is the greatest City Builder of all time as an absolute. The shear scale without having to hop between simulations in a region, the more freeform nature of what you can build, and the additional gameplay systems (like flowing water) all on top of being a more modern game with a more modern interface make it shine. Of course, no two city builders focus on exactly the same gameplay so some may feel differently depending if they e.g. want to care about details like transportation along the way or just want to see the city grow.

Also, given this is HN, if any of the modding folks responsible for things like NAM/SAM/NWM/CAM/etc are around thanks for all the additional free fun those many years ago :).

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#196

Post by hgsgm »

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…

Pocket City is a much simpler City Painter with practically no gameplay at all, except for an annoying drag through "quests" to build 1 of everything.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#197

Post by bleep_bloop »

izacus wrote: post #159
bleep_bloop wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The minimum requirements for Civ 6 are far below the capability of the M1 series macbooks so I don't know why you'd think so.

Because that's not how games work - they don't run "at minimum capabilities" and they run their game loop constantly, rendering graphics. This means that it will almost certanly saturate at least M1s GPU and probably at least one of P cores. At that stage, even the M1 starts drawing a lot of power which needs disspiation. Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are sti…

I've played plenty of games on M1 that are graphically more impressive and have higher base requirements than Civ 6.

Seems that others have pointed out that Civ is more CPU bound than GPU so I don't know if that's something that could be optimised without completely changing the mechanics of the game or if Civ is just an unoptimised beast but then again the M1 is way above the minimum required spec for Civ 6 so i don't think it's some unfeasible concept.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#198

Post by whywhywhywhy »

billfruit wrote: post #156
chongli wrote: 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 problem with city building games is that they are far too gamified. In reality construction takes years, even decades for many infrastructure projects. Because of that, the challenge of solving the problems of 25 years in the future is not well represented in many such games.

Try Workers & Resources, it's more about managing a whole supply chain and being self sufficient than spending money. You can tackle it at different levels but at the most complex you're making the cement then trucking it to the building site.

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#199

Post by cptcobalt »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #150
Sargos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The others help your point but Cities Skylines is memed because it's graphics over substance as it's basically a city painting game with shallow mechanics that most people use to make little city dioramas which is still fun but not deep gameplay.

People mostly complain that it’s not SimCity but the gameplay is fine. It’s in no way shallow. Just different.

It has deeper micromanagement than, say, Planet Coaster, but it is not on the level of gameplay loop micromanagement as the like of SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon

Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago

#200

Post by sofixa »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #168
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.

The "best (according to me)" games are still 2D or 2.5D: Roguelikes Dwarf Fortress Factorio EU4 My theory is that deep gameplay and AAA 3D graphics are mutually exclusive because deep gameplay fundamentally requires "tile grids" of some kind, which don't lend themselves to AAA 3D graphics. (Diablo 1 and 2 kind of railed against this by taking the approach, "Hey, what if we took a tile-based roguelike and rendered it…

Depends on the genre. I think few people can seriously say Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't have deep gameplay, and it is beautiful.
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