Be Excellent To Each Other

I love Sim City. I love Sim City 2000. I love Sim City 3000. I love Sim City 4. I love Sim City 4 most of all. Yes.

And now Maxis have announced SimCity (sic) the next stage in making little electronic cities with tiny people in them. They've just put up the trailer. And it looks awesome. But Sim City has always had splendid trailers - but what of the game? One hopes it isn't going to be a Sim Societies; that ghastly aberation that made a mockery of the Sim City promise that your city will be different from anyone elses, and requiring of endless intriguing decisions. It has to be said though that the statement from EA that the game will be a PC exclusive gives me great hope that this will indeed be a playset of awesome.



I remember getting Sim City on the Amiga. I loved it dearly and recall obsessing over little beautiful harbours and island communities, with the industry always crammed into the corner behind a huge wodge of trees. I never deviated from this strategy over the following titles. At the time I recall being disappointed at the fact that Sim City 2000 had a sandy terrain, instead of a pleasing grassiness. Now, thanks to my love of Americana, it seems oddly suited. When 3000 came along I really began playing with the topography, creating winding hillside communities, and ever increasing mountain ranges to block industry off from poluting the city. The fact that this almost inevitably led to day long commutes never really bothered me. True, the addition of fiddly piping and subway systems were teeth grindingly annoying, but that was more than offset by the fact that the city now really looked like a city.

Then came Sim City 4. I really loved the way you could micromanage, adjusting individual budget sliders so that your tiny town could afford the odd vanity. The way buildings decayed when crime and polution rose and land values plummeted was a genius way of providing instant visual feedback and the terrain never looked more plausible. It had its faults of course - building on hillsides was immensely frustrating to achieve without creating weird looking box-like concrete canyons. And there was the traditional odd Sim City suicide where your city hits a certain point where nearly everyone is old and retired, and the entire thing breaks down. Plus the 'Drive' feature was rubbish. Aside from that though it was an endlessly entertaining bag of customisation with a mod scene that made every other gaming community bar Freespace look hopelessly limited. The harbour town buildings with the little wharfs, restaurants, fish markets, lighthouses and marinas meant you could accurately recreate Amity Island from Jaws if you so wanted. I even found buildings and maps from my beloved small town Oregon holiday haven of Bend, and now could place my favourite brewery in my city.

And the disasters rocked.

But Sim City 4 came out God knows how long ago. It's been half a decade at least and though Tropico 3 and 4 have sated my city building needs somewhat, they lack the true complexity and sheer unique variation of the true Sim City title. (Let us not speak of Cities XL - their entire style is wrong-wrong-wrong! Who are those hideous Jimmy-Hill faced Euro-trash people wandering around in their cartoony cars? Ugh!)

So now I'm tempted to fire up Sim City 4 and begin afresh and see what I can make of a 'Beexville' with a Metalangel sort of visual diary. God, I hope SimCity is awesome. It's my favourite game series ever. Pleasebegreatpleasebegreatpleasebegreatpleasebegreat.

I bought SimCity 4 on release date. I had a new, albeit not a gaming, Desktop PC.

10 years later, my new laptop now just about runs it properly, for the first time.

Simcity was excellent. We played it whenever we could at school, and we all wanted it at home.

I bought a new video card just for Simcity 2000... plus, it was the basis for SimCopter!

I bought Simcity 3000 from a shop in Liverpool Street station, on my way to be interviewed for a course at UEA. The weakest of the series, though the music was the best (ILY Jerry Martin)

Simcity 4 should be great, except the commuting logic was so broken it was hopeless. Plus, you could just do the Rush Hour missions over and over for bottomless money.

Simcity 5? I can't wait to see the DLC, it might be worth playing in four years.

Heh, the original Sim City was my introduction back on the Amiga, same as Pete.

Me and a couple of mates would studiously avoid homework round at the one of us whose parents could afford an Amiga, and spend hours and hours building cities, with us acting as real life advisers to each other Must be going back to 1989 or so I'd think there.

Later on it was Sim City 2000 on the PC, when you had to get a SVGA card with 512K of RAM and the investment felt well worth it with those lovely crisp 640x480 graphics and the dramatic cities you could build.

The last one I really played in anger was Sim City 3000, properly ragged the arse out of that one, for some reason Sim City 4 just never grabbed me in the same way. (I did spend a lot of time with Sim City 4, but never did that 'totally maxing it out' thing that I did with Sim City 3000.)

Would love to see a new 'proper' release in the series, it'll be fascinating to see what they can do with modern PCs

How many people used to play with disasters turned off? I could never bear to see my carefully crafted city ruined by chance events!

FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS
*earthquake*
FUNDS
FUNDS
FUNDS

FUND

edit : O/

I always wobbled between the two, on the one hand it hurt so much when an earthquake struck in just the right place to find the bit of my city where the fire cover wasn't ideal, so I turned them off, and then I felt a bit cheaty, so I turned them back on, and so on.....

I want to know when we will all be moving in to arcologies for real.

2013?

Bah.

Fixed.



Apart from the nuclear meltdown (which made parts of the city permanently uninhabitable) , none of them were especially destructive.

The real pain in the backside was the power plants wearing out as introduced in SC2000. Everything else, from bridges to police stations lasted forever, but oh no, the single most expensive and vital objects in the game would stop working, every 50 years. Except, wind and hydro. Solution: Build a ridge of land, use water tool to put a physically impossible waterfall along it, build a huge dam. Ridiculous.

I thought it was five and then the earthquake?

Four, as I recall it. EA seem to have removed the free Java version because they're complete cunts.

Fascinating. That individual vehicles and objects actually represent things being done and not just eye candy is a huge step forward. The randomly spawning vehicles, even in SimCity 4, were disappointing to say the least (especially a freight train larger than the screen materializing out of thin air, driving to the end of the track, and vanishing again). This seems to put it more on a par with Transport Tycoon, where that wasn't just a representation of, say, a bus... it was an actual bus carrying actual passengers that would result in income when it reached its destination.

The framerate seems to be terrible for all the pointless graphical effects.

10 minutes of gameplay goodness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YceL2C4TW4Q


I must say, I thought it'd look a bit prettier than that. Plus it doesn't seem to move too well, seems a bit stuttery. I appreciate it's an early version but the game comes out in Spring! Surely they'd be showing the game off on a top end PC, right?

Not that any of this puts me off at all.

WANT WANT WANT.

Not fussed about the fairly average graphics, they're plenty good enough to do the job. And you've got to remember that it's got to keep everything moving at a decent pace in massive cities, far in excess of what we've seen in that video.

It looks like it runs smooth enough for an alpha build, and you've got to remember that YouTube videos are capped at 30FPS which never does videogames any favours.

I JUST WANT MORE SIMCITY!

There was a bloody good piece in this month's Edge. The screenshots looked wonderful.

Watched the video, things I like:

Curvy roads!
Tilt shift not as intrusive as I feared.
I like the modular expansion of the wind farm. 120mph wind speeds though? What?! That's a category 2!
The glassbox simulation aspects genuinely seem to work.
I like the idea of making a city prioritising one style, ala a low-rent Reno gambling city.
Tram lines!
That beautifully relaxing classic Sim City lite-Jazz I love so much, yay!

Things I bit my lip nervously about:

The maps just don't seem big enough.
I don't like how there's already connections down everywhere. I'd prefer to start from scratch.
No terraforming stage, does this mean the maps are pre-cooked?
There didn't seem near enough residential as compared to commercial plonked down.
Buildings were going too many stories, too often for population level.

Things that are clearly alpha:

90 degree train track connection. Don't worry kids, I'd be hugely surprised if that wasn't placeholder.
Graphics a little rough around the edges, but still a while to go so I'm not worried.

Well, I'm a little less excited now than I was from the initial trailers, but I'm still cautiously optimistic. My big concern is that this is going to be more 'Sim Town' than Sim City and that you'll end up with residential area the size of Weston Super Mare with inexplicable huge skyscrapers in a feeble attempt by the game to make a too small map ruleset look like a metropolis. I'm also worried about the need for multiplayer, with cities sharing resources, etc. It could be great, but it could equally be terrible. Look at the disaster that Cities XL was, all thanks to foolish multiplayer resource swapping that was incredibly broken.

There's still a while to go before it's out. Part of me actually wishes they'd push it back until late Spring to put more features in and make it a bigger size. I fear that in won't match the complexity or the modding potential of Sim City 4. However, I am optimistic of a quite different and pretty good game.

I just want it to be excellent. That's all. Sim City is my fave franchise. Please be excellent. Please.

I didn't like the 90 degree train track connection either! Argh!

It looks promising, but I am concerned that EA are going to DLC the fuck out of it and so lock it down to prevent mods. SimCity 4 was transformed by mods, and the idea of a dripfeed of Sims-style expansion packs will irritate me.

They've promised added mod capability in an update post release. Not that I entirely trust 'em, but they've promised.

It's totally going to be DLC'd to fuck. Just so long as the base game is expansive enough, I don't mind. I really want to believe everything's going to be awesome, no fear, etc. But I remember Spore.

Christ, biggest let-down ever.

Sure I saw somewhere that pre-orders get the so-and -so pack for free. So yeah, DLC and it's already planned.

I'll be able to accept some latter DLC if it's useful and city-enhancing. For example entirely new landscape ecologies (c'mon high desert plain!), proper expansive new architecture packs (mountain village, mexican town, etc.) and new concepts and functions ala the rather good Sim City 4 Rush Hour expansion.

But I have a dread fear it'll be mainly 'Lol Meerkat Manor!!!' plopables.

Download the McDonalds store pack with three varieties of McDonalds restaurants and get the Sir Christopher Wren pack half price!

It'll probably be country themed shit with one crucial, desirable item thrown in.

Buy our 'ISTANBUL' Theme Pack which includes the commute-destroying Sim Teleporter!

Pete - they confirmed no terraforming. This may be related to the limited natural resources thing. They also confirmed no chance of laptops meting requirements so now I really need a New house.

No terraforming, eh?

Well, it's not going to replace Sim City 4 then. That's a game that has some tremendous user maps and a brilliant terraforming mode. Even if it is horribly tricky to install the new maps.

I'm still going to get Sim City if it gets great reviews. After all, the first couple didn't have a proper terraformer, only really number 4. But if I ever want to recreate Bradford, PA or Bend, OR. (the terrain maps are out there online!) then I'll have to turn back to SC4.

I thought that video looked pretty good, but it does seem like sim town rather than sim city.

It's a 100% get from me, but if it is going to be DLC up to the eyeballs (as The Sims 3 is, currently it costs around £200 to buy all the content via Steam) then i'll just pirate it...

Don't worry, EA will be happy to sell you one of dozens of 'terrain packs' based on real DEM data to expand the options for starting a new city!

Why is that such an issue?

As long as the 'base game' is expansive enough I have no problem with high-quality DLC being offered at a reasonable price. (See also, for example, BF3.)

It's an issue if they deliberate avoid putting in a much loved feature specifically because they think they can make more money out of selling you what you would previously have been able to do for yourself.

Well it looks like the terraforming has been left out more on a technical basis than any intention of selling it as DLC later on.

We're all just second-guessing anyway really, it remains to be seen what they release the game with, and what they add as DLC later on.

Mainly because EA don't have a history of DLC of high-quality at a reasonable price. They have a history of one small upgrade that is interesting, padded out with shit, and then charge 75% of the original price of the game for it.

Off the top of my head the last EA games I've bought DLC for are:

Bad Company 2
Burnout Paradise
BF3

All of those have had high quality, reasonably priced DLC.

I can't comment too much on Sims3 as it's not a game I've ever played, but I got the impression that the DLC was a raft of cosmetic stuff that you could pick and choose from.

As for the new Sim City game, I suppose we'll have to just wait and see, but I'm certainly not filled with any sort of dread with regards to an imminent gouging.

DLC is an absolute fact of the gaming landscape now, it's never going to go away, and as long it's done properly, I don't see it as a problem either.

(But even here I guess we're not gonna reach a consensus, I thought BF3 Premium was (and is!) pretty damn good value for money, but you guys seem to think it's the most unconscionable rip off.)

I agree that those games listed don't have a bad record of DLC.

However I would be extremely surprised if Sim City doesn't use The Sims 3 model of DLC, which is price gouging crap. IMO.

Oh, it's entirely speculation. I'm just saying it very much would be a bad thing to remove a feature for the purpose of enabling DLC sales.

If it's a key and/or 'expected' feature, then yes, I agree with you.

And if they leave terraforming out to sell it as DLC later on, then yes, that would suck balls.

But even then there's a question of 'leaving out' and 'not ready', games have to ship at some point, and DLC is a way to release stuff that in the past would have been left over to a sequel or perhaps never be seen at all.

Personally speaking I can't think of a game off the top of my head whereby there's clearly been a massively cynical release of an 'uncomplete' game, only to finish it off with DLC later on, although that's not to say it hasn't happened.

So 'don't buy overpriced shit you don't want' is the general advice then?

Mrs Bulge's Sims expansion collection has its own shelf.

Two years ago when I first got my laptop I was sorely tempted by the Sims 3 superduperpack on Steam which would have more or less been the equivalent of its own shelf worth of DLC. £119 even with the huge discount.

My work laptop is a quad cored i7 with really quite good 3d chip, and it's not even a gaming one, though it WAS a grand ex VAT. Bit silly to nlanket-statement them.

I don't know how to play Sim City. Like, get started. On the original.

The very first one, you mean?

Yes. I decided to get some classics I missed out on, first go round. PC gaming!

Where did you dig up a copy of the original Sim City from?!?!?!

Oh, it could be SC 2000. It's old, I know that much...

Well they all follow the same basic procedure.

You need a power station and an industrial zone, preferably in their own area as they cause pollution. And then on the other side of town you want some residential and commercial zones. Make sure everything is connected with roads and has got power, get a police and fire station down, get the water supply going (you need to do the below ground view for that), and take it from there.

You can't really 'lose' in the traditional sense, apart from running out of money.

In many ways it's quite common sense, stuff that makes the sims happy are parks and libraries and museums, but they cost money. Schools and hospitals improve health and happiness, and so on. Residential zones with low crime and in a nice location such as next to a lake, will attract higher value property, etc etc.

Just play around with it

I played Sim City quite a bit on the speccy. Since then it's been far too mind bogglingly complicated for me.

Build a power plant, four or five industrial zones, eight residential zones and three commercial zones. Connect them all to the power plant with power lines. Build roads around and between them. The city will start to grow when you unpause the game.

That really is all there is to it. Police, fire, railways, airports, seaports, all come later.