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You know what SimCity is. If you somehow don't here's a primer: you know cities? Well what if there was a game which simulated them? Lately EA has taken this storied franchise and run it into the ground with something called "Cities: Skylines" taking the city-builder crown. This thread is for remembering the OG Citybuilders. Sim City  The one that started it all. This game started from a map editor Will Wright created for a shoot'em up called the Raid on Bungeling Bay. The map editor was so good Will Wright decided to make it its own game. Sim City is barebones, no-frills. The graphics means that one building represents an entire blocks. You only really have one kind of building for each kind of service. You have the basics of what will eventually become Sim City as we know it with the RCI demand system but not much more. It did however possess disasters which was the primary way of playing for most of the people who played it. It had a hell of a time getting released because Game Distributors thought it was unsellable due to its strange revolutionary ideas like "No win condition". Sim City SNES  This was just a port of SimCity but because it was actually ported by Nintendo itself as a first-party title they added some of their own touches to it. Enough that it's really its own game. The graphics are better. This is the first entry to have reward buildings when you reach certain population levels. Its also the first one to have schools and hospitals. Both are completely privatized though with both occasionally being built in residential areas by private developers. Sim City 2000  The favorite of a lot of people. Probably made the most radical improvements of any of the five versions. The game is no longer overhead but isometric. Land can be different heights. We can now build schools and have an actual educational system. We can now lay down water pipes (nobody liked this feature but its here to stay). We have neighboring cities we can build connections to by road. We can set different tax rates for different industries. We can have Urban Decay. There's a fake newspaper to find out how the city's doing and some in-jokes about llamas. Sim City 3000  Time to take out the trash. The big addition here is a trash system. They added farms but its impossible to get them to grow. You can now connect power lines and water pipes to your neighboring cities so that they can scam you with unfair deals and bug you mercilessly if you refuse to take them. On the plus side the biggest update is the graphics. SC3K probably has the most personality out of any of the entries in the city. All of the others have a brown color pallet. SC3K is brightly colored with pastels, you will occassionaly get petitioners from the citizenry who all have caricature-type portraits and give you a long speech filled with jokes and humor when they complain about your lack of parks for example. You can also select your terrain type and building style when you start up to make a asian-style city for example. Pretty cool. Sim City 4  Oh yeah. This is my favorite. They transitioned to 3d, gave you far more control over your budget options, with the big improvement being the idea of regions. You now have control over your neighboring cities and you get to decide how they build themselves and interact with your home city. Sims can now commute to other cities for work making bedroom communities possible. Farms are given their own zoning making small agricultural communities possible. They took out the terrain options so I hope you like playing in Southern California brown. Oh yeah its also a buggy unplayable mess. BUT, Maxis was extremely smart and did everything possible to encourage players to mod the game. They released tools to mod the game as easily as possible put a folder where you could put in your mods and have them work. Its great. Network Addon Mod is an absolute neccessity if you want to start playing this game and there's a bunch of other mods that are must-haves. Once you get your mods in order, and get in the habit of saving constantly (this game loves crashing to desktop) t is an absolute blast.-
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Oct 29, 2019 21:48
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A modpack of an enormous number of mods + their dependencies for people who just want to play a modded-up version of Sim City 4. Has roughly 3 Gigs of mods uncompressed but that includes things from new growable buildings, to new ploppables, to farm mods, to texture mods, to Network Add-on Mod. I can tell you as someone who's been really into modding that this takes 20 minutes to install and would take maybe an entire day, spread out over 3 sites, with you having a handwritten checklist to make sure you're not repeatting anything to do individually. Groly posted:What I've got is 'Oldfashioned3.0.rar'; here's a copy. Rupert Buttermilk posted:I feel strongly that the THREE frontpage articles about the Simcity Board of Advisors, written by Retronauts co-host Bob Mackey, should be in the OP of this thread. Eric the Mauve has some tips on using launch arguments to make your Sim City 4 crash less. Eric the Mauve posted:Make a shortcut that points to your SimCity4.exe, then create a shortcut to it, right click the shortcut -> Properties, and the target will be listed as "C:\{whatever}\SimCity4.exe". At the end of that (after a space) add -CPUCount:1 BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 21:48
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Sim City SNES I spent a shameful number of hours playing this. A few related items of interest: The main game has a sort of "soft" ending at a population of 500k but you can keep playing. Never got there myself but it turns out people have done speedruns of getting to that goal. Here's a TAS example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g6uPk-A1HY A NES version was developed in parallel to the SNES one but got scrapped late in development. Thankfully it was not lost: SimCity NES prototype, prototype ROM Fabulousity fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 22:35
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Simcity 3K was my first and I loved that game go death, was real upset when the disc no longer worked. I tried 2 afterwards because I heard everyone loves it more but just never could get into it. I had a lot of fun with 4 but the game crashes so frequently it becomes a test of patience
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Oct 30, 2019 01:17
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Hello and porn tips guzz ardo, my friends. I didn't know that you were supposed to drag power lines over the residential/commercial/industrial seedlings for an embarrassingly long time, and it's still extremely difficult for me to keep my people well-hydrated.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:07
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The last thing I remember are a bunch of my buildings shooting into space.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:28
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sc3000 is such a beautiful game. incredible spritework. amazing soundtrack. just the right amount of complexity. snes simcity is really fun too. i grew up with both and love coming back to them occasionally
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Oct 30, 2019 04:02
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While 4 has the superior mechanics, especially with the traffic analyzer tool, it's soulless and bland next to 2k and 3k. The music of 2k and the citizens and their personalities of 3k elevated the earlier games.
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Oct 30, 2019 15:31
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:While 4 has the superior mechanics, especially with the traffic analyzer tool, it's soulless and bland next to 2k and 3k. The music of 2k and the citizens and their personalities of 3k elevated the earlier games. I just placed the SC3k soundtrack into 4's. 4 is easily my favorite game, I loved making megaregions dotted with small rural farm towns in between. The biggest problem I had in 4 was that you could get your inter-region traffic bugged, where people that had one job in an adjacent region would get "stuck" transitioning, causing your cities to become unemployed. As far as I know, that bug wasn't fixed by a community patch.
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Oct 30, 2019 15:40
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My favorite thing about SC2k was if you went to your city advisors and got advice from the tax guys, you would hear booing in the background.
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Oct 30, 2019 17:31
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YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
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Oct 30, 2019 20:50
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I go back and read the The Deadly Hume's SC3k let's play every few years. It's a good laugh.
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Oct 30, 2019 21:36
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Sim City 4 Simcity 4 is a crazy game with mods, you can make loving anything you want, go all nuts with custom boulders and streams and turn the whole thing into SimCountryside. The earlier games were less messy and more "contained" and clear about how their simulation worked, 4 was kind of weird and had gameplay rules (especially about development and region commutes) that were opaque, but that also made the game feel a bit more deep.
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Oct 30, 2019 23:16
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While it's not really retro are we allowed to talk about how SimCity 2013 effectively killed the franchise (as it existed in games 1 thru 4 anyways) and could've deep sixed the entire genre if it weren't for a third party taking the torch? It seems like a settled discussion as far as the main games forum goes but at the same time it shouldn't be forgotten why we don't really have a SimCity "5" and will probably never see a 6 from whatever is left of Maxis. Because drat that whole mess was just peak EA triple A level fuckery and those unfamiliar with it should hear the tale.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:30
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Fabulousity posted:While it's not really retro are we allowed to talk about how SimCity 2013 effectively killed the franchise (as it existed in games 1 thru 4 anyways) and could've deep sixed the entire genre if it weren't for a third party taking the torch? It seems like a settled discussion as far as the main games forum goes but at the same time it shouldn't be forgotten why we don't really have a SimCity "5" and will probably never see a 6 from whatever is left of Maxis. Might as well. This subforum's not going to get a lot of traffic in general until they update the Awful App
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Oct 31, 2019 00:48
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Simcity 2013 sucked rear end but Skylines isn't really a good sequel either. Simcity doesn't work very well as a very complex 3D game, the same way Planet Coaster is an overwrought mess that isn't fun to play. It was all over when every city builder had to suddenly simulate every single inhabitant of the city instead of just abstracting them as traffic flows, when they did that the games became traffic management sims with too much realism to be fun, but not enough realism to be interesting.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:49
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There were a bunch of variations on the early games. Anyone play the PC version of SimCity with the videos? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_jaC20wtYs Or SimCity 2000 crammed into a SNES cartridge? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QoCc3xzn9s
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Oct 31, 2019 01:59
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i played sc2000 for the snes as a kid. it was ahh...not as good as simcity snes. good soundtrack though
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Oct 31, 2019 04:14
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SC2K is the one I played the most as a child. Floppy disks on a 486. My friends came over and we built cities together. The music. The llamas. I'm a frayed knot. I got the SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Planning strategy guide which explained in detail how the simulations worked under the hood, and went far beyond the game in discussing economics and the philosophy of city design, as well as interviews with all the developers. The strategy guide is a lost art, and it's the best book of that type I've ever seen.
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Oct 31, 2019 06:57
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rujasu posted:YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS! Wasn't there some reason why your roads would instantly start crumbling if you reduced your transit/infrastructure funding below 100%? Like one of the creators wanted to make a point or something.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:21
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YeahTubaMike posted:Wasn't there some reason why your roads would instantly start crumbling if you reduced your transit/infrastructure funding below 100%? Like one of the creators wanted to make a point or something. In earlier games anything less than 100% would cause random road tiles to start breaking throughout the city. I'm not sure about 3k and 4 because the first two trained me that YOU DO NOT CUT BACK ON FUNDING to the point I never tried it. Dunno if Maxis was trying to make some sort of larger point with that mechanic. Googling just turns up the meme and links back to a SA LP from over ten years ago. The SimCity 2000 manual was also amazing. Game manuals are a lost art form.
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Oct 31, 2019 23:37
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YeahTubaMike posted:Wasn't there some reason why your roads would instantly start crumbling if you reduced your transit/infrastructure funding below 100%? Like one of the creators wanted to make a point or something. Will Wright was really upfront about putting his personal political beliefs into SimCity and he was an absolute nut about mass transit.
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Oct 31, 2019 23:52
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does anyone still have the Goon Megapack for SimCity 4 sitting around on their hard drive? e: or GrandFromage's modpack? Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Nov 1, 2019 |
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Nov 1, 2019 02:40
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Fabulousity posted:The SimCity 2000 manual was also amazing. Game manuals are a lost art form. I'll keep the manuals for Sim City 2000, SimAnt, and Wing Commander: Privateer forever as mementos of my youth, long after I've lost all ability or desire to play the games themselves. I think my biggest problem with returning to city sims is that it has become more obvious the use-based zoning of SC is a terrible idea in real life, but mixed usage form-based zoning isn't very interesting as a game. Once you realize it's a bad idea to make everyone take an elevated highway to work, the game is trivialized because commuter traffic was the most interesting challenge.
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Nov 1, 2019 21:15
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SimCity 2013 was a bigger let down than Spore.
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Nov 2, 2019 20:47
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My first introduction to the genre was not SimCity, but a little-known game for the Colecovision called Fortune Builder which predates SC by at least five years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-dW1ztOxH0 It’s a bit different in that you’re not running a city per se, but a business. So you’re laying down factories and resorts and toll booths and a bunch of other money making poo poo in an effort to make the most cash. I think there’s a certain amount you have to get to “win” the game. You can also play 2 player where you compete on the same map. I was like 5 years old when I would play this at a friend’s house and my biggest memory was that I would always build a bunch of arcades everywhere and the parents would get pissed off and shut them down.
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Nov 2, 2019 21:06
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Mister Bates posted:does anyone still have the Goon Megapack for SimCity 4 sitting around on their hard drive? What I've got is 'Oldfashioned3.0.rar'; here's a copy.
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Nov 2, 2019 22:22
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PerniciousKnid posted:I think my biggest problem with returning to city sims is that it has become more obvious the use-based zoning of SC is a terrible idea in real life, but mixed usage form-based zoning isn't very interesting as a game. Once you realize it's a bad idea to make everyone take an elevated highway to work, the game is trivialized because commuter traffic was the most interesting challenge.
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Nov 2, 2019 22:31
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Olive Branch posted:How is use-based zoning a bad idea in real life, if you'd care to make a layman effortpost? I wouldn't (I'm far from an expert), but the gist of it (as I understand it) is that it is an inconvenient and car-centric development pattern (because you're necessarily putting everything you do far away from where you live). You can see this easily in Sim City 4 or C:S, at least; if you mix commercial/offices into your residential areas, many of your commuters will be pedestrians. The trend now is to move toward form-based zoning, which permits mixed usage. Form-based meaning stuff like building size and setback, i.e. you can't drop a six-story building into the middle of some single-story houses. But, you allow stuff like an apartment building with ground-floor retail, which can't exist in SC. Something like an aesthetically-pleasing small-town downtown is basically unsupported in-game. PerniciousKnid fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 2, 2019 |
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Nov 2, 2019 22:42
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SimCity 2000 had the awesome thing where you could import your city into SimCopter and fly around it. It was terrible, and also great.
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Nov 3, 2019 00:54
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There was also Streets of SimCity which was an oddity in the same family as SimCopter. They were both good ideas but their executions were ugly probably because the technology of the time just wasn't there yet.
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Nov 3, 2019 03:13
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did anyone ever play SimIsle, the one that was SimCity reimagined as a really cynical and borderline mean-spirited neocolonialism simulator where you destroy the rainforest and roll over indigenous cultures in order to produce wealth for Western megacorporations?
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Nov 3, 2019 06:34
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I used to have a boxed copy of SimCity 2000 on floppy disk, and in the meantime have picked up the CD version of it from a second hand store and SimCity for the SNES in its original box with manual as well.
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Nov 3, 2019 07:38
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SimCopter was kind of amazing for it’s time because it really carried over the map specs. It’d be really interesting to see Simcity 2000 and SimCopter remastered
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Nov 3, 2019 23:21
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Mister Bates posted:did anyone ever play SimIsle, the one that was SimCity reimagined as a really cynical and borderline mean-spirited neocolonialism simulator where you destroy the rainforest and roll over indigenous cultures in order to produce wealth for Western megacorporations? Yes. But as a dumb kid I could only win the scenarios that revolved around building tourist traps and hotels. Now I'm curious about the drug trade scenarios.
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Nov 4, 2019 00:12
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Groly posted:What I've got is 'Oldfashioned3.0.rar'; here's a copy. Can I put this in the OP? Used it on my new computer that doesnt have any of my old moda and its really good.
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Nov 4, 2019 02:27
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Shibawanko posted:Simcity 2013 sucked rear end but Skylines isn't really a good sequel either. Simcity doesn't work very well as a very complex 3D game, the same way Planet Coaster is an overwrought mess that isn't fun to play. It was all over when every city builder had to suddenly simulate every single inhabitant of the city instead of just abstracting them as traffic flows, when they did that the games became traffic management sims with too much realism to be fun, but not enough realism to be interesting. Yeah Skylines lost its appeal to me because of that. The sim was flawed in a lot of ways and it didn’t even manage to be fun for it.
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Nov 4, 2019 03:04
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Can I put this in the OP? Used it on my new computer that doesnt have any of my old moda and its really good. Please do. Hopefully all of the old packs will turn up.
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Nov 4, 2019 04:51
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Groly posted:Yes. But as a dumb kid I could only win the scenarios that revolved around building tourist traps and hotels. that game had a huge influence on my development as a person, seriously I played it at a really young age and played it like any other building game, just building to make my island bigger and more prosperous. I needed resources so I built mines and logging camps, I needed them processed into goods so I built sawmills and steel mills and factories and such, I needed unskilled labor and food to feed my labor so I 'recruited' the natives into my labor pool and trained them in modern industrial farming techniques. I needed electricity so I built power plants and burned the coal I mined for power. I needed way more labor so I built towns to house the large migrant labor population I was bringing in, and finally cities to house the skilled immigrants I needed to operate the more advanced machines and manage my native and migrant laborers. I displaced native villages to make room for ferry harbors and oil terminals, converted their ancient cities and sacred burial grounds into tourist traps, exported the local wildlife for profit. I got pretty good at it, too, I built a big and efficient modern economy. I stripmined the mountains and cut the rainforests flat, polluted the plains and rivers with industrial runoff, pumped smog into the air, laid great ribbons of concrete everywhere, and, at some point over the course of doing all this, I started to feel bad about it. The game does not sugarcoat what you are doing; you are taking something beautiful and destroying it. You are obliterating a people's way of life, ruining an ecosystem, repackaging all the wonder and beauty and knowledge you discover in the jungle into cheap kitsch and selling it to tourists, and sucking an occupied nation's natural resources dry to pad out the bank accounts of the transnational megacorporation you represent. The game never actually straight up tells you this is bad or that you are a bad person; it just shows you the impact, in a very matter of fact way. looking at my factory complexes and soulless cities standing in the middle of the vast polluted wastelands I'd created, the few remaining native villages barely hanging on on the edges, and the high score page helpfully telling me that I was doing very well indeed (accompanied by a depressing picture of a destroyed rainforest because the high score screen looks worse the better you do), I remember kid me having to process the idea that maybe making the numbers go up was not an inherent good. I'm honestly surprised the game even got made in hindsight, because it's not just a game with a message, it's a straight up blatant piece of anticolonialist political propaganda with a game layered on top of it. The game is quite good, which definitely helps advance the message, but there's no way anyone could get away with marketing something this blatantly political as an edutainment game in 2019. also the drug trade scenarios are great because if you send an agent with no Negotiation skills to try to negotiate an arrangement with a drug growing operation they kill your agent and mail them back to you in pieces, which is one of the only ways to permanently lose an agent in the game Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 05:06
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HopperUK posted:SimCity 2000 had the awesome thing where you could import your city into SimCopter and fly around it. It was terrible, and also great. SIMCOPTER 1 REPORTING HEAVY TRAFFIC. But, to actually contribute, my first exposure to SimCity came from the SNES version. I give it to Nintendo for that game because it sounds like it became the ultimate Trojan horse to bring fans in to the actual PC versions of the series. As a result, I fell instantly in love with the PC sequels, but SimCity 3000 is the pinnacle of the series in my opinion. SC3K also has an exceptional soundtrack that I'll even put on in the car on the way to work if I need a nostalgia fix. Specifically this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkMZtXFdlso. Technowrite fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 17:37
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