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Mister Bates posted:that game had a huge influence on my development as a person, seriously So did you end the game with a good high score? Cause that's the important part 
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Nov 4, 2019 18:15
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also the SimIsle midi music was really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86vH4YsgK2s fun fact, this was actually originally recorded as high quality 48khz 16 bit audio and this lower quality version was supposed to be used for the 'lite' install for people who couldn't fit the full install on their computers, but the data tapes with the high quality versions of the songs were lost at some point during the production process, and the 'lite' version of the soundtrack ended up being the only one available when time came to ship the game it's a shame, I would have loved to hear what this sounded like in its intended form
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Nov 6, 2019 02:05
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Fabulousity posted: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. Streets of Sim City was loving bananas. I'm not sure now and wasn't sure as a child whether or not it was actually good, but it clearly felt like it didn't make sense and was somehow a blast to play. I wonder where I put my copy.
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Nov 6, 2019 12:20
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Mister Bates posted: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. John Hiles posted:We built another simulation called SimElection, and no one got to see because the sponsor, who I won’t name, was horrified when it came out! I made the mistake of bragging that SimElection would help people to understand that given enough money and a dog that looked like Rin Tin Tin, you could make Rin Tin Tin become the president. And they were horrified and shocked and said, “We can’t have our name associated with that!” And they actually had it destroyed, the entire stock, the entire product.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:25
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Sim City 4 is the best mechanically but so incredibly sterile after SC3K I could never really get into it. The jazzy soundtrack and caricatures went a long way and the Sim models did not. e: Streets of Sim City was broken garbage but super fun anyway RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 15:30
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Oh man SimIsle. That is a fascinating write up. I never got that far as in my experience the game interface was so bad I was baffled by construction and movement. I did manage to get a few of my park rangers executed by drug lords with that "sent back to you in pieces" message, which was scary for a Sim game. Uh, isn't this franchise about llama jokes? I wonder if the game development wasn't supervised so the team could put in lots of politics and ultra violence that wasn't on brand for Sims. Anyone play SimTower? So much potential but buried in frustration. Build a condo and want to raise the sale price? Better click on it the half second before it sells. There was a hidden way to have a luxury three story lobby but it was impossible to implement without starting a new building. I don't think the game had time acceleration. Digging an excessive amount of parking searching for buried treasure was a workable strategy. Also putting in lots of apartments then leaving the game running for days was a great way to stockpile cash. I'd frequently build movie theaters then forget to change the film for years, so workers showed up each day to unquestionably play the same film endlessly to an empty room.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:09
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Anyone play SimTower? So much potential but buried in frustration. Build a condo and want to raise the sale price? Better click on it the half second before it sells. There was a hidden way to have a luxury three story lobby but it was impossible to implement without starting a new building. I don't think the game had time acceleration. I played SimTower so much. To this day, I am tempted to go back to playing SimTower, and to just keep it running in the background like an idler game. The trouble is that, at some point, with a better understanding of the game, it feels like it's just about elevator management in same way that Cities: Skylines feels like it's fundamentally just about traffic management. gently caress it, I'll start another tower and report back. It was one of my favorite games from the era before I really Got Into Gaming (i.e. when I was a preteen).
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Nov 6, 2019 22:15
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For anyone wanting to try SimTower there's the very similar abandonware title Yoot's Tower available here.
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Nov 6, 2019 22:32
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There is also a modern remake called Project Highrise on Steam
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Nov 6, 2019 22:41
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Technowrite posted:SIMCOPTER 1 REPORTING HEAVY TRAFFIC. Uhoh SimCopter 1, the Centering Tool's got you in its sights!
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Nov 6, 2019 23:09
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Oh man SimIsle. That is a fascinating write up. yeah the SimIsle interface was really bad even by the standards of the time The agent selection bar just has their name and portrait visible, if you want to see their skills you have to actually select the agent, and there's a couple dozen different skills and dozens of different agents with differing skill combinations that are all useful in different situations, so you needed to basically memorize your team's entire skillset if you didn't want to have to spend a bunch of time clicking through their portraits trying to find your guy who had Local Flora or Industrial or whatever. Construction involved moving an agent with the construction skill to an open field site somewhere, clicking on their parked vehicle, selecting the building you wanted them to build, and then placing it, after which they'd start construction. You have to do everything through agents, there's very little you can do directly without sending someone there to do it for you. Even poo poo like importing shipments of building materials requires you to have an agent with the appropriate skills present to do the ordering and handle the delivery and distribution. It's kind of a neat mechanic in theory - your team can't be everywhere at once and their skillsets are highly varied so you need to make sure you have the right talent in the right place at the right time to do what you need to do - but in practice it could get irritating. In addition to the skill visibility issue, there was no multi-select, and actions requiring two or even three agents could crop up occasionally. There's also a finite amount of agents in the game, no way to give them new skills (they can be trained but only to improve existing skills), and multiple ways to get them permanently dead, which means it's entirely possible to gently caress yourself into a soft failure state where you can't do anything because your last remaining agent with a vital skill like Construction got blown up in a retaliation raid by drug cartels or swallowed up by the jungle or something. The exploration mechanic was another one that was kind of weird and hard to figure out. You could send agents with the Exploration skill deep into the jungle in search of various things (there were tons of unique discoveries you could make and some of them were extremely powerful, like lost ancient cities that had huge tourist development potential or previously-thought-extinct animals you could put in a game reserve), but there was no way of telling in the interface exactly what their detection radius was or even exactly where they were located in the jungle, so it was impossible to approach it in any kind of systematic way or plan out a strategy, you just clicked around at random and hoped you hit something. I loved it and it's got a few little bits of absolute brilliance buried in there but it's not a game I find myself coming back to play occasionally 20+ years later like SimCity 2000 or even SimTower. It could have been a masterpiece but there were just too many niggling little issues, good ideas that weren't implemented well or couldn't quite be made to work. It feels like a passion project that a team was developing on the side because they wanted to make it rather than because they had made a business decision to make it, with all the good and bad that entails.
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Nov 7, 2019 01:38
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Dang that does sound like a cool concept. It wasn’t as environmentally themed but Tropico was a heckuva lot more accessible. SimCity 2000 was one of my favorites. Highlights (keep in mind I was 8): -playing the Flint, Michigan scenario, where it starts with protestors upset about high unemployment. So you’re supposed to build up industry and give them jobs. I defeated the mob by lowering terrain and flooding them. -the manual (great book as someone pointed out) mentioned being able to fire air traffic controllers. Not getting the joke, I covered the map in airports and carefully clicked on every building trying to find the fire button. -playing with money cheats meant no taxes, but my Sims would still sometimes complain about them in the newspaper. -I didn’t realize the music was random, so when a slower sadder jazz theme started I thought my city was upset and mass built parks -saving up for my first archeology and foolishly putting it by the airport, right where planes take off. 
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Nov 7, 2019 02:00
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Technowrite posted:SIMCOPTER 1 REPORTING HEAVY TRAFFIC. Hell yeah that song was my jam
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Nov 7, 2019 02:09
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Hyrax Attack! posted:-I didn’t realize the music was random, so when a slower sadder jazz theme started I thought my city was upset and mass built parks 
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Nov 7, 2019 02:19
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Hyrax Attack! posted:-playing with money cheats meant no taxes, but my Sims would still sometimes complain about them in the newspaper. My friend and I discovered the infinite money cheat in Sim City SNES, so we could build anything we wanted with no taxes or loans, one time we decided to build an entire city of just stadiums.
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Nov 7, 2019 02:50
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Vavrek posted:gently caress it, I'll start another tower and report back. It was one of my favorite games from the era before I really Got Into Gaming (i.e. when I was a preteen). Fabulousity posted:For anyone wanting to try SimTower there's the very similar abandonware title Yoot's Tower available here. Mister Bates posted:There is also a modern remake called Project Highrise on Steam My day basically followed these posts in order. Found a copy of SimTower you could play in a browser, couldn't remember how to get the extra-tall lobby. Decided to figure out a DOSbox solution so I wasn't playing in a browser. Remembered I had Yoot Tower installed and working already. Looked back at this thread and decided to see if Project Highrise was better than what I remembered from the last time I heard of it. Verdict: I have been playing Project Highrise all evening. Thanks for the posts about SimIsle. I played it a bit, but never really got into it, and I think never fully grasped the environmentalist message. It just came across as clunky, difficult, and unfun. SimFarm was more straightforward. Now I want to track down a copy of Isle and toy with it ...
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Nov 7, 2019 05:13
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SimFarm was great, until you realized that oranges are king, and nothing ever comes close to their ease of production and income. Just gas the hell out of them the first year, and your precious oranges will take care of themselves until the end of time, for some reason.
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Nov 7, 2019 13:20
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THE BAR posted:SimFarm was great, until you realized that oranges are king, and nothing ever comes close to their ease of production and income. What? Did I get some broken version of SimFarm where strawberries were everything that you just said oranges were?
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Nov 7, 2019 18:56
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rujasu posted:My friend and I discovered the infinite money cheat in Sim City SNES, so we could build anything we wanted with no taxes or loans, one time we decided to build an entire city of just stadiums. All residents age 18-35 are required to register for the NFL draft.
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Nov 7, 2019 19:25
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YeahTubaMike posted:What? Did I get some broken version of SimFarm where strawberries were everything that you just said oranges were? And oh man, SimTower (or Yoot Tower depending). I used to love that game and can totally see how it was an "idler." I loving HATED having to micromanage each and every room and could never understand why apartments would go from blue to yellow to red over time. I think I was able to get up to four stars but never higher. The fact terrorists or the mob also planted bombs in your building also strikes me as off yet original now. What other Sim game (other than SimIsle I guess) had mob violence like that?
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Nov 7, 2019 19:31
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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. They are  *chili burp*
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Nov 7, 2019 19:46
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A reason I have good will towards the classic SimGames is Maxis was cool about porting them to Macs, which was all we had available at home. SimAnt was also a fun time. Lots of educational content such as scent trails, life cycles, and drone subtypes, but it was still accessible and fun. The campaign mode of starting an ant hill in the yard and seeking to destroy the red ants and conquer the house was great, but weirdly most difficult at the start and super easy once you had a few yard tiles under control. Highlights: -messing with the red ants by plugging their access holes with pebbles, then sealing off any escape attempts. -the brutal ant lion and spider death screens. Especially the zoom on the spiders face with a horrifying sucking sound. Lots of fun when switching ants to take over the spider and go to town on the reds. -it was inefficient to steal unhatched red eggs and take them to your nest to be devoured, but worth it.
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Nov 7, 2019 21:04
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Hyrax Attack! posted:A reason I have good will towards the classic SimGames is Maxis was cool about porting them to Macs, which was all we had available at home. I loved Sim Ant so much, and I agree with all of these points. There really was no challenge once you had a few squares in the yard. gently caress the reds! 
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Nov 7, 2019 23:22
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forcing the humans to move out and then just taking over the entire house was a blast
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Nov 8, 2019 02:48
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Hyrax Attack! posted:A reason I have good will towards the classic SimGames is Maxis was cool about porting them to Macs, which was all we had available at home.
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Nov 8, 2019 03:00
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Whenever I think of SimFarm’s music I think of Kraftwerk’s Ohm Sweet Ohm for some reason
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Nov 8, 2019 04:40
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Vavrek posted:Thanks for the posts about SimIsle. I played it a bit, but never really got into it, and I think never fully grasped the environmentalist message. It just came across as clunky, difficult, and unfun. SimFarm was more straightforward. Now I want to track down a copy of Isle and toy with it ... it's quite easy to find, in both formats (a Windows and a DOS version were released, with slight differences, and there are a few different versions of the Windows install CD with slight variations), but you'll either need the DOS version and DOSBOX or a virtual machine running an older version of Windows, as it just flat out does not work on Windows 7, 8, or 10. the Windows version is generally considered superior but it's also quite a bit more work to set up a Windows virtual machine than it is to run dosbox which is essentially just plug and play., if you do decide to play around with it, some tips: transportation of goods and resources is not abstracted, it actually has to physically travel across the map from location to location, which makes planning placement of your industries and resource extractors very important, especially for more complex chains. you can extend the range of your logistics network by using warehouses to collect and distribute resources. the warehouse is the most powerful building in the game, use the warehouse, love the warehouse, the warehouse is your friend. be careful because multiple polluting industries close to each other will compound on each other and generate worse pollution than the same industries would if they were spread over a wide area - you're gaining speed, efficiency, and profitability but at the cost of even more environmental damage. training your agents to maximum skill makes them much, much, much faster at almost everything and is definitely worth doing when you can spare the cash. tourists are also not abstracted and have to physically go to their hotels and the tourist attractions, make sure all your tourist structures are reachable from each other. building hotels on the beach gives you an additional beach tourist attraction building for free, and it's right next to the hotel so it will have a commute time of zero. it's seriously extremely powerful and it's worth it to build as many of your hotels on beaches as possible. once you've pressganged enough native labor, gold and silver mines are an excellent source of money in the early game, they create heavy pollution and have finite deposits but they just convert directly into cash and are quite valuable. you'll need heavy machinery. to get heavy machinery build a heavy industry complex - you won't have the labor or resources to operate it and that's fine, you just need it to act as a hub for heavy machinery imports in the early game. heavy machinery is used for a ton of poo poo and you will need to be able to import it to get your economy off the ground. train the poo poo out of native villages, you will need both the unskilled labor you can 'recruit' and the food surplus they produce. be careful not to take too much labor from one village because it tanks their happiness and if they hate you they might start working with the drug cartels. if villages grow large enough some of the surplus population will split off on their own and found new villages, which you can in turn train up to produce even more food and labor. towns are an excellent source of unskilled labor and can later evolve into cities which are the only reliable source of skilled labor, but be careful, they're a huge ongoing investment and can be a gigantic money and resource sink if you don't develop them properly. once they are developed they will automatically generate unskilled labor for you without you having to pressgang anyone, which is handy, especially in the late game when you need tons of workers and recruiting them manually would be tedious. the wildlife preserve is the most powerful building in the game, borderline gamebreaking good once you've got it fenced in and have hired some game wardens to limit poaching. you cannot build it, it is built automatically when your explorers discover an endangered species. these are not present on every map but it is worth it to have your agents comb the jungle until they find one or run out of places to explore, it can just about sustain your entire economy when fully developed. slash and burn logging can reveal hidden things in the jungle but your explorer agents can do this just fine without wrecking the environment, meaning it is only useful if you somehow managed to get all of them killed. it does clear land for use in construction but you should already have plenty of clear land. non-sustainable-yield logging is also generally pointless unless you have a serious labor shortage; you can produce the same amount of wood with less environmental destruction by just setting all your logging camps to sustainable yield and building more of them. it takes more workers but if you're training the native villages like mentioned earlier you should have a huge labor surplus at basically all times. for the love of god make sure you have told your industries to distribute their resources internally instead of exporting them before you use them to import goods, or they will immediately sell and export the poo poo you just imported Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 05:47
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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. "In theory, increasing the length of school buses should make our kids smarter." Originally a good chuckle in 2007 but now in 2019 it's something you'd hear being said by the Department of Education with no irony.
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Nov 8, 2019 05:59
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YeahTubaMike posted:What? Did I get some broken version of SimFarm where strawberries were everything that you just said oranges were? Orange (and apple to a lesser extent) trees sold high, and with low maintenance required. Strawberries sold extremely well, but with wild price fluctuations, and you had to blast them with gas all year long. You also lost space by having to put wind-breaking shrubbery everywhere. Trees didn't care about wind. But you really couldn't do wrong, as long as you weren't betting on livestock.
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Nov 8, 2019 09:21
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FuturePastNow posted: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. That sounds amazing, think I am going to pick up a copy. Sank many hours of my childhood into SC2K. I deeply miss strategy guides - because modern games get patched and updated so often, they just aren't feasible. I remember both the Warcraft 2 and King's Quest one had both a step-by-step guide as well as one that put the info in narrative form - I used to love just reading it.
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Nov 8, 2019 12:17
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Found some old screenshots of SC4 cities that I made at one point, I spent way too much time in that game:   
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Nov 8, 2019 13:19
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Shibawanko posted:Found some old screenshots of SC4 cities that I made at one point, I spent way too much time in that game: These look incredible.
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Nov 8, 2019 13:57
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The final two are from the same city, you can see the same tower in the lower left corner, the trees changed seasons. I was a bit of an amateur at the time and didn't do enough to prune similar buildings. I made way crazier ones, especially some of my countryside maps, but these are the only ones I could find. This is what I mean when I say that I don't like Cities Skylines. 3D and individual agents lead to having to sacrifice too much in terms of city size and visual detail.
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Nov 8, 2019 14:26
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Shibawanko posted:The final two are from the same city, you can see the same tower in the lower left corner, the trees changed seasons. I was a bit of an amateur at the time and didn't do enough to prune similar buildings. I made way crazier ones, especially some of my countryside maps, but these are the only ones I could find. I made a huge tourism beach and district that had hundreds of abandoned buildings and twenty rotating ones that had anything in it because it just doesn't care about it at all by default so like 100 tourists are all you get.
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Nov 8, 2019 15:55
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Shibawanko posted:Found some old screenshots of SC4 cities that I made at one point, I spent way too much time in that game: I would live in these cities.
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Nov 8, 2019 17:18
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Unfortunately last time I tried to mod SC4 it didn't really work, the mods don't play nice with modern operating systems
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Nov 8, 2019 18:24
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Shibawanko posted:Unfortunately last time I tried to mod SC4 it didn't really work, the mods don't play nice with modern operating systems The best way to play it now is probably to just run a virtual machine dedicated to running it with the right OS, specs, etc. I didn't realize it came out 16 years ago now (2003). It is absurd that no other city simulator has looked as good as SC4 (not even cities skylines). With the right modpack and some careful planning you can make incredibly convincing looking screenshots.
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Nov 8, 2019 18:43
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I've been debating whether to start a Sim City 4 LP. What would be the best way to take screenshots in game. The ingame tools awful.
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Nov 8, 2019 18:46
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piratepilates posted:The best way to play it now is probably to just run a virtual machine dedicated to running it with the right OS, specs, etc. Yeah it's the number 1 game I want to see resurrected as a remake. There's a game on Steam called Citystate that sorta looks like it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/ .. but still doesn't have the same scope. I also think the region view is very important, I loved crafting countryside stuff and just generally play it like SimVillage, the countryside lets you be way more creative in terms of scenery. Making a new version of SC4 is probably hard though and beyond the abilities of the average indie team, you need to make a lot of handdrawn assets, map texturing and transformation tools, create rules for how buildings conform to the landscape, some kind of traffic abstraction, regional flows, it's probably very labor intensive and kind of amazing that SC4 got made in the first place.
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Nov 8, 2019 18:57
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Which SimCity let you drive a tank and fire into your own town? It was either 3 or 4.
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Nov 8, 2019 19:21
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