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Comment by tedeh | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a lot of SimCopter (1996) where you could also import your SC2k city and fly around and do missions. Mostly about helping people in various forms of distress by picking them up and flying to various destinations. Great flashback from 90's gaming, I remember tossing people out at random when flying which was always hilarious when you're a young kid. You could then pick them up and fly them to the hospital to get fixed up.

But I must say I think the original SimCopter looks slightly better graphically than this Minecraft version.

You can play SimCity 2000 online here, by the way:

https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-onli...

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Clint Basinger's Lazy Game Reviews always has excellent reviews of Maxis games.

LGR - SimCopter - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI

LGR - Streets of SimCity - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi60A2-PcpM

The SimCity 2000 Retail Demo Disk for DOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2b5HRRTH70

LGR - SimCity 2000 Network Edition - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9e3WlJChro

LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview

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

SimCity 30 Years Later: A Retrospective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrScy1icWjI

The Sims 1: An LGR Retrospective Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsob06m9p_4

Clint is great!

I can't help but think your username was inspired by LGR. Put another coin in the 'HN usernames are on topic' jar.

If only they make more games of this type

SimCopter wasn't the only game that allowed you to import from SC2k -- the city import is the only notable feature of the otherwise-unremarkable Streets of SimCity[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity

The music, the music was the other remarkable feature of streets of sim city.

"I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life."

https://youtu.be/uqnU8wAyHdQ?t=3999

that game had so much potential, so many bugs...

Streets of Sim City was great. I'd use a bug to create glitchy self-intersecting bridges I called "super springs" which launched cars straight up. The AI certainly didn't know what to make of that.

Streets of SimCity was great for making an outrageous racket by using the increased gravity cheatcode. Every polygon intersection would trigger the "suspension crashing" sound effect. Fantastic fun.

This was endless comedy for sure. The jank of the game only added to its appeal.

SimCopter was actually the inspiration behind this project, but what annoyed me was that the buildings mostly looked nothing like in SimCity 2000.

My biggest disappointment was the lack of Arcologies in SimCopter. If I remember correctly, the land they were originally on was just empty once imported.

Unfortunately that's the case in MineCity 2000 as well

I'm quite sure, that at least the one with the glass dome on top was in the game, because I remember trying to land on top of the glass dome.

I liked to play the SimCopter demo and thanks to it Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries still remind me of the game. I suspected (or maybe just hoped) that you could somehow import SimCity 2000 cities (I had the original boxed release, the first game I owned), but either it was not possible to do in the demo or I just failed to find the way (I was barely a teenager without the Internet access).

This is kind of like being a fan of early Simpsons, where exposure to one thing leads you to find out more about the thing they’re drawing inspiration from.

The association of Flight of the Valkyries and helicopters came from Stanley Kubrick’s Apocolypse Now.

And of course there's The Simpsons association of Apocalypse Now and Highway To Hell!

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

>> ‘Stanley Kubrick’s’ ‘Apocalypse Now’

…in what possible world; lol. I want to see that world.

I think you mean Francis Ford Coppola. :P Or ‘Full Metal Jacket’ - but your statement as it stands just makes me giggle.

Oh god, I am grown man who did not know the difference between these movies.

lol, it’s okay; we all make mistakes. :)

I only found it so funny because obviously, those are two of the most significant and important films / directors of all time; and the concept of ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Apocalypse Now’ is just both utterly fascinating and totally humorous.

Not sure what your age has anything to do with your comment or mine; though? Except that I guess that obviously as a grown man you’d have a much easier time identifying these two films and their directors than, say; a 20-year-old? Is that what you’re saying? Sorry; I think it just went over my head.

They may well just mean that making these sorts of mistakes feels worse when you're an adult. When children don't know the difference between a goose and a duck, or between N Sync and the Beatles, we don't think much of it, whereas suddenly as an adult this seems like a big deal.

I used to get Al Pacino and Robert De Niro muddled up, like badly enough that it made it difficult to follow Heat (which features both actors in major roles)! No, they don't look alike, I don't know why I couldn't keep that straight.

Whereas I had no problem distinguishing the real Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) in the Phantom Menace while apparently that plot point caught out other people I watched it with the first time - shrug.

My embarrassment comes from speaking with a cocky degree of self-confidence on a topic with only loose familiarity, in spite of life experience.

We have all been there

I remember it was possible to import your own maps in the demo... by just copying your own city over the demo one.

I preferred the flying toasters. I'm upset there's no classic flying toasters screensaver that uses the original graphics/style (the original had bagels, jumping toasters, and other animations), but not enough to make one myself.

Thanks for this, I usually hate to say sequels are bad (since Simcity 2000 was itself a sequel and much better than the original SimCity) but that series really went off the rails around when Simcity 3000 came out.

(It’s a shame we didn’t get a higher resolution version of Simcopter and Streets of Simcity instead of a long string of “The Sims” plus… well I quit gaming before they took GTA online, but I got the impression the GTA community is more into murdering sex workers for cash rather than equipping your car with an airfoil and a hopper so you can jump high in the air then glide down into areas of the map your opponent cannot reach.)

Ps I’ve never seen that domain you can also play Simcity 2000 at https://archive.org/details/SimCity2000

But where can we play simcopter? I need the ability to dangle my passengers out of the helicopter in a threatening way. It’s been awhile.

Someone actually went and created patches and installers to work with modern Windows for both SimCopter and Streets of SimCity.

http://krimsky.net/patchers.html

This will always be my absolute favorite thing about PC gaming. The lengths gamers will go to ensure their favorite games still work or even improve them, even when the original studio doesn't exist anymore.

> Playclassic.games does not intend to violate any copyright or violate any license of a game.

I thought there was a chance this site might have arranged licenses from the original publishers, funded by revenue from the (many) ads, but no, it appears to be good old fashioned piracy.

Edit: I tried Settlers, which has one of those copy-protection systems that involves entering information that can be found in the printed manual. Either I got very lucky, or this game has been cracked. Or, as the site euphemises it, “unblocked”.

Now, I’m sympathetic to the cause of video game preservation and use of abandonware, but the second you put ads around it and make money off it for yourself, you cross a line.

Plus, intent isn’t relevant. If the copyright holder doesn’t pursue, you’re fine. If they base their decision on “intent,” then fine.

Infringement is infringement, intentional or not.

There's been a trend of putting 'no copyright infringement intended' on top of blatant copyright infringement and thinking they're fine. This is nuts. Legally, it's about as sound a defence as chasing down a crossing guard in your car while shouting "no injury intended!"*

Copyright laws are nuts too, and I'm very empathetic to game preservation efforts, but this kind of boilerplate is legally nonsense. Don't make the mistake of thinking this in any way protects you, folks. It does nothing. If anything, you're indicating that you knew that the content was under copyright protection at the time you posted it and that you knew you didn't have permission to use it.

(* Not saying they're equivalent offences, just equally nonsensical defences!)

Yeah, lawyer here.

I suppose (and this is absolutely not advice) another thing to consider is "likelihood that someone is going to take time out of their day to sue you."

Do with that what you will.

Hard disagree. Severs aren't free to run. They're welcome to recoup those costs and even make a profit from providing a valuable service. Ethically they're doing nothing wrong by letting people play a 30-year-old game for free, even if they're in violation of our utterly insane copyright laws.

I didn’t see any statement on the site that the ads and donations were ringfenced to cover server costs.

Sure, I said they're welcome to make a profit.

A website costs a few bucks a month to run and the files should be distributed via BitTorrent anyway. This service could be funded by any single individual.

Sounds like you're volunteering! Have fun!

I never had SimCopter, but I did have the vehicle based one. I remember having fun playing in it in cities I made. Is it called Streets of Sim City?

I spent a lot of time in SimCopter as a teenager. It was always fun to get to explore the cities I had spent so much time curating in SC2k.

I remember being able to do this in SimCopter, but at least as a kid I could never get it to import right.

SimCopter was awesome! I had forgotten all about it. I didn't realize you could import SimCity cities!

God I love SimCopter. played it so much as a kid but I never got to the fanciest helicopters because every run hit a bug where I couldn't enter the hanger anymore, I was too young to know that patching a game was even a thing, if it ever got a patch to fix that.

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