SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
SimCity 2000 has almost none of that. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. So you can sit back (with a cold beverage of your choice) and enjoy a nice relaxing time playing mayor and seeing your little city develop before your eyes!
Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play.
There's also the Endless series from Amplitutde studios, Endless Legend, Endless Space 1 + 2, that are of a vein of Civ games, plus they've recently brought out Humandkind (though to mixed reviews unfortunately).
The popular sim genre in recent times has been more 3rd person building mixed with exploration, there was the wave of multiplayer ones like Minecraft, Rust, Arc Evolved, etc. And then single player ones like Subnautica, etc.
So there's stuff out there if you want it, it's just not a very popular genre at the moment.
Yes, technically you can still play a bunch of cool 4X games, but most people still making them (with the exception of like, CAs Total War, which also notably defocused the 4X part in favor of RTS combat) is copying the Paradox approach and Paradox is largely known for its absurd depth and mechanics... which unfortunately translates to the games devolving into spreadsheet simulators with fancy graphics.
Civilization was the right mix between "flavorful civilizations", "fun endgoals" and "reasonable to achieve victory against the computer". Most 4X games, because they copied the Paradox approach, kinda suffer from the fact that they pretty much demand immediate mastery of the systems if you want to succeed, unless you're playing with friends (in which case you have more control over each other's bumbling and one person can just hyperfocus on learning one system, while the other can focus on another.)
Its the difference between SimCity and Cities: Skylines. SimCity (before the final game) is a sandbox toy that lets you build a super dysfunctional city but y'know, as long as the taxes don't go in the red, you're doing fine! Cities: Skylines otoh has way harsher feedback tools if you don't build a highly functional city. That's fine if you're already tuned in on SimCity as a game and crave a higher challenge, but if you're new to these kinds of games, Cities: Skylines is just too much.
The budget mechanics are a joke, before long the player has practically endless money.
One rather unknown point that, while not directly related, highlights this is how in C:S your income depends on your current budget. I.e. you magically receive less income if you have 10 million in the bank, and receive more if you're in debt. That point alone makes objectively comparing and strategizing unnecessarily hard, and it feels like the game really does not want you to work with numbers instead of paint buckets.
Take clarity in communication. Pong is maximally clear: the background is black, an interactive object is white. Every white object is integral to the game. The further you move away from this ideal towards photorealism, the less clear this distinction becomes. You must add more UI elements on top to compensate for the loss of clarity, creating mounting tension between the functional and the ornate.
When a bush has the gall to shoot you.
The big new Zelda that just came out does exactly this. They took the shell of the last game and spent six years just making things to flesh out the game much further.
You'll be surprised, but gaming magazines used to say the same thing(s) even in the 80s. It's a platitude.
Fun thing: A famous game developer of that time, but can't remember which one, once said that "the name of game companies aren't creative enough". /shrug
I’d say quite a few. Just not AAA publisher shovelware.
Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.
This is probably true as well, but the internet editor map editors use are often very different than what they would offer the community, requiring a lot of polish compared to what's used internally (and we all know that the 20% last polish takes 80% of the time) Although there are some games that offer the very same experience, like what Crysis had (with the CryEngine Editor) and ARMA series.
FWIW, I have a pet theory that WoW took over at that point not because of the MMO concept (which already existed), but because their UX was so smooth. That was the first MMO that "just worked" to understand what you were trying to click. The others at that time would take multiple tries to click an object correctly.
In any case, the success of WoW is what changed the direction of gaming a few years after all those games came out, so I'm agreeing with you that it was an incredible era.
I cannot think of a more revolutionary span of games over 3 years.
Super Mario Bros 3
Zelda II
Mega Man
John Madden Football
Battle Chess
Tetris
Contra
Double Dragon
Street Fighter
Castlevania
Metal Gear
Metroid
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Final Fantasy
The Legend of Zelda
Dragon Quest
Super Mario Bros
Adventure Island
Paper Boy
GauntletRoguelikes
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 in isometric 3Dsortof?" At the time, that isometric 3Dsortof was state of the art, I guess.)
The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.
However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up.
All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.
I think we'll come full circle with generative ML tooling as games will have to compete in wider areas than just marketing & graphics.
These games were a product of their time and you definitely do have an age based selection bias!
99 pages long my friend.
Checkout the manual for StarCraft, which gives you the entire backstory!
SC3K is similar enough in structure to SC2K that it can actually load SC2K city save files directly; SC3K being a relatively strict superset of SC2K in terms of available elements and their sizes certainly doesn't hinder that backwards-compatibility at all.
The only things that would actively break when you did this were related to maximum terrain steepness for underground elements (metro, water pipes), 90-degree rail connections would sever (at least, graphically), and hydroelectric power generators as they're the only power building not implemented.
The arcologies were also dropped from SC3K, but to be fair those were mostly just designed to be population boosters in SC2K- something that wasn't necessary in SC3K now that the simulator was allowed to keep track of more than 250 buildings (or at least, so the manual and the query tool say).
Earlier versions of SimCity 2000 are more limited in this regard as arcologies after the first 150 special buildings don't count towards the population count; the later versions do, however.
Graphics hardware at the time wouldn't be able to handle a city builder with the depth and scale of SimCity 2000.
Heck, it wouldn't have been able to handle a 3D version of the original SimCity unless the draw distance was limited to like 300 feet.
For proof, check out SimCopter. I can't imagine trying to play a city builder with those graphics.
You don't have to do that. Leaving the sliders at defaults work just fine. You only need to tweak them if you wanted to micro-optimize spending, which rarely needed given how easy it is to make a profitable city to start with.
The open creation of any layout you could think of was my favorite aspect of the game.
Anyone have a particular recommendation on how to play SC 2000 today on Windows 10?
That said, there are a lot of games where the details of the simulation compound on themselves in interesting ways (Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, DC:Barbarossa, Shadow Empire, Paradox games). I enjoy those sorts of games, more minimalism and abstraction isn't always more fun.
In other words an alternate history of population and human development.
A multi-player Sim Earth.
But to do it right, I'd want it to be the scale of a moderately large nation like the USA. You'd buy plots of land one square mile as you expand. The game world would be seeded with a major highway and railroad system that you could not remove, just add connections to.
I'd want traffic to be simulated in the same depth as Cities: Skylines, and have freight have to move over a thousand miles to reach destinations.
But most importantly, I'd want the entire game world to be seamless. You should be able to pan from one side of the country to the other.
But such an ambitious game would require immense processing power. I don't know how I would scale it.
I am asking, because I think I haven't seen the multiplayer support in any railroad/transport-tycoon game. I remember in Railroad Tycoon 2 and then in Sid Meier's Railroads [0] we could play against NPC. Same as us, NPC is establishing a company and we may buy all his stocks to win.
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7600/Sid_Meiers_Railroads...
In OpenRTC, each player gets full control over managing the same park from a shared pool of funds. Mayhem may ensure if you set your game to public and don't configure permissions carefully.
In my mind, such an OpenSC2K's multiplayer would work like the latter. Each player managing the same city. Though if they removed game engine restrictions, it would be nifty if each player could manage his own city on one big shared map, similar to OpenRTC.
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 of game design.
It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc
Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects.
It marked a technological zenith, fruitfully applying the latest technology in a way that later versions fell short. It was an inflection point in simulation game design and immersive production values, having reached a point where any further elaboration would only lead to diminishing returns. It struck the ideal balance of complexity by remaining true to the original SimCity Classic, while learning from the oversimplification of SimAnt and the overcomplication of SimEarth.
And just like the high-water mark described by Thompson, the peak of SimCity 2000's game design was a place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Subsequent versions, despite their technological advancements, could not recapture the magic of that moment. They were like the Las Vegas of today, where with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark of game design that was SimCity 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
In a 1996 talk, Will Wright dove into how the designs of SimAnt and SimEarth both influenced SimCity 2000. During a Q&A session, a student asked what he was making next, so he also gave a sneak peek into his current project, Dollhouse, which was later renamed The Sims.
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
Who programmed the original games? Is that unimportant? Did Will Wright program?
Only downside is no mods and the mods give serious quality of life improvements.
It's still super fun (I have over 1,000 hours played) but it's not something I would call a reliable or stable piece of software.
Porting it to a different CPU architecture sounds like a recipe for introducing even more bugs to an already unstable program.
Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are still mobile CPU/GPU SoCs, not high clocked 100W+ TDP desktop CPUs with a separate 100W+ TDP GPU) so you won't see it use less than maximum what GPU (and CPU) can handle.
Don't mix performance profiles of games with performance profiles of bursty desktop browser software running Electron.
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.
Unless you VSync?
Eh? Civ 6 is a turn-based game with really very little in the way of animation. It's not a first person shooter rendering whole screens at 30fps.
Even leaving M1 aside, on my PC with a capable graphics card Civ 6 always thrashed the CPU a ton. I know there's a lot going on under the hood but I always suspected it was nowhere near as efficient as it could be.
also how high do you think the penalty for running an intel binary is?
I can saturate all my 16 cores, on my workstation, the only result is that the turns are processed faster. When you play multiplayer, everyone is going to be pinned to the slowest person in the lobby.
The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit thus heavily limited regarding mods.
I wonder how it affects mods, I might have to dive back in ...
I also note it's on the Mac App Store so that's probably why they're upgrading it.
Still, worth the buy at Steam for $2.
A few great links for you: http://jerrymartinmusic.com/music_demo.php On this demo page website, you can find some original jazz samples not included in SC3k even though they are quite amazing
http://boombamboom.com/ Some website Jerry Martin opened a few years ago where you can download high-quality music from the games he worked on (Sims, Sim City etc)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1467440/SimCasino_Soundtr... Sim Casino is a way more recent game, and Jerry Martin / Marc Russo came back together to write the OST! It has a lot of feels from SC3k/SC4 music, so you might want to look into it.
You can also find one of their interviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158420/view/4689895...
As you can see I am quite the fan... :-)
Anyway, I miss the isometric grid. Yes, it's less realistic, but it's so pleasing. The thing I'm most annoyed by in modern sim games is placing roads and paths. They never look quite right. It's the same with Rollercoaster Tycoon -> Planet Tycoon.
I'd like to see some new games which embrace a grid.
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 :).
If I play a game today, I just get straight to it. I don't wander around too much in the open world or try to game the mechanics for some weird bugs or try the same thing over and over again.
Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter; however.
It would be fun to have a game where you have about as much control as a "real" city and mainly what you do is pull levers behind the scenes to get people to do what you want.
SimCity meets Dwarf Fortress, perhaps.
Imagine bulldozing is as expensive, complicated, and despised as in real life.
Then imagine having to fight against infrastructure cost overruns. You play a city building game, and you don't have access to roads (cars haven't been invented) so you want to put rails everywhere. You do that, but then you realise later how expensive and complicated it is to remove some rails to put down roads.
Imagine the game stopping, and telling you that the cost of roads will double when you unpause the game. You'd have to manage putting down more road than you need and the consequences of overreach.
It could be super fun.
I think they had a rule saying they could rezone or bulldoze a building that was abandoned; but that of course led to accusations of intentionally forcing buildings to be abandoned (which is a real thing that happens).
For example, you could add "federal/state requirements" where a new freeway/rail line/whatever would appear on the edge of the map and you have to get it to the other side, making connections as appropriate.
hehe, I tried to do that, but with a walking sim: https://rafsters.itch.io/all-hands
(inspired by a meeting being a retrospective to a meeting about a meeting)
I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.
I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.
This message brought to you by the "BreadTube[0] but its for cars[1]" gang
[0] A segment of very left-wing, libertarian-leaning YouTubers named after The Conquest of Bread.
[1] AKA Adam Something, Not Just Bikes, and a few other channels
Also curved roads and buildings don't need to be right besides the road, etc.
Sim City 4 is more like a suburbia simulator imo
Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.
The cool thing is you can paint your cities and still play the traffic management game, down to timing the signals at individual intersections.
Jerry Martin, the composer for most of The Sims franchise, is a legend. The music is like vaporwave before vaporwave.
I like Cities: Skylines but am a little turned off at how central the traffic management is to the gameplay. Maybe I just never figured out all the right optimizations, but it feels like after a certain city size you're just spending all your time reworking your roads
It's a little annoying that they chose to be super realistic with realism in some aspects then kind of fuzz the details on others. Hopefully the sequel corrects this.
I'm also struggling with the same issues once I hit a certain size, and I don't want to spend 90% of my time trying to fix traffic issues.
There are four critical ones imo:
- Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited
- Realistic Population 2
- Rebalanced Industries Revisited
- You're Fired
Those alone will make the game considerably more enjoyable to play. If you do a lot of public transport there are additional mods needed to make it work well but I normally stick to roads so it's not a problem for me.
My last few cities really had no traffic problems at all except for one old main road that I really didn't want to redevelop for some reason.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/SimCity_4_Deluxe_Ed...
There were several minigames where you would drive vehicles around in your city. If you drove a train, you would have to get from one point to another in a certain amount of time. Drive fire trucks to a fire to put it out. Stuff like that.
Emergency vehicles had sirens that you could turn on that caused other cars to drive towards the shoulder and stop so you could pass them, which worked great... except at intersections, which caused cars driving at right angles to your path to dart forward and come to a complete stop, blocking the road. Making the siren totally useless, oops!
Sounds like real driver behavior to me.
Still better than Sim City in the long run though. The incredible building flexibility made up for shortfalls in the simulation.
But this article motivated me to play sc4 again.
You can make road-free portions of the city, but you need other mods to handle garbage, etc (basically dumpsters) because without roads you can't get the trucks in.
The latest DLC seems to have some more on that area (roads that ONLY emergency/bus/service vehicles can use).
I have not tested the latest DLC I think. I thought it was about airports only.
I've not played with it much, but I used similar mods that let the paths from the earlier Parklife and Campus DLC do similar tricks.
I couldn't and didn't entirely get rid of roads, but I had 50+ utilizing non-car transportation.
They grabbed this thing which isn't even a thing and turned into some buzz.
I have hope that there is an online massive Sim world where Sims and SimCity players can co-play and create some amazing real-world scenarios.
I agree that SimCity 4 was the peak of the series but there are many hardcore simcity players that claim 3000 was peak SimCity. Just look at Magnasanti city for some proof of the dedication.
[0] I have no clue if any viable launch trajectories from Cape Canaveral support such an emergency landing.
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.
But yeah, the successors to 4 were undoubtedly a dumpster fire.
Then one day my friend lent me his 512KB ram upgrade and it was a different game :-)
SC4 trended heavily towards unnecessary complexity.
Who knows, maybe that will be a big trend in the near future.
---
[SB: welcome to look in my bio here if curious]
mic drop
Build bus stops. Don’t build subways. Can’t lose.
But SimCity 4 at its time is still quite good.