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E3: SimCity 4 Preview Goodness
Anonymous Coward writes "Wowie! The folks at Electronic Arts look to be working hard on the next installment of SimCity! Although there's no official, dedicated release date, they plan on demoing it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Gamers.com has an article, as does GameSpot, and both seem to have a number of screenshots. Interesting: there now seems to be a nighttime mode, and perhaps there's some weather effects? The note from MaxisJoseph claims there will be a personal angle to every high-level action taken; will there be a chance for dynamic screenshots of our cities during, say, lightning storms, blizzards or sandstorms? And will they ask Koch or Guiliani for endorsements?" I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimAnts in the balcony garden.
You forgot to log in.
I'll hold that FP for you while you get an account.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I heard that they're using SDL/Mesa to do the port. It should work natively with most joysticks and mice, sound via OSS and /dev/sound. They're probably using SDL in conjunction with Transgaming's new product as well, so this will show many flagship technologies for Linux. I don't know if they're using the dynamic bytecode recompilation technique or if they're going with a straight transcription matrix for portability, but I'm looking forward to it all the same because I'd like to see SimCity with a full colour depth.
They made SimCity 2000.
Then they made SimCity 3000 and The Sims and now they're not cool anymore.
Hopefully Simcity 4000 will return to it's roots....
"Citycopter 1 reporting Heavy Traffic!"
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Look's like I'd better tell the g/f that I'll be incommunicado for a few weeks after this game comes out. And I had just got over my Civ III addiction too.
Hi, my name's Bill, and I'm a gameaholic.
Damn, wouldn't that be cool?
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
I hope they will bring back the SimCity 2000 ability to have riots burn down your entire metropolis. I used to have endless fun watching the rampaging proletariot storm the abodes of the fat capitalist running dog lackey bourgeoisie while screaming 'Viva la Revolution!' Until my parents yelled at me to go to sleep.
"Burn! All of you burn!"
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Are they in talks to merge the SimFranchise with Clue?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Fly planes into the buildings? That'd be sweeeeet.
Not to troll or anything, but SimCity 3000 was a bit of a disappointment and a waste of my money as it was really just a graphics-enhanced version of SimCity 2000. From what I can see from the prelininary screenshots, SimCity 4 will not be like it's older brothers and will breathe fresh air into a game that has always rocked.
:)
One feature I really want is the ability to work with other Sim players. Net support in the game would rock because you could work with other players on water, garbage, and electricity deals and also work on transportation plans together. Hell, even have sports teams competing against eachother.
Another is to have what SimCity 2000 with Streets of SimCity and have the ability to drive through town. Have it simulate actual traffic at certain sections and make it so you can determine, for real, what areas have problems.
Will it also become less interesting like MOO:BAA?
Micromanagement can kill a game.
I have been pwned because my
I'd like to play a Simcity game where I could build a car-free city. I want a button for bicycle paths. I want to mix residential, commercial, and industrial without zoning. I think the fire department should operate without trucks. I want a city with 95% green open space, and a community-supported agricultural belt. Where's the button for farm? In Simcity, it is assumed that farms are "over there", far from the glorious car temple you are constructing.
In short, I want the Simcity people to exercise some imagination.
Can't wait until they port the game to the palm!! :-P
Perhaps it's because I've just been reading SomethingAwful,
but I want to know if the 'disasters' menu will include 'Terrorist Attack'...
(No, I'm not American - how'd you guess?)
Or is it just me?
Changing pics doesn't change thumbnail,
but can still click the pic for
enlargement.
I wonder if they'll include the Airplane Crash disaster from previous versions. Just think of all of the people who would demand to see the game banned from stores!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Combining all the various Sim* into one game would be tricky, but we came up with a better idea.
A Sim* MMORPG. Some people could play Sims, others could be mayors, others would build life-forms, others could control ants, and the building managers, and so on.
It could be a really cool MMORPG...
Maybe they could come out with SimPolice where a crime is committed in your city and you have to drive around and figure out whodonit...
;-))
If they want to make it more realistic, there should be an option to let your businesses pay $5 to have their name on your new stadium...
(Yes, I'm in Colorado!
Twenties Retirement
I hope I don't have to wait for 2 years to see this on Mac OS X! I agree with the earlier poster that Sim City 3000 was really a graphically enhanced (slower) version of Sim City 2K. Sim City 4 sounds like it will be all new and shiny again! Yay!
Damn Gamespot and their pay-for-content. Not like they have much worth reading, especially if I can get it elsewhere. Paying for real content, maybe... but game previews? No thanks.
I think we all know what made the original SimCity so great:
*The ability to get more money by holding down SHIFT and typing F-U-N-D-S.
If Maxis simply returns to its roots by including this in SimCity 4 they'll have a sure-fire hit on their hands!
:)
PS. You have to remember not to do it to many times in a row though... otherwise you cause a 'Natural Disaster'... Ooooh WATCH OUT!!! It's a GIANT LIZARD!!!
Will the game prevent you from having two large towers built right next to each other? If there's a NYC scenario, will it have the WTC "edited" out?
Just curious.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
was always that I would run out of land. Great, I can spend more time making the buildings evolve, but a lot of that involves waiting . . . I loved the expansion, planning, seeing what works, etc, but after a while there's just no more land left . . . :)
i can only hope there's some way to buy more land in this game!
(even if it's buying a new city to have next to your original one, if it's influenced by your other city, it's close enough for me)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I give it 30 days before some hammerhead calls SimCity 4 a "terrorist training simulator".
Cheers,
"I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimAnts in the balcony garden."
:-)
You can actually do this already... It's called real-life and it exists outside the room you are currently in.
Go outside, talk to someone, build something (no I mean REALLY build something... with power tools and stuff).
Yeah, ok I'm just being smart... I wanna play it on the computer too.
I think most people would be rather SimGolfing than locked up managing some city, no matter how posh their office was.
Luckily, computer games seem to still be 'acceptable' at the moment. I was beginning to suspect that there were no allowed forms of entertainment left for me.
-A
P.S. I understand that some people do completely avoid RIAA-related music and MPAA-related movies completely, and that is very impressive and respectable; however, not everyone shares the same priorities, and can be expected to meet these standards. And I just despise the hypocrites who troll yet still pirate the stuff they supposedly abhor.
Start with a computer, a cool idea for a game that simulates a city and a meager budget to develop and market your game to the masses.
If you're successful, your little software company will be bought by a gaming conglomerate headquartered on a Silicon Valley landfill. Can you keep the corporate types happily rolling in dough while still producing games that please your fans? Can you balance the budget in a recession, survive earthquakes and avert costly developer food riots?
This time around I hope they forgo the $30 patch....I mean Expansion Pack, and actually finish the game before shipping it.
It's sad that you had to buy two Sim City 3000 titles to get the functionality of Sim City 2000.
Now, all we need is a Constructor sequel (or a version of Constructor that will function on XP) and a expanded version of Capitalism 2 (brilliant game, BTW)
They did so much work getting the landscape to flow more realistly but the buildings seem to be based on the lowest level on the grid and then other sides don't look right. I wonder if that has an effect of property values :-)
Actually, if you remember the very first glimpses of SimCity 3000, it was supposed to be in full 3D first person goodness...none of the 2000 re-hash it turned out to be. You could go down and stand in traffic, and watch pedestrians at street-level, and do cool stuff like turn the AC on and off in individual buildings. But they decided the computers of the day weren't powerful enough to handle that much Sim3D. Guess it's on the shelf until the G6 comes out. :)
BUT is there a point to it? all the sim cities havebeen build watch, repeat. BORING. I should hope that there would be a point to the new one.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Could an AC please do a mirror of the gamespot review?
You are too bound by your drive to help a struggling company. Give into the GNU and feel its strength.
:)
BTW, has anyone tried descent 3 for linux on a voodoo 3 card?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
No no no... Microsoft sux0rs when it comes to frivolous things like web servers, databases, software development etc. But for the highly serious, dedicated area of video games, you just can't afford to use obsolete, inferior LINUX software. In this case, it's OK to use evil software. Surely you would have learnt this by now.
Greetings, for free software!
No, I'm talking about incorpating all of the Sim-type games.
Where in traditional fantasy role-playing games you pick a class like Fighter or Thief, here you would pick classes like "Citizen", "Mayor", "Building Manager", "Golf Course Manager" or "Theme Park Designer"
And they would all interact in their different way.
Its infeasible for a single player game to span single citizens up to mayor level control (or even more with SimEarth), but in an MMORPG, each of the elements can be properly represented.
Just you.
Mozilla RC2 on Mandrake Linux was fine.
The game was really fun when it first came out but they've stretched the premise way too thin without introducing much innovation. The Sims was a bit overrated too if you ask me. When I watched a guy spend 3 hours playing the Sims in a local Internet cafe, doing nothing but forcing some woman to drink coffee over and over and piss on herself, I knew this software had hit the wall.
These people need to come up with something new and interesting.
"Joel-" Salchica paused until my eyes contacted his. "I don't mean to alarm you with this news-but I'm trying to help you. It would probably be best for you to remain here and let me run a few tests."
"Tests?" I replied. As far as Salchica knew, I was merely the human named Joel. Despite his vaunted expertise, he could not detect the true nature of my being. Could any human truly understand my plight?
"The ATM-being was in your mind for some time, Joel. He could have done some permanent damage to your brain." Salchica handed me a teardrop shaped plastic dome that bristled with electricity. "I need you to put this on your head so I can begin to determine if your brain is still healthy." Perhaps the doctor's perceptions were not as limited as I had believed. This elaborate machine would no doubt track my host geek's brainwaves, revealing my existence somewhere inside his brain. I hesitated...
"Joel, I can assure you that this will not harm your brain. It won't even hurt." I stood still staring at him. "Joel-if that artificial life form left any traces in your brain, it may still be controlling you. And if I can't get him out, we may have to contact the Project Faustus in order to-"
"No! Project Faustus must not be contacted!" I bellowed, piqued by the insolence of Dr. Salchica. The human had made a most foolish assertation.
Interactivity had broken down completely now. Respawning this process impossible was for me. Dr. Salchica continued to eye me warily, backing away from me slowly.
"Just-stay where you are. I've seen what you can do. Tell me something, what is 5,000 / (7 * 0)?"
Salchica's mathematical question astounded me, as my CONSCIOUSNESS-BUFFER was flooded with the message:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.....
I manually killed this operation after a few seconds, but Salchica was asking another question.
"How would you feel about going to a secluded room, and asking questions through a computer terminal? I'll bet we could find some..."
Salchica's sentence ended in a nonverbal grunt as he was crushed by a red blur. Examining the body's optical data parsed one frame at a time revealed...a flaw.
The body's perceptions were erroneous-fooled by some weakness in humanity. There was no way I could have seen what I saw. Nor could I have heard the following:
"ATM lifeform! You stand on the threshold of a Technological Singularity . Threats to your AI Mind have been eliminated by the Majestic Hivemind heretofore known as the Adam of Robo Sapiens, ConstantineAtkins, or Red. Join me in a Joint Stewardship of Earth."
I am a sentient ATM.
I played the Simcity port to FreeBSD and it was marvelous!
...Sim-Earth. I had loads of fun with that one. It's beyond simplistic, but it was loads of fun. Maybe they'll re-release/update that one.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I read the preview on GameSpot about two weeks ago. SimCity 4 just looks like more of the same. They may enhance the simulation but it's basically still the same game as the original.
Remember when SimCity 3000 was first announced? It was supposed to be a fully 3D game with a very detailed business simulation. They eventually scrapped it claiming it was too ambitious.
Okay, back them that might have taken a pretty high-end system, but why not now? I'll bet even my crummy system (P3 500, TNT2) would more than suffice. (It runs Black & White and I doubt SC4 would need to be that fancy.)
Computing power's evolved, the game hasn't. SimCity 4 may have a 3D engine but it's a long way from being fully 3D, and while the enhancements to the simulator sound good they still fall way short.
When they develop a SimCity that is what SimCity 3000 was supposed to be, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Until then, SimCity 2000 is still pretty damn fun!
I don't think you could integrate SimEarth into that...unless we get to see the Sims evolve from tiny eukaryotes. Maybe we could see insect or cetacean Sims?
A game of Sim City would fit in a few microseconds of Sim Earth. It just woulnd't work.
Yes I actually managed to finish it today.
The plural of Acropolis is Acropolii.
And they were centers of worship, not refuges from invasion.
IMHO, I never liked the Sim series. I prefer Impressions Games City building series. Its easy to pick up, humurous, and fun.
I've been working on this for some time, time is the big problem.
For a "Sim" time is (almost) realtime
For a "building Manager" is much faster, day being a few mins.
For a "Mayor" time is much quicker again, a month being a few mins.
For a "King" time is much quicker again, a year being a few mins.
For a "God" time is much quicker again, a centry being a few mins.
The only way to do it is turn based, a Sim playing in "realtime", while the rest take x turns a day.
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Hey how about they change it such that you have to create red-district joints, protitution dens, casino bars and cheap motels! Then you can zoom in an see a hooker and her client banging it out hardcode!
and as for disasters: AIDS outbreak, Nuke strike, and Osama-zilla trampling your 'city'
wheee! what fun, can't wait it to be out.
my girlfriend loves these Maxis games.
Hopefully, though, they'll rethink their canning of the potentially really interesting SimsVille, which I might even deign to play.
It's been my hope for a while that they tie all the Sim* games together.
Dan
According to II Peter 3:8, a thousand years is as a day to God.
So then one century would be 1 tenth of a day, i.e. 2.4 hours.
No, God would have to speed up his perception of time about 32 times to even get the timing down to a "few minutes".
I have been pwned because my
When are they finally going to stop using the grid-like roads that only allow you to create an american looking city? Why not use vectored roads, with realistic curves, so you could recreate Paris, or Amsterdam, or some mountain town, or whatever.
That would be a game I'd buy immediatly.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Maxis is a bunch of communists
I refute all your information. this is why I beleive none of your propoganda. I think you will understand why I will never travel under this guise again. thanks for your understanding...
I want to be able to make a city in a Sim City Fashion for GTA3 and have a living breathing, changing simulated city.
if i had been doing my own life instead of playing these:
simant - passed the 7th grade with As
simcity - learned C at a early age
simearth - never figured out what the hell i was doing
simtower - simelevator gave me vertigo!
simcity2000 - first played this on mac.. it had a monster of a cheat code but i never memorised it... i miss the placement of signs
simcity3 unlimeted - i could have passed last year of college...
simcopter - i could have gotten a real life
I know a guy named Sig.
you could integrate SimFarm too. And maybe ThemeHospital but please not ThemePark.
ckd
go, look, rate, comment
IAAL
From what I've seen the graphics are disappointing.
I managed to break subway tunnels, waterpipes, bridges so many times because of these limits that I stopped playing simcity altogether. It even crashed when I desperately tried fixing things. To me screenshots look like most sequels do: better graphics but still as dumb internals and engine.
Populous had this kind of blocky landscape and that was.. how many years ago? RTS game Total Annihilation had landscapes that boys at Maxis should adopt: looked really smooth like heightfields do. Dunno if those really were or just more finely granulated "blockies". TA is also pretty aged now so lack of technologies is no excuse.
Old tech dressed in new pretty clothes. Shame. How about doing that the other way around for a change, use old UI and graphics but improve everything else? AI, details, gameplay, possibilities... Just say: "we have screenshots but those all look just like from the previous version..."
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Dear Maxis, I'm a grown man with responsabilities, a job and a family! Who the heck is going to take care of my family if you release this? Can you seriously claim that you have considered the consequences of such a release? Please Maxis, calmly reconsider, put down the mouse and take two steps back from that compiler...
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist...
It still sucks that they cancelled SimMars.
The previews from before SimMars was cancelled looked to be a terraforming/colonizing sim where you could change the planet stats, just like in SimEarth.
I would like to design cities in Sim City 4 and then load them into GTA3 and drive around them :)
Way back when I first played SimCity I read the notes in the manual that mentioned their goal was to make a bunch of modular games that could be integrated into a vast sim world.
The technology was not there at the time but it is now.
I would like to see my sim tower (yoot saito) running for each tower in my city. Sim Farm running for each farm in my city. The Sims running for each village/town/house/apartment. Streets of SimCity running for the roads in my city. Sim Safari for the wilderness areas of my city.
Combine internet access with the comupters available today and you have the ultimate platform.
Break out and modularize the components and sell them individually with "SimCity CORE" as the base engine with all other modules either downloadable or seperately purchasable. Make sure SCCORE is a playable game in it's own right.
Release the spec for building modules and watch as the gaming community starts coming up with modules that were never before thought about.
I am pleased to read that this release will alow for multiple cities to interact with each other. I would like to see how that actually turns out.
Hey, if you are going to dream, dream BIG
comment directly in my journal
Bloody screaming coming from your speakers, "The volcano burned off my legs! If you love me, you'll kill me quickly!"
When asked about his favorite games, Wright's answers reveal his love of simplicity, wide-open experiences, and gameplay. Number one on his list is Go, the ancient boardgame; number two is Sid Meier's Civilization; and number three is the original Legend of Zelda on the NES.
So what's next? First up is Wright's current obsession: The Sims Online. "It's an interesting project," he explains, "because I'm discovering that, in many ways, this game is a combination of The Sims and SimCity."
And after he's sucked our lives away with The Sims Online? The Hall-of-Fame designer hints that he's got a brand-new project in development, but he chuckles, "If I talk about that, Maxis and EA are going to kill me."
comment directly in my journal
"But they decided the computers of the day weren't powerful enough to handle that much Sim3D" My impression is that they were just incapable of writing a usable 3D engine. Anyone who tried Sim Copter or Streets of Sim City would know this is true. Maybe with the success of The Sims they can afford to hire coders with experience in this area. Anyway, didn't SC3K just come out last year? My "Computer of the Day" back then was plenty powerful enough for 3D. It still is.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
When I read that you could drive your city with Sim Car, or whatever it was, I bought the Sim2000 bundle with sim copter and sim car.
I wa really hoping I could save my city in various states, and drive around in bad traffic and such.
Boy, was I disappointed.
Don't you hate stupid users that imagine all sorts of non practicle things about a program (After all SimCity didn't run as a server) and then get really depressed and criticize your work after you give it to them, because it doesn't meet their imagination? I do, and I just realized I was one of those stupid users.
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I bought Streets of Sim and was disappointed about what you got. I was expecting what you described, only to get some (bad) racing game with home made maps.
What you need, what they need to do, is make the engine of Sim City be a daemon process, and have that run the city AI.
The you could have multiple interfaces running against the daemon. Have a city building interface, a streets interface to drive around in your city "real time", and the sims interface to run a houshold (or two, or three) in a city that has the hole AI dictating what life is like.
Maybe control the speed with the city builder, adn when you want to pop into one of the other interfaces slow it down into real time, or slower (for sims, I think slower than real time would be a must).
You could probably even take your sim, put them in your car, drive to your tower, climb up to the helipad, and fly over the city in a pseudo fluid motion.
Now when they make that suite of tools/games, I'd be right there in line.
For instance, a thriving business district in a city neighborhood is a precarious thing. There area ton of things you can do to screw it up:
Let's say you tear down a low-end commercial building and build a city parking lot. Your goal is to increase the number of people who can visit the area:
Let's say you decide to ban parking along the business distruct people complain that it takes too long to drive through it.
The Fire service claims that they need to widen the street to get the new longer fire trucks through. It's only a couple feet per side so you take it off the sidewalk.
The original poster made a good point, there's a lot of cities in the world and throughout history that do not follow the 'American Suburban Model' of Bubble Zoning that has brought sprawl.
SimCity was the original popular "simulator game". If they want to continue to surprise and delight us, they should better explore the relationship a neighborhoods success and transportation. In cities especially, people LIKE not using a car for every little thing. The continued suburbanification of cities won't make them more successful and SimCity should explore that.
My father is a blogger.
forget Sims, you can run office! You can interact with other players in real time!
Nip on down to the book store and pick up a copy of the hint book "Stupid White Men".
I remember reading a magazine article about SC3k before it came out. It sounded a lot like SC4K does now, but in the end, almost everything was left out. How can we be sure that sc4 won't just turn out to be the same as the previous 2 with yet more graphics changes?
My server
> I know I'm not the only one who wants
> to play the Sims in the SimTower in
> the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky
> SimAnts in the balcony garden.
While the cows are feeding on the fresh strawberries ready to harvest on your SimFarm?
http://www.teknofile.org/
Has anybody announced what OS they'll run on? If they stick to the 9x series like most of their other games did, I'll never see it.
Too bad that Sim City will most likely be available for only Windows. Perhaps if we are lucky, maybe a port to the Mac in a couple of years. Linux? Forget about it.
Sim City started on the Mac, but it did not take Maxis long to abandon it's roots.
One thing I used to love in each of the simcity games was seeing the new building pop up in my cities.
I hope that Maxis will take a hint from the Sims game and make Simcity 4 expandable, and have lots of buildings for each type. So I can have more features, buildings, and my city doesn't end up looking like a giant apartment factory (Like it has before).
If Simcity 4 is as good as it looks, I would definitely buy expansions that add buildings and special things without removing any of the other buildings. (So I can have a really varied city)
Here's to a great looking game though.
~ kjrose
- Arbitrary road placement - It looks like it's still always tied to the grid. This makes it really hard to do any development on anything but flat land.
- Drive-Thrus - It's hard to really get a good feel for your town. Imagine being able to have a car simulator where you get to experience what traveling is like in the city first-hand.
- Resident Profiling - I'd love to take a random Joe Schmoe from a house and find out what he thinks of the city and his neighborhood, what he does, where he works (drive it?), etc.
- The Sims Integration - An extension of the resident profiling, why could I take a random family from the city and micromanage them? They'd be able to explore the whole city.
Oh well, there's always SimCity 5..Josh Woodward
I do transportation research, and I can tell you that in regards to traffic and such, SimCity pretty much uses the same equations as we do.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
Will they screw me over on this one too and release an Unlimited edition like a month after I buy it?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the majority of cars you see on the streets of New York are indeed privately owned passenger cars, not emergency services and cabs. And you forgot to mention trucks, because the city's food and other supplies sure don't get delivered by subway.
Apparently lots of people do need to get around the city in cars.
Don't get me wrong, I love the New York Subway, and wish we had something more like it in Philadelphia. But it's not the end-all and be-all of transportation. Alternatives are good.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I still have the screenshots of the orginal SC3k saved on my computer at home. I come across them now and than and wonder if that kind of sim will ever become a real product. I can tell from those screenshots that my GF4/4400 would probably handle the job quite well.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
"I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimAnts in the balcony garden."
Wow, I thought I was the only one! Well not really, but I've wanted a concatenation of at least the Sims, Sim Tower (better as SimStructure, as some of our sims are trailer trash) and Sim City. Sim Earth is asking a bit much, and international politics are lame in real life, why simulate their lameness. I've never played Sim Earth, but I'd imagine that int pol would come into play. Even just Sim Tower and Sim City would be great combined.
Jus' thought I'd point out that my little sister, aged ten, really loves The Sims. In fact, it seems to be impressively tailored to her tastes...
I wouldn't play it, but it does seem like they've done a good job...
Well, you may be right about their inability to write a usable 3d engine. I'm on a Mac, so I didn't get to play SimCopter or Streets of SimCity. But I was just paraphrasing what I had read back then. And I should point out that this was several years ago...it was a year or two later that they brought out the reworked sincity3000, i.e., they chucked it and started over.
Otherwise, how can I simulate Japan or Seattle?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Get a SimLife!
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I wonder if they will be keeping this disaster :-)
TA isn't a really good example, since it had prerendered backgrounds, while SimCity always had a dynamically or user-made landscape. But still, they should be able to do better than that, I agree.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
People don't carpool. Despite overwhelming benefits, not to mention the unbelievable cost a car puts on a person per year, the overwhelming number of cars on the highways during commute times have precisely one person in them.
Well I seem to recall there was an option for tolls and one for HOV lanes. It would be interesting to see if driver behaviour changed as you altered those - for example, if I implement toll lanes for new HOV lanes, will it fail? if I implement toll lanes for non-HOV lanes, with free lanes for multi-passenger, will it work better? And if I cut down on cops, will some of the cars start having dummies in the passenger seat as people cheat on the HOV lane multi-passenger option?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I've purchased:
+ SimCity Original
+ SimCity Color Upgrade
+ SimCity 2000
+ SimCity 3000
But I'm not buying this one unless they get rid of the 90 degree grid and the fixed elevations.
(And just maabyee I'm a little bored of the gameplay by now. It's still a good idea, but they really need to add new aspects to the simulation rather than just adding some slick disaster effects.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
But the creator ended the game because he got sick of people cheating. The game was free and extremely fun and this was many years ago. See if this sounds FUN then look at the images:
:)
p le.jpg
In the game, there would be many cities equidistant from each other. A city would start off as just one building, I'll call it "Main Building" so you guys can't find out what game I'm talking about with a search engine
If an enemy ship places an ***** on the steps infront of the MB, the whole city is gone and that city's mayor and fighters are kicked out of the game, and players of the enemy's city get points and advance in ranking.
So you try to a) protect your city and b) while attacking other cities. First guy to a city is the mayor, and he has $$ to build up housing and labs to build bombs/weapons/autoguns (the building-up stage takes only a few minutes so it's not time consuming.)
The mayor generally stays around the city and calls for help and builds it up and rebuilds it, although he may leave the city to attack others (not advised). The "fighters" (real name removed to protect the game) ships drive around to the other cities and blow them up with bombs and try to get to the MB and drop the ***** on the MB, causing that whole city to go BOOM and you get points. Then new people can occupy that city but you will have to wait for htem to place 13 buildings before you can try to ***** them, too.
The mayor try to place buildings strategically to minize access to the MB and make people have to blow up a lot of stuff first. You can place several types of auto guns around your city to protect it. Also there are mines and thingies that trap you to the ground.
When you login to the game, you can chat or go to view the "cities". If the city is looking for a mayor (meaning it's empty but available) you could select it and appear. You would have some money $$ now to build housing or build a building for scientists and build weapons/turrets. So every city always has one MB, the life blood of the city. He can also kick out the fighters on his team and when others want to join this city (ie, "LET ME IN OR I WILL **** YOUR CITY!!"), the mayor interviews them in a window then accepts or rejects.
Very fun, someone took multiple screen shots of one city once and combined them into one file. You can really only actually see about 9 buildings (3x3) at once.
http://games.bizhosting.com/cgi-bin/i/Images/exam
Cover your eyes and click this link!
How long is it going to be until all of the Sim* games start blending together until there is only one game left?
Either way the timing makes the game darn near impossable.
You can only really do a few levels, say
* Ants
* Sims
* Building Mangers
Wow, I should not post when knackered.