Personally, I loved the Sim City franchise! However, I really hope eventually they will give you a way to drive through your own city. The new game looks beautiful, but we are gonna have to wait till 2013 for its release.
Call me an old-timer, but I think after 2,000 there was no better Sim City game. ... I might still give this a go.
But it's true! Sim City 4 had a godawful, convoluted way of importing new maps for cities from a Sims game, and having your Sims live in them. No, I don't want Michael Bachelor bitching at me every time I bulldoze his house. Bitch can move, I gotta put shops there. Bah, too much realism. I got Sim City 4 as a birthday present from a friend who didn't know any better and I basically used it to wreck pre-built cities with a kid I babysat. Kid was 6 years old at the time, and he absolutely loved unleashing tornadoes everywhere. Kept him busy for an hour.
I think Sim City 3000 Unlimited was probably the pinnacle of this franchise. I also never got into 4.
4's strongest point is the modding community. Problem is, you pretty much need mods to make it worth playing. And on my (older) systems, they tax them pretty hard... and I'm missing a few dependencies x.x 2000 was actually hard to get back into after playing 3000 and 4; I have a hard time getting 3000 to work on my systems for some reason. I hope SimCity 5 doesn't end up like that shit SimCity Societies.
That's the last one I played, and I still fire it up once in awhile. And there is a rudementary way of taking a car ride around your city. Not Grand Theft Auto style by any stretch, but you could at least see the stuff you built. It's only fun for me if I cheat my way into basically unlimited resources and instant technology advancement, and don't have to worry too much about the economy or getting gradual access to new tech. Pick a huge map, flatten it completely, and make a nice, orderly grid of roads, water lines, and power lines. I zone everything "high density" and end up with a perfectly square city that has to have schools/hospitals/police stations/jails/colleges/parks/water supplies on every other block or the citizens bitch about the inadequate coverage or shortages.
Great...just what I needed. Another multi-hour time waster. I do that more than I care to admit. But, one of the most fun things I've done was building a small town in a big map. I started out with a whistle stop on a rail line. I built a few small roads, zoned appropriately, and then made the rest farmland.
The last one I played (and I played the FUCK out of it) was the SNES Sim City. It looks like things might have changed a bit since that version.
Scorp, you've been able to drive through your own city since Sim City 2000... I had this in fact. Streets of Sim City: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity You could drive through and blow up cars and buildings with your cars missiles. On Sim City 4 I think there was an ingame way to drive or fly around your city. i.e. if you had a police station you could drive a police car, etc. Or maybe it wasn't in game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_4:_Rush_Hour
Ah yes, Streets of SimCity. Reminds me, I want to do the Grannymobile missions again... SimCity 4: Rush Hour was the official expansion pack for SC4; the Network Add-On Mod (NAM) and Real Highway Mods (RHW) are unofficial mods that added true (though somewhat challenging to use) transportation network functionality to the system (like 10 lane freeways, 16 lane setups as on Ontario's highway 401, light rail, light rail in streets, etc).
Yeah, I mis-said what I meant. I know you can take a car and drive through your own city, but what I meant to say was "in first person view". As far as I can tell, all those buildings are polygons. Driving through your city should just be a matter of putting a camera on the top of one of the cars and letting you view in panoramic view. And this is the first I've ever heard of Streets of Sim City.
If you've a box able to play old Win 9x games, I'd be willing to burn you a copy and send it your way (you won't find it on the Torrents, trust me).
Cities XL had that for a while. Seems like they discontinued the feature. And then there was SimCity 2000 Network Edition.
You would be right. A cursory image search of Streets of Sim City does reveal that you can, in fact, drive around in first person view. Thanks for the offer! However, I would probably not have time to install or play it. I barely play video games as it is, and if I did, my friends would be angry that I'm not playing WoW or SW Old Republic with them instead.
I picked up Sim City 4 on the cheap at Christmas and enjoyed it immensely...until some fo the bugs and constant crashes begun to infuriate me. Now I'm playing Cities XL instead, which is basically a clone. Better graphics but not really as much fun. (Anyone else play?) Now I'm really looking forward to Sim City 5, which would presumably marry the best of each.
Bump. Only a few weeks away now. All indications are that it's very good, but I've heard that - for gameplay reasons and presumably to guard against piracy - you'll need to be online all of the time to play the game. They'll allow for dropouts of 2-3 minutes, but that's it.
Yeah, the beta testing went horribly wrong because EA didn't have enough server capacity. The always online thing is dumb, but hopefully they've fixed the bugs. Otherwise it will just encourage people to pirate the game.
Yeah, that whole online thing - I ain't buying it due to that. I'm more of a casual fan of SimCity myself, so here I'll take my stand against this sort of bullshit.
With all the talk of violence in video games influencing real life violence, I wonder how many civil engineers did the Sim City franchise inspire? I'm thinking of giving this a go... if I can ever figure out how big picture mode works on my TV... Does Origin have a similar feature?
I'll wait for the pirates to crack it. I love the Simcity franchise, but EA isn't getting a penny from me for this always online nonsense.
So pretty much everyone but EA/Maxis themselves saw this coming. SimCity 5 was only released a few days ago and already plenty of people are experiencing problems with connecting to the servers, players are having problems with their cities not being saved to servers, servers are constantly crashing, cities don't transfer across servers (so if you put hours of work into a city and can't reconnect to the server, you're boned), and there has been a generally poor response from EA. Some of the problems stem from EA not allowing those who pre-ordered the game to download it in advance, which caused a rush of downloads the day it was released. Also, they probably just didn't have enough server capacity allocated to begin with. They're supposedly not even giving out refunds to those people who haven't been able to play the game at all, and banning players from Origin who attempt charge-backs to get their money back. Amazon has even halted sales of SimCity 5 because of these issues.
Speaking of Sim City 5 and Amazon.com, SC5 is will on its way to being Amazon's worst rated product ever: Linkey
Debunked. http://m.kotaku.com/5989299/no-ea-wont-ban-you-on-origin-if-you-ask-for-a-refund-for-simcity Still, EA has a serious image problem and this doesn't help. This has been an unmitigated disaster the likes if which I've never seen. This gives me doubts about a future where I'll download all my games digitally. These corporations have more strides to make in customer service first.
