Oh, you kids with your World of Warcrafts and Minecrafts and what-not. When I was a wee lad -- well, at least a pimply-faced teen -- I spent all my hours making the world's greatest metropolis in SimCity, so I'm very excited to know that Maxis is finally making a proper sequel in 2013. Kotaku says the new game will be full 3-D, the buildings will be fully customizable, and you can talk to individual Sims -- but you don't have to keep those Sims from pissing their pants while simultaneously setting themselves on fire, which is nice. Most importantly, there will apparently be curved roads. HOLY SHIT, PEOPLE. IT IS TRULY THE 21ST CENTURY.
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36 comments
SimCity 4 was visually gorgeous. It's been a while since it came out. I'm hardly upset by the disclaimer, due to these reasons. It probably just means, in this case, that it won't ACTUALLY be played like a motion picture with sweeping camera shots.
I don't know why people prematurely scour for reasons to hate a series revival. It's like their judgement and reason are clouded by nostalgia making shit seem like gold.
Excuse me, Imma going to get a new pair of panties...
*looks at disclaimer*
Wow, my underwear has magically unwet itself. Miracles never cease.
The most important question is, will be be able to save Tokyo from monsters as in the original game?
Arrrgh!
"Take me down to the new SimCity, where the stuff's 3D and the llamas are pretty!"
See how easy it was to make that actually fit the original song's meter?
I'm still holding out for a new SimEarth...an environmental/terraforming simulator where I can create worlds like a god! An angry god!
SimCity 2004 was the pinnacle... anything after that (from other makers) got too complicated and fussy. This might do the same, focusing too much on the micro and not enough on the big picture.
If there's a time to say WTF... it's now.
"Images not of representative of actual gameplay"
WTF.
And, like most PC games, it will require to you to make a $500 investment in new hardware just to run this $40 game.
The last PC purchases I made to build my current machine was back in 2009. Quad core CPU and a decent card, I haven't had problems. Just about 500 dollars worth of stuff, and I can still run everything put out recently a lot better than the 360 can. It's better than investing that money in a console and having a very limited and closed version of game releases.
I'm an A+ and Microsoft certified geek and even I shudder to think about opening up my home machine to upgrade it. There are only about eleventy million things that can (and do) go wrong during a hardware upgrade like that.
And this desktop is my last. From now on I'm going the laptop route. My electric bill thanks me.
This was my sixth PC build - starting back in '84 when I had to cook my own chips - they've gotten stupid easy to put together, truely plug and play. If you have issues with the modern PC equipment you probably shouldn't be allowed to work on anything with moving parts. Laptops and PCs are tools and each has its place... of course a lot of people use the wrong tool for the job and manage just fine - doesn't make it a good idea.
And how much of your time did you invest in actually building it? You're not factoring in the cost of your own labour when you're boasting of how cheap it was.
Additionally, it's easy enough to say that "oh, I put it together with off the shelf components", but that's by no means representative of the average user's experience or capabilities (not to mention that most people these days view their laptop as their PC, and don't want to invest in a separate dedicated gaming rig when consoles are so cheap and accessible - go to store, buy system, connect wires, not worry about it for the next five years).
It's just another aspect of the niche that PC gaming got itself stuck in sometime around 2005.
PC guts are far easier than than ever to manage. It's not even remotely like the days of config.sys and autoexec.bat. It's slap in a motherboard in a tower, clip in a chip, power supply, harddrive, boot your OS and you're good to go. Even with a budget PC, putting in a new card can give you way beyond the capability of what a current console can do. I think it's worth it to get a better experience than what you do with consoles these days. Like having access to mods and private servers and such to give you even more longevity in your game.
Just noticing that putting your nuclear island in the middle of the waterway that goes under the bridge is going to cause some huge transportation issues
Fark Maxis, promising Sim Mars and never delivering and allowing the Sim City series to lay dead for a decade after they sold out to the mindless masses that buy dozens of expansion packs for their Sims' Doll Houses.
Not a big Sim City fan, just stopping by to tell Rob how awesome the title for this article is.
I hope they drop the "talk to individual Sims" feature, it seems like it might create a lot of useless code and lead to really idiotic bugs related to pathing, like a lot of bugs that "still" plague the Sims 3. It seems much better if, instead of asking if Maximus McSimmons if he likes the new industrial park, that approval ratings can dictate if or when the game tries to take away some of your control through trying to introduce, say, a management system that edges out the mayor, i.e., you; or to try and break up the city into little autonomous parcels. The game should cleave closer to its original simulations aspirations, rather than to tie itself to the idiocy of pants-pissing masochistic Sims.
It's looking pretty awesome. Actually, I think I have a copy of Sim City 2000 lying around somewhere....
If they fixthe economic model to make sense I'll be impressed. The last two have kowtowed topolitical correctness and removed all economic management and most expectation managementfrom what is supposed to be a management simulation reducing it to “placingthings” – also curved roads take up more space than a simple grid layout for no benefit.
Looks like the curved roads aren't THAT much different than the ones in earlier games - they're just better integrated into the landscape. But, mercifully, it's still grid-based; the last thing anyone needs is the type of stupidity that infected Civilization 5 ("why, yes, putting in hex-based systems and unit facing makes perfect sense in a game where turns literally take YEARS.")
Still, my poor laptop is already crying in pain because it knows it might have to run this in one year.
If the self-righteous pricks I've met over my 28 years on this planet have taught me anything, it's that the road to hell is the straight and narrow.
It's not really so much a "road" as it is a set of broad guidelines, industry standards and end-user-agreements.
You catch that tiny disclaimer?
"Images not representative of actual gameplay"So...we know nothing.
Indeed. Anyone remember the tiny movie at the beginning of the first "The Sims" game, where huge chunks of pre-built architecture slotted seamlessly into each other, and trees towered over the houses yet still allowing detail underneath them to be seen? This bore no real resemblance to what really happened in the game where rooms had to be square, rooves had absolutely no detail and mature trees were still the same height as the Sims themselves.
Still, happy days.....
