SimCity Classic

SimCity

The new SimCity is out 5th March: http://www.simcity.com/

Shame you have to be online to play it and the game will become useless if and when EA shuts down the servers.

Wonderful game you have there...

...Now if it had any relation to "reality" it would be nice. Politicians need some expertise in managing a population. What happens if you take the view of a dictator, and fight wars to gain territory? If you take the view that giving out government funds will get you re-elected.

Now that would be an interesting simulation that our government here in the USA needs to try its hand in! It would be a cheap lesson.

Funny how you remember this sort of stuff...

My donuts used to be on a 5 blocks high by 4 across layout. Each donut would be made up of either all industrial or a mix of commercial and residential blocks and have either a police or fire station in the middle surrounded by those little park squares. Three squares distance would separate each donut, with the centre square of the three holding a railway which only touched each block once to connect it. A gap would be left somewhere in the donut to connect the fire or police station. Lots of gardens in the rest of the space if it wasn't forest already, to keep the property prices up.

No roads, which meant no traffic problems and low maintenance costs, allowing the city to grow quickly. Worked really well. The river/coastline bit gave you the space to put your airport, stadium etc. without interrupting the repeating pattern.

Very addictive game that. Once I even stayed up all night playing it, then fell asleep on the bus on the way into town a couple of hours later :-)

I played this on the Super Nintendo, now sometimes on an emulator. Personally, SC2000 was my favourite. Arcologies were a very cool concept and the constant references to llamas were pretty amusing. I can't say I cared as much for the sequels, but they were okay.

I used to love SimCity although I came to it rather late, I think it was SimCity 2000 I first played. Recently I learned that Maxis had updated it and were planning to launch the new version this year. I got excited and did a little digging. That's when excitement turned to disappointment. First I discovered EA's involvement, typically they ruin classic games and second I found out that you only get half the game on the disc. The rest is tucked away on EA's servers meaning you MUST have an always-on, high speed data connection. Oh and your save-games are stored online too.

There are many other things about the release that Maxis/EA have confirmed and people are already complaining about.

But as I said, EA = Games Ruined. Part of me thinks that EA does it on purpose so that 'little' companies like Maxis go under and can be bought out cheaply for the copyrights.