EA Classic games added to Steam & on sale (SMAC, C&C, Red Alert, Sim City 3K, Dungeon Keeper, Populous)

[Blake00]

EA is making the news this weekend as they've released a huge amount of classic games in their catalog ie the entire Command & Conquer collection, Sim City 3000, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and many more including a very important one to a lot of people on this site Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri! On top of that they've put them all on sale at mega low prices!

Enjoy up to 60% off unforgettable classics

Sale ends on March 21

store.steampowered.com

 

[Quintillus]

Exciting news! Several (all?) of these were already available on GOG, but it's good to see this catalog of good old games getting some attention. I played quite a bit of Sim City 3000 in particular back in the day, and still have my CDs.

Now all they need to do is come out with a proper successor, call it Sim City 5000. Take the Sim City 4 code, expand the maps (play a whole region?), sharpen up the graphics, add more transportation options, maybe add that districts idea that Cities: Skylines added, keep the real-world years/unlocking of technologies over time, definitely don't add the annoying Twitter bird from Skylines but keep the advisors instead, and release it on Steam or GOG, without requiring uPlay like the Anno series.

 

[Blake00]

SMAC was on GoG, the ultimate C&C/RA collection with all the classic ones wasn't (they were on EA Origin which no one liked haha), not sure about the others.

Sure enough I'm coping some burn from Steam haters on the socials, so I usually point out that while GoG is a nicer option for many of us personally, if you think about the bigger picture Steam has the massive customer base dominance so this is a very good thing for SMAC fans as it injects new life into the fan communities resulting in more cool fan projects (ie mods and remakes etc). There's some really good ones going on atm that will get more exposure thanks to SMAC being back in a mainstream store.

Sadly I never did get to Sim City 3000.. I used to be a huge Sim City and Sim City 2000 addict back in the day but Civ kinda killed them for me lol. Despite being different games once I discovered Civ I never touched them again.
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[Quintillus]

Oh yeah, from a modern-audiences-discovering-the-games standpoint, this is huge. All else equal, I'll buy a game on GOG, but Steam has... an order of magnitude larger user base? And even as someone who likes GOG, most of my game playtime is on Steam, largely because of how many games I bought that were only on Steam at the time of purchase.

SC2K is the only of the Sim City games (through 4) that I didn't play. Which is unusual as it's the one with the most stellar reputation. But I had the original as part of a "Sim" pack from Maxis, and by the time I'd played through all those games, Sim City 3000 was out. And it probably wasn't too long after that when I picked up Civ III, which indeed also significantly reduced, though didn't fully eliminate, my Sim City time. I think the most recent extended Sim City game I played was when we had a Sim City 4 succession game here about a decade ago. Fun times... this made me think perhaps this is the time for one with Sim City 3000.

While EA's thinking about their back catalog, there are a bunch of old Maxis games I'd love to see available again. Which mostly are the ones that don't work so well with modern Windows, due to being 16-bit but also often kind of sloppily coded and buggy. Sim Ant works well with a 16-bit compatibility shim, but everything else... good luck! Sim Copter needs to be patched so it doesn't crash on CPUs that are faster than Pentium IIIs. Streets of Sim City was always crashy too, but along with Copter its integration with SC2K was pretty cool (if only I'd had SC2K!). I remember playing Sim Tower a few years back, and it has a cult following, also 16-bit (so I probably played on my 32-bit XP laptop?), but a deserving game that could also spawn an elevator-focused sequel. The original The Sims is another one where I regret giving away my install disc as I'd like to fire it up again; The Sims 2 used to be on Origin, but isn't up for sale anymore, and at any rate I never played 2 back in the day.

I'm sure there are people who's like to revisit Sim Safari, Sim Earth, and others on the list... Sim Isle was always the toughest one for me, but with some user interface improvements it could be a nice industrial-island simulation. I fondly remember getting an economically successful isle up and running once, and when I tried again about five years ago, I couldn't figure out how I'd done it for the life of me.

Point being they have a large back catalog that isn't available, and while I understand why dusting off a buggy game from the '90s and making it run well enough on modern systems to have > 50% positive reviews hasn't been at the top of their priority list, there's likely an audience of nostalgic gamers who would buy them.

 

[Blake00]

I remember playing the demo of Sim Copter (which crashed a lot) and thinking it was super cool that the full game supported loading in your sim city 2k maps for you to fly around.. I always planned to get it and try that but never got around to it.

The sims was when I really checked out of Maxis games sadly.. it just didn't interest me. I remember really wanting to play Spore though.. but still never got around to that one either.

That's a shame.. so many great old games missing. Civ1 and 2 missing is just ridiculous but all the Microprose Star Trek games are another huge one. GoG recently somehow got all the Activision Trek games out of limbo but I'm like guuuuys what about the Microprose ones.. Final Unity, Birth of the Federation, Klingon Honour Guard, Generations.. omg they need to be back in modern stores. Final Unity & Birth of the Federation are still my 2 favourite trek games ever made.. and they're just forgotten to time now.

 

[Quintillus]

I tried Spore in like 2020... didn't really get into it though. It suffers somewhat from its still-early-3D graphics, and somewhat from plausibility-of-the-faux-genetics-or-lack-thereof.

So I have been firing up Sim City... I'd forgotten about SC4's performance issues. The mechanics may have aged well, but the code itself, like many Maxis titles, didn't, and the Sims style UI doesn't fit it as well as it fits The Sims. Will I revisit it, after getting it to run as smooth as possible, and likely setting up the NAM? Maybe, maybe not. But I did find the SC4 Succession Session from 2013-14 on this forum, which was a fun time.

But I also installed Sim City 3000, from the original CD, and... it runs well on modern systems. I loaded up the largest city that ships with it, with 2 million residents, and the graphics are smooth (aside from the like-in-1999 issue of taking a while to load textures initially). The simulation speed is a bit variable, but it's a very large city; our SC4 succession session maxed out at about half a million, though a flatter map could have gone higher. And it's the one I remember so well, with its advisors and music and historical evolution of the city, which I thought SC4 had, but it was just SC3K.

That only emphasizes that Maxis has a huge opportunity to make a new city simulator that runs well on modern systems (modern resolutions, running graphics on a separate thread, multithreading where possible for scaling, not having the "EA Games - Challenge Everything" video play every time you start the game until you disable it). And maybe that one they made in 2013 does some of that today, but from what I've heard while it surprisingly does run offline now, its too-small-of-a-city problems never went away.

And yes... there are still a lot of good old games missing. I used to follow GOG's blog as it seemed like every week or two some old game was being dusted off, but now there are so many other things in the blog, and so much more content, that it's impossible to keep up so I don't try to.