SimCity 5

[Chairman Meow]

Even if the game sucks, I just bought SimCity 2000 Special Edition in its wrapper for $.99. I thought it would just be a nice thing to have, but is there something that can make it run on my iMac?

If you've got a copy of Windows available, you can install it in VirtualBox, and SimCity 2000 will work in that. Otherwise, you can try running it in Wine, but it may or may not work.

 

[Michkov]

Run it with Dosbox

 

[Save_Ferris]

Run it with Dosbox

Link isn't working.

 

[Maniacal]

http://www.dosbox.com/

 

[Save_Ferris]

Great! I'll let you know if it works.

 

[bombshoo]

Well, even if this is a great game, I can already say there is a 90% chance I won't buy it.

I want my Sim City game in order to make simulations of big sprawling metro areas. This also means that I want to be able to cheat in order to make something aesthetically pleasing, if I so desire. Since this is online I don't think this is going to happen.

If some of what they say is true, this game also sounds quasi-competitive, which is the absolute last thing I want from my Sim City games. I play Sim City because it's so uncompetitive that it's relaxing. When I play a game of Sim City it's because I'm in the specific mood not to deal with other people.

 

[J-man]

Well, even if this is a great game, I can already say there is a 90% chance I won't buy it.

I want my Sim City game in order to make simulations of big sprawling metro areas. This also means that I want to be able to cheat in order to make something aesthetically pleasing, if I so desire. Since this is online I don't think this is going to happen.

If some of what they say is true, this game also sounds quasi-competitive, which is the absolute last thing I want from my Sim City games. I play Sim City because it's so uncompetitive that it's relaxing. When I play a game of Sim City it's because I'm in the specific mood not to deal with other people.

Good point. Sim city games in my view always had to find a balance between challenging to play and 'artistic' freedom to build a city you want. I can't say where this version sits, though.

 

[Quintillus]

I don't really mind not being able to reload from a previous point, as that always would spoil the simulation aspect for me, anyways - what's the point of a simulation if you can undo every bad decision? The only thing I like about reloading is going back after the fact and seeing, "Wow, my city really grew a lot from 1940 to 1980," when you look at the 1940 save 40 years later. And it's kind of neat in games like EU3 where you can pick up an old save and play it as someone else - that doesn't apply to something like SimCity, though.

Only being able to build one city would be a huge turn-off though. That would mean only being able to go through the initial city building process once, which would be a major bummer. Glad that isn't the case.

Having thought about it a bit more recently, and after seeing more of their blog posts, I'm starting to think more and more we're going to get a bit of a shock re how small the new "cities" will be (more than I previously posted about). My intuition (sorry I can't back it up more than that) says that moving away from a statistical simulation means complexity of the city and its systems increases at a faster rate with increasing population size than it did with the statistical "shortcuts" simulation. And with increasing complexity comes greater hardware requirements or lower limits on city size. If there's a demo you can bet it will limit the size of the city so that any problem like this won't be noticeable.

I anticipate there will be people in a year calling for a return to the more 'realistic' and 'better' gameplay provided by a statistical simulation instead of the planned fine-grained one. Bigger cities will be one of the main reasons.

I'm also a bit concerned about how great the UI designer (oops, I mean "User Experience Director") seems to think he is (reading from the latest blog post (1),(2)), and I'm half expecting to see a heavily streamlined game where numbers will be hidden as much as possible so as to reduce the chance of scaring off the easily-intimidated. I hope I'll be proven wrong of course.

Shrinking cities is a legit concern. One series, Civilization, pops to mind right away when I think of games that have a trend of shrinking maps. I don't know if Civ2 allows bigger maps than Civ3, but at least ever since Civ3 the maximum practical map size has been shrinking.

Though TBH, I never completely built up a huge city in SC3K. So, if the shrink is modest, I might not mind. But it does seem like the computing demands of a gigantic city with this amount of small-scale detail would be pretty massive.

 

[Save_Ferris]

Great! I'll let you know if it works.

I can't figure out how to mount a CD on a mac. Where's the D drive?

 

[LucyDuke]

When I zoom in in a game it is because I want to see everything in better detail, not cover it in blur. Hopefully it can be turned off, but then again I'm not going to spend a single penny on SC5 anyway so the more it sucks the better.

EDIT: Apparently the devs have said on twitter you are not stuck with just one city. However, the rest of the online crap is still there and still good enough reason to avoid this like the plague.

What kind of spiteful crap is that? You don't like something you heard so you hope nobody else has any fun?

I'm disappointed at a lot of things I've heard but I'm still intrigued and hopeful. I don't like the idea of the Origin type stuff, but I'd put up with it. I'm not sure it's really SimCity if it's not a proper sandbox. But it still looks like something that could be... something else.

 

[The_Tyrant]

After finding out SC5 requires Origin and an internet connection, I lost all interest. I can wait for Cities XL 2013 (or whenever the next installment is).

 

[LucyDuke]

The new SimCity looks amazing, and I'm certainly still looking forward to it, but it comes with at least one major downer. As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No." The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your region.

The caveat, Katsaelis says, is that there will be a cheat mode that will disable achievements and let you quickly and easily build large cities for the purpose of wrecking. That's some consolation, I suppose -- after seeing a brief demonstration of a giant bowling ball inflicting physics-based damage to skyscrapers, I am very interested in watching cities get demolished in this new engine. But this is a prime example of how the benefits of online connectivity in new games can deprive gamers of some of the things we love most about their classic predecessors. Disasters will be far less fun if seeing their effects means potentially losing hours of progress.

At least we'll always have the old games for that, right?

Update: Maxis clarifies on some misinformation out there: You can have multiple regions going simultaneously, and multiple cities within those regions. You are not limited to a single city, and you do not have to delete one city to start another.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sim-city-5/1224978p1.html

There's some sandbox anyway.

Also, they announced the release will be February 2013.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

This just gets stupider and stupider. I mean, the whole concept of the online system is cool, but it should be completely separate from the single-player game.

 

[Quintillus]

This just gets stupider and stupider. I mean, the whole concept of the online system is cool, but it should be completely separate from the single-player game.

Quoted for truth. Especially the bold part.

 

[SouthernKing]

I was looking forward to this, the engine looked great, and initially the MP feature seemed cool.
But then Maxis announces that MP was the focus, and it all went down from there.
Well it is EA, what did I expect

 

[Synobun]

I was looking forward to this, the engine looked great, and initially the MP feature seemed cool.
But then Maxis announces that MP was the focus, and it all went down from there.
Well it is EA, what did I expect

Plethora of comments inbound saying that EA has no control over the companies working under them.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Maxis has been dead to me since Spore.

 

[PreLynMax]

Maxis has been dead to me since Spore.

 

[Leonel]

Maxis has been dead to me since Spore.

 

[Quintillus]

Really, the golden age of Maxis was in the early-to-mid-90's when they were pumping out tons of Sim Games for Windows 95 and 3.11. Though some were of questionable reliability (save often!), it sure was a lot of fun. Amongst my favorites were SimCopter, SimTower, and SimAnt (who'd have thought a game about insects could be fun? it was). Unfortunately, SimSafari in '98 was the last of the plethora of Sim games (EA acquired Maxis in '97). SC3K ('99) and The Sims (the original, 2000) were still great games, but since then there's really only been more SimCity and The Sims games (not necessarily bad, but obvious sequal candidates), plus Spore, which might be a good game, but didn't come close to expectations.

I'd love to see Maxis go on another simulator spree, but I don't see it as very likely - they're probably too focused on big-budget games now to do low-to-medium budget ones en masse. So to me, Maxis as Maxis had been was already gone several years before Spore came out.

That said, I did just pick up SC4K on Steam for $5, and am still interested in how SC5K turns out.