Pretty good read, makes me want to dig into my SNES pile and put Simcity 2000 in, but I think I'll wait for 5 and not taint my memories of that glorious past.
Oh no I was a C64 man long ago, and started with the sim games on my old IBM compatible back in the day, but those where a lot harder to keep around than a SNES and some carts, at least until steam and to a lesser degree origin.
The Maxis games (Sim city, earth, ant, pretty much everything but golf and tower) were my bread and butter along with X-Wing when I was a youngster.
Obviously the controls are a bit more clunky but they transferred pretty well to the consoles back then.
Nicely written. I've never been able to play strategy games, but I'm at least ashamed of this fact. But, duder, you went HAM with the assonance and alliteration.
It's hard for me to pin down what keeps me from enjoying strategy games like this. I think it relates to why complex board games, or card games, aren't really for me. There are so many rules, and it they give me the feeling that I'm not doing it right or that there is always something I don't know. They aren't necessarily confusing... they just seen to require a hefty initial investment in learning the system and rules, and this just isn't much fun to me.
Simcity 4 was not a big enough leap over 3000 for me, I played the hell out of 3000 though. That said, yeah I'm really excited for 4. I have quibbles with some of the changes in efficiency that they did to make the game prettier(curvy roads look great but they make this has made zoning inconsistent) but all in all it's my most anticipated game of 2013.
I have a feeling the most efficient design from what I played of the beta will be a revision of the L'Enfant plan with how zoning is fucked. That said, I think it looks really nice so who cares right?
I don't remember which, but I think my first jump into Sim Cities was one of the thousand games. I want to say 2000, or 3000. Ether way I remember having fun just laying out the cities and trying to make them as pretty as I could and to come out with weird/wacky designs and I never got into the management side of things. Which I think is why I'm most excited for this Sim City. Just a dam shame they had to marr the launch with their shitty pre-order/special editions crap. EA being EA and all that I guess.
I have been watching Jesse Cox and Crendor playing on youtube for the last few days and seeing all the options to make the layouts align symmetrically kind of gave me a perfectionist boner. It drives me nuts in these time of games that deal with layouts when things are not perfectly aligned and this looks like it's going to make it so much easier. Time will tell how the game turns out in the long run, and how badly EA botches it post release with paid content will be the deciding factor on how long I play it I suppose.
Anyway, if I get my code from Greenman Gaming tomorrow and can start preloading tomorrow night I think I'm going to take Tuesday off work to get a jump start on the weekend so I can get up early and jump into the game. Looking forward to playing online with a friend as well. Will be interested in seeing how much interaction we really have with one another and how much is just token gameplay elements that don't really do anything.
@granderojo: Yeah, once you start getting this far down the path of iteration with this type of game, those leaps start to come a little less often, and end up not being quite as big as before. That said, it's been a decade since our last go round with this series, and from the footage/previews/demos I could see they'd worked to explore places within that finely honed structure that were previously unexplored.
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