Sim City (2013)

[THEWOOD]

Sim City for Mac delayed again...

http://www.tuaw.com/2013/06/07/sim-city-for-mac-delayed-until-august/

 

[jwinslow]

Sim City remains a disaster, leading to the closure of Maxis Emeryville. However a team of 13 people just gave us what we wanted, for $30.

PC World:
Cities Skylines review: This is the SimCity you were looking for

Cities: Skylines somehow lives up to the unfair expectations heaped upon it, presenting one of the best city builders in years.

I debated about a dozen different ways to open this review and explain why I like Cities: Skylines so much. I could talk about what a disaster EA's SimCity reboot was (culminating in the closure of veteran studio Maxis Emeryville last week). I could describe how I blinked in confusion at the clock the other night, pausing in the middle of constructing a massive coastal highway to realize it was four in the morning.

But the key to Cities: Skylines is scale, and scale just can't be described. Here

And that's when I only owned eight of the nine regions I could eventually purchase, only three of which I'd really built on. Cities: Skylines is, true to its name, a city builder.

oning colors, for instance: Blue for commercial, yellow for industry, green for residential. In essence, Cities: Skylines goes "Hey, you didn't like that new SimCity? What if I told you I could give you SimCity 2000, but bigger?" And to that I say...well, I've played until four in the morning multiple nights this week. So I guess I'm on board.

Seriously, Cities: Skylines is one of the best city builders I've played in years. You can basically do anything you want with your city. Want to make rolling suburbs with nice curved streets for wealthy families? Sure, you can do that. Want to create the Judge Dredd-esque all high-rise buildings nightmare dystopia of your dreams? Yeah, you can do that too. Want to make your entire population live next door to garbage incinerators and heavy industry? Mmm, poison those citizens. Want to make a penis-shaped city?

Well. [Clears throat.] You can. Not that I would know.

(You can also really do anything, thanks to built-in mod/Steam Workshop support, but that's not really pertinent to this review except to say "Remember when EA wanted to charge you for every single DLC building in SimCity?" Okay, moving on.)

There's a lot to do in Cities: Skylines, but it's kept fairly manageable thanks to a gated unlock system that adds new concepts to the game as you add population. For the most part these unlocks make sense according to your city size—you wouldn't see an international airport in a town of 500 people for instance.

Which I guess brings us to the biggest problem with Cities: Skylines—it's pretty easy. It took me about eight hours to get to what I'd call the "end game," a.k.a. I've got millions of dollars, my budget is stable, my support buildings (fire departments, police, hospitals, etc.) are all in place, and I'm adding entire districts onto my city.

Yes, Cities: Skylines has the same problem as practically every city builder: The first few hours are the most entertaining. It's really fun getting a city started, putting those first few districts in place, trying to balance your budget against your urgent need for a fire department, or even just expanding your borders.

But there comes a point where your city is basically a perpetual motion machine—all the parts are in place, and there's nothing for you to do except keep expanding. And I did! I kept building and building and building long past the point where it'd become rote. I just kept thinking back longingly on those earlier, hardscrabble years where unlocking a new set of buildings meant choosing between a hospital and a fire department. By the end, I was unlocking things like airports—and then putting two into my city because why the hell not?

SimCity used to throw disasters at you to make this period of the game a bit more interesting, or at least more "challenging." I'm not sure that's the right answer, but there's no doubt that after a while the feeling of "I'm struggling to build a city" is replaced in Cities: Skylines with "I literally can't build fast enough to use all this money."

When EA flubbed SimCity's launch, a tiny Finnish developer saw its big chance ...

As CEO of the game's developer Colossal Order, she wanted to celebrate the young company's success. Her 13-strong team gathered together in their Tampere, Finland offices and ate the cake. There were a few words of congratulation and some laughs. Then they all went back to work.

"Finnish people are modest," she says. "We don't like to show off. It's in our nature to be very humble and hard working. Being from Finland we don't really do elaborate parties." The cake, she says, was "a classic, very good."

The celebration was all the sweeter because success for Cities: Skylines had been a long time coming. For a while it looked like the game wouldn't get made at all.

Hallikainen and her team had spent years pitching a city building game to publisher Paradox, which the developer had worked with on urban transport series Cities in Motion. Paradox was cautious about embarking on such an ambitious project.
As CEO of the game's developer Colossal Order, she wanted to celebrate the young company's success. Her 13-strong team gathered together in their Tampere, Finland offices and ate the cake. There were a few words of congratulation and some laughs. Then they all went back to work.

"Finnish people are modest," she says. "We don't like to show off. It's in our nature to be very humble and hard working. Being from Finland we don't really do elaborate parties." The cake, she says, was "a classic, very good."

The celebration was all the sweeter because success for Cities: Skylines had been a long time coming. For a while it looked like the game wouldn't get made at all.

Hallikainen and her team had spent years pitching a city building game to publisher Paradox, which the developer had worked with on urban transport series Cities in Motion. Paradox was cautious about embarking on such an ambitious project.

 

[jwinslow]

CDKeys has it for $13.99:
https://www.cdkeys.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=cities+skyline


It looks like they have some good mods to address some issues (not enough depth of info on what needs to be fixed, terraforming, fixing traffic routes/lights/etc, etc).

I think the game might be a bit simple but based on the five reviews I've read and watched, this is the game EA should have made, at least the beta version.

 

[CentralMOBuck]

CDKeys has it for $13.99:
https://www.cdkeys.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=cities skyline


It looks like they have some good mods to address some issues (not enough depth of info on what needs to be fixed, terraforming, fixing traffic routes/lights/etc, etc).

I think the game might be a bit simple but based on the five reviews I've read and watched, this is the game EA should have made, at least the beta version.

Cities: Skylines is the game EA should have made.

EDIT: I did not see that @jwinslow was talking about skyline's.

 

[jwinslow]

The mods are spectacular for this. However, I'll point out some of most outrageous ones I've found so far:

Best Rated Mods - AKA Ridiculous Interchanges
Downtown Chicago
GTA Los Santos

 

[scooter1369]

"Cities: Skylines" is fantastic and truly is everything SimCity was supposed to be. Been playing the hell out of it for the last few days. Got my city up to over 20,000 have over a half mil in the bank and have districts set up, incuding a an oil producing district called the "J.R. Ewing District".

The part that frustrated the hell out of me has been the trash pick up. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why my capacity far exceeded the need, yet half my city was complaining about the trash piling up. Turns out I had high traffic areas leading to and from the incinerators and land fills. Trucks were taking forever to get to and around the city. Four lane roads and BAM, no trash problems.

 

[scooter1369]

I'll be modding very soon.