SimCity is 30 years old - But is that a good thing?

[dunbrine47]

Not really, T4 with it's expansion is one of the highlights of the series.

 

[Goddessoftheshire]

I loved Sim City 2000 it was one of my first games but I also loved Sim Farm, Sim Ant, and Sim Tower. This was how I got into The Sims was from an advertisement on the back of Sim City 3000. What makes the anniversary so sad is because EA killed it with that god awful Sim City 2013 or whatever it was called.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Not really, T4 with it's expansion is one of the highlights of the series.

Cool, thanks for the info!

 

[MysticMisty]

Sim Farm, Sim Ant

I had both of these as well, along with SimTown (basically the kids version of SimCity). Sim games were a huge part of my childhood.

 

[Xarpho]

Hell, if SimCity 2013 hadn't been royally screwed over by EA and had bigger maps, an actually working traffic simulator and a proper single player mode, it would have wiped the floor with Cities Skylines. At day one, SC2013 had advanced industrial production chains and disasters - stuff that would only appear in separate DLCs in Skylines years after release. SC2013 had modular service buildings, C:S doesn't. SC2013 had regions and interactions between cities, albeit poorly made; C:S doesn't even have that. SC2013 had a proper art style and building scale reminiscent of SimCity 4 that still looks way better than Cities Skylines.

I never was a big fan of 2013's "life in miniature" inspired artwork, but what was especially tragic about 2013 is that they had plans (interview which I forgot to link) to make really big maps (can't remember the exact number but it was enough that you could comfortably make Manhattan, or most of Inner Loop Houston), or actually fix the traffic simulator, but because EA had forced it to be online.

SimCity 2000 for Windows is a 16-bit application, from what I recall - it won't work on 64-bit systems, unless you have a virtual machine with an older operating system. But if you somehow still have a 32-bit system, it will work - SC2000 for Win3.1/9x runs flawlessly even on Windows 10, from my experience.

From research, it looks like the installer is 16 bit but the application actually isn't. The more you know...

 

[Slap47]

Sim City 4 is better simply because it embraces the autism.

Is there anything I'd be missing playing 4 instead of 5? Don't really care about "muh graphics", 4 looks pretty good to me.

Just play all of them. Each game is basically the same game but slightly different with ups and downs.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

From research, it looks like the installer is 16 bit but the application actually isn't.

This was actually fairly common among mid 90s games and applications. Old versions of Worldcraft (the Quake level editor that Valve bought and turned into Hammer) have 16-bit installers, but the program itself is 32-bit and runs on modern machines just fine. Just gotta install it on XP and copy the files over.

I didn't really get into SimCity until I tried the original. I have SC4 and like it, but I suck at it, and since I'm not really into sim games, I couldn't really appreciate all the detail. It was more a turnoff than anything else. The original on the classic Mac is really fun though, very satisfying and there's a lot of charm in the blocky black and white buildings. I like the look of it more than SC4 actually, or even the color versions of the original.