Can I suggest paying attention to the upcoming <i>Cities: Skylines</i>?<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfeBpagvQw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfeBpagvQw</a><p><a href="https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines" rel="nofollow">https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines</a><p>Having spoken to the lead designer, this gave me the impression of the <i>SimCity</i> I used to know, albeit with some more features like policies and districts.
Note that HN user SimHacker did the original port of Sim City to unix, and maintains the micropolis open source version.<p>His blog: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/</a>
Real world SimCity: <a href="https://earthengine.google.org/#intro/LasVegas" rel="nofollow">https://earthengine.google.org/#intro/LasVegas</a>
If you've got about an hour and a half to spend, and you enjoyed this article, I'd like to recommend a lecture given by Will Wright in 2003.<p>He covers his background, early computer games, the origins of Sim City, the Sims, as well as more abstract/high-level discussion of game design and simulation.<p>Some high level themes of the talk: using the computer as a modeling tool, simulation design, Will Wright's game design principles and philosophy, programming for two dynamic processes "the software" and "the player's model of the system", and traversal of possibility spaces in game design and simulation.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo</a>
<i>SimCity 2000 for Win95</i> is my personal favorite SimCity game (sadly a 16 bit EXE). It's a sandbox style game, with no real end goal. SimCity 1 started as a map editor for a helicopter game, that was more fun than the actual game. It would be great to see a new triple A reboots of SimCity (and real time strategy) games, but without any casual or free2play or DLC flavours - just straight old school games game mechanics with modern 2D/3D graphics.
That's some weird native advertising(?): <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qapXCSe.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/qapXCSe.png</a><p>Did BMW pay the "devotee" to do this interview?
Great game, this brought up lots of fond memories. I don't really understand why a modified Gotye song reference was used for the article title as it doesn't really make sense in this context. Has the SimCity concept changed such that we don't recognize it anymore? The article itself doesn't seem to be saying anything to that effect.
For anyone feeling nostalgic, I ported the open-source version of the original game to the web: <a href="http://micropolisjs.graememcc.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://micropolisjs.graememcc.co.uk</a>
The community around SimCity 4 has really transformed the game with Mods and Addons. If you want to have a go at SimCity, I cannot recommand SimCity 4 with some Addons highly enough. I'd suggest you start with the <i>Network Addon Mod</i> [0] (not sure if this is the official site), which
<i>is a mod improving and expanding upon the functionality of the game's transit networks</i> (I'm not affiliated with that project in any way, just had a lot of fun with it).<p>[0] <a href="http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Network_Addon_Mod" rel="nofollow">http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Network_Addo...</a><p>Example of what is possible with this and probably some other addons: <a href="http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-mod/images/possibilities-of-nam2" rel="nofollow">http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-mod/images/possibili...</a>
i recently played <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banished_%28video_game%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banished_%28video_game%29</a> and its quite nice..
“I think everybody just puts too much trust in Wikipedia,” he said.<p>He says this because the original release date is off, well. . . . . Edit the damn page then instead of worrying about it being off?
I've been playing SimCity in some variation for 25 years, according to this. That... humbles me for some reason. And makes me want to play it.<p>Edit: Since we're all vying for the games we wish we had: I want a game that is half Simcity, half OpenTTD. Some players manage cities, some players manage companies, and you all have the goal to grow cities. And not all companies would have to be transport companies, it'd be neat to play as the OpenTTD industries too.
I used to spend hours and hours playing Utopia, which is incredibly similar to Sim City, but came out in 1981 for the intellivision. I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but I still enjoy playing it sometimes. I suggest checking it out if you can.
Will Wright gives such great interviews. One of my favorites is <a href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/</a>