Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects. It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect.
Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark of game design.
#Satisfactory creative mode plus
That's fine if you're already tuned in on SimCity as a game and crave a higher challenge, but if you're new to these kinds of games, Cities: Skylines is just too much.Ībsolutely! SimCity 2000 was a masterpiece, striking the perfect balance between the immediate grokability and comprehensible simplicity of the original SimCity "Classic", plus the judicious addition of rich immersive CD-ROM quality graphics and sound. SimCity (before the final game) is a sandbox toy that lets you build a super dysfunctional city but y'know, as long as the taxes don't go in the red, you're doing fine! Cities: Skylines otoh has way harsher feedback tools if you don't build a highly functional city. Its the difference between SimCity and Cities: Skylines. Most 4X games, because they copied the Paradox approach, kinda suffer from the fact that they pretty much demand immediate mastery of the systems if you want to succeed, unless you're playing with friends (in which case you have more control over each other's bumbling and one person can just hyperfocus on learning one system, while the other can focus on another.) which unfortunately translates to the games devolving into spreadsheet simulators with fancy graphics.Ĭivilization was the right mix between "flavorful civilizations", "fun endgoals" and "reasonable to achieve victory against the computer". Yes, technically you can still play a bunch of cool 4X games, but most people still making them (with the exception of like, CAs Total War, which also notably defocused the 4X part in favor of RTS combat) is copying the Paradox approach and Paradox is largely known for its absurd depth and mechanics. The difference with sim/4X/any genre that's fallen outside of the general "popular games" trend is that they ended up becoming overly specialized and inaccessible to newcomers. So you can sit back (with a cold beverage of your choice) and enjoy a nice relaxing time playing mayor and seeing your little city develop before your eyes! It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare.īack on topic though. Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic.
I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic).
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