19 ms·
SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
- awinter-py 3y agouhhh it has 4 fewer arcologies than simcity 2000 so it is hard to evaluate the truth of this statement
- CydeWeys 3y agoYes, the arcologies were fun, but, they were also game-breaking, and building them completely changed the nature of the game into something unrealistic that frankly didn't really work. So not having them isn't a huge loss.
- lagniappe 3y agoah but placing that 301st arcology was so fun to young-me for some reason :)
- qball 3y agoThe exodus has begun.
- SilverBirch 3y agoIn a way they were a really neat way of ending the game. There's no natural stopping point in running a city, but once your entire city is covered in arcologies it's quite a nice way of saying "and this is done".
- bombcar 3y agoI think SimCity 4 is the best city simulator game. Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter; however.
- nkrisc 3y agoCSL as a virtual model hobby is a great way to save space and money. The cool thing is you can paint your cities and still play the traffic management game, down to timing the signals at individual intersections.
- ok_dad 3y agoI want a VR version that supports mods
- sidewndr46 3y agoCities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.
- piperswe 3y agoIt makes sense, given that its developer also developed Cities in Motion 1 & 2, which are _especially_ transportation mode simulators.
- spideymans 3y agoWhat’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town. I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.
- Gigachad 3y agoThat was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections. I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.
- chongli 3y agoI prefer SimCity 2000. 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). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare. Back on topic though. 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. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player. SimCity 2000 has almost none of that. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. 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!
- gruez 3y ago>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. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player. You don't have to do that. Leaving the sliders at defaults work just fine. You only need to tweak them if you wanted to micro-optimize spending, which rarely needed given how easy it is to make a profitable city to start with.
- iJohnDoe 3y ago100% agree. Fond memories of SC 2000. The open creation of any layout you could think of was my favorite aspect of the game. Anyone have a particular recommendation on how to play SC 2000 today on Windows 10?
- genocidicbunny 3y agoGOG has SC2k available and it should work just fine on Windows 10.
- 3y ago
- tbm57 3y agoNostalgia wave at seeing images from this game again I like Cities: Skylines but am a little turned off at how central the traffic management is to the gameplay. Maybe I just never figured out all the right optimizations, but it feels like after a certain city size you're just spending all your time reworking your roads
- toadi 3y agoClose to real life issues :) Traffic.
- Spastche 3y agoI think that's the most common complaint about the game, hopefully they fix it in the next one.
- db48x 3y agoThat’s actually why I like the game. Logistics is everything. A city is not merely a beautiful arrangement of buildings, it is a machine with many moving parts. If you neglect the movements, the city won’t function and your people will move out. Unless it kills them first.
- tracyhenry 3y agoThe problem is that the traffic issue is nonstop and affects things, so you have to fix it. In reality at least the traffic will resolve itself overnight.
- bombcar 3y agoThere are mods that can do that (literally wipe every simulated traffic off the map) but you can handle traffic pretty easily if you plan ahead. My last few cities really had no traffic problems at all except for one old main road that I really didn't want to redevelop for some reason.
- db48x 3y agoI'm not sure how that can be a problem. If traffic couldn’t have any effect on your city, then why bother simulating it? The whole point is to make you think ahead and plan the capacity of your road network so that traffic jams are less likely and fixing them is easier.
- jcranmer 3y agoHaven't seen it mentioned yet, so I also want to raise a toast to the wonderful music of SimCity 4.
- jordemort 3y agoYes, such an amazing soundtrack. When it was new, I mistook it for a new Aphex Twin album at least twice while my roommate was playing it.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoooooooh thanks for this, i "collect" video game OSTs, will have to check this one out
- jphalimi 3y agoIf you love SimCity 3k/4 music, it is made by Jerry Martin and saxophonist Marc Russo. A few great links for you: http://jerrymartinmusic.com/music_demo.php http://jerrymartinmusic.com/music_demo.php On this demo page website, you can find some original jazz samples not included in SC3k even though they are quite amazing http://boombamboom.com/ http://boombamboom.com/ Some website Jerry Martin opened a few years ago where you can download high-quality music from the games he worked on (Sims, Sim City etc) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1467440/SimCasino_Soundtrack/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1467440/SimCasino_Soundtr... Sim Casino is a way more recent game, and Jerry Martin / Marc Russo came back together to write the OST! It has a lot of feels from SC3k/SC4 music, so you might want to look into it. You can also find one of their interviews here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158420/view/4689895466705925095 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158420/view/4689895... As you can see I am quite the fan... :-)
- NBJack 3y agoThis is a stretch. 4 was alright, but it also marked the death of the series. 3 was great, 2 was legendary. There's a great reason Cities: Skylines became the spiritual successor.
- tjpnz 3y agoIf SimCity 4 marked the death of the series what was SimCity 2013?
- Dalewyn 3y agoSimcity 4 was the high point, it was its putrid and inbred successor that killed off the franchise.
- kmeisthax 3y ago"Putrid and inbred" correctly describes the DRM scheme. The game underneath that crud was trying to go way more in-depth by building a sim game out of an RTS engine. They wanted to, say, have Sims in your SimCity actually drive to work and back and get stuck in traffic jams. Problem is, the average computer in 2013 couldn't actually handle simulating that many units. This isn't inbreeding, this is being overambitious. Shooting for the moon, and landing not in the stars, but in the Salton Sea[0]. [0] I have no clue if any viable launch trajectories from Cape Canaveral support such an emergency landing.
- crashingintoyou 3y agoI was a little surprised that they actually released an Apple Silicon version for it just a few months ago (https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-How-to-access-the-Apple-Silicon-update-on-Mac-Steam-SimCity-4-Deluxe-Edition https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H...) in spite of its age.
- Rury 3y agoI think that's because surprisingly, it's still a marketable/profitable game. If only it weren't, then maybe it would eventually be open sourced. Only flaw I find is that due to it's age, it wasn't really designed with maximum concurrency in mind, and doesn't utilize the full capabilities of modern hardware, so the simulation slows to a crawl after a certain size.
- bombcar 3y agoIt's even more amazing because EA didn't do the port, Aspyr did, and they're still around to do an Apple Silicon port. I wonder how it affects mods, I might have to dive back in ... I also note it's on the Mac App Store so that's probably why they're upgrading it. Still, worth the buy at Steam for $2.
- speeder 3y agoThe game actually does support decent threading, but it relies on old RDTSC behavior and will crash on modern CPUs if you allow all the threading to run. I nagged EA a lot to Open Source SC4 or allow fans to fix bugs on Windows version, but they are stubborn :( The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit thus heavily limited regarding mods.
- mhh__ 3y agoSimilar with the Sims 3, the Mac version is 64 bit the windows version is not and thus becomes unplayable after a given length of savefile.
- 3y ago
- jordemort 3y agoMy only complaint about this game is that even the largest region size feels too dang small. I'd pay full retail price for a SimCity 5 that was just SimCity 4 with larger regions.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoAre there mods?
- capableweb 3y agoBasically that was what the entire community wanted + deeper gameplay, but instead EA chose to go the complete opposite direction, screwing the entire community and letting Cities: Skylines be the spiritual successor instead. Let's hope Cities 2 don't repeat the same mistake.
- jordemort 3y agoCities: Skylines seems like the kind of game I should love, but I bounce off of it every time I try it. I'm not sure what it's missing for me but I just can't get into it.
- Tokkemon 3y agoC:S also has limitations, like the agent limit of 70k, which means even moderately large cities of 100k are not realistically simulated. Not to mention the nonsense of every building having essentially a single family. And the garbage system being gorked. Still better than Sim City in the long run though. The incredible building flexibility made up for shortfalls in the simulation.
- kuon 3y agoI have fond memories of simcity 1 and 2000. I currently play cities skylines but it has its cons. I hope cities skylines 2 will have less central traffic and we can zone without road. It's our best hope to a modern simcity. But this article motivated me to play sc4 again.
- bombcar 3y agoThere are mods for CS that let you zone against the park paths, IIRC. You can make road-free portions of the city, but you need other mods to handle garbage, etc (basically dumpsters) because without roads you can't get the trucks in. The latest DLC seems to have some more on that area (roads that ONLY emergency/bus/service vehicles can use).
- kuon 3y agoYeah I tested a bit, but in the end you always feel that the game was designed around roads. I have not tested the latest DLC I think. I thought it was about airports only.
- bombcar 3y agoIt was the one after airports, Plazas and Promenades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Q8RN9ut4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Q8RN9ut4s I've not played with it much, but I used similar mods that let the paths from the earlier Parklife and Campus DLC do similar tricks. I couldn't and didn't entirely get rid of roads, but I had 50+ utilizing non-car transportation.
- NikkiA 3y agoEveryone always forgets SimCity Societies, it wasn't perfect but it was fun
- sclarisse 3y agoThe problem is they launched it in a miserable no-good borderline unplayable state without any budget challenges at all, and only spiffed it up later.
- sbierwagen 3y agoMy favorite SimCity 4 bug: There were several minigames where you would drive vehicles around in your city. If you drove a train, you would have to get from one point to another in a certain amount of time. Drive fire trucks to a fire to put it out. Stuff like that. Emergency vehicles had sirens that you could turn on that caused other cars to drive towards the shoulder and stop so you could pass them, which worked great... except at intersections, which caused cars driving at right angles to your path to dart forward and come to a complete stop, blocking the road. Making the siren totally useless, oops!
- iggldiggl 3y agoThe train minigames were also somewhat annoying because trains couldn't reverse and the game just picked a random selection of stations you had to visit without regards to your network topology.
- orthoxerox 3y ago> except at intersections, which caused cars driving at right angles to your path to dart forward and come to a complete stop, blocking the road. Sounds like real driver behavior to me.
- mproud 3y agoIncorrect. Cities: Skylines is the best of all time. But SimCity 4 at its time is still quite good.
- sidibe 3y agoI enjoyed the first couple Sim Cities but at the time I really loved those city building games like Caesar and Pharaoh, so satisfying watching the houses level up and immigrants pour in
- StanislavPetrov 3y agoGreat game, still remember spending countless hours on SimCity1. Shout out to SimAnt and all the other Sim-inspired games that followed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shmde 3y agoIt's currently on sale on steam.
- meerita 3y agoI love SimCity 2000. I remember back then the most legendary build: MAGNASANTI (6 million residents, 2.523.010 commerce and 644.173 industry. 9172 million total population) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
- theandrewbailey 3y agoPretty sure that Magnasanti is 3000, not 2000.
- meerita 3y agoMy bad, I thought it was 2000. I saw the video long time ago.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoThere’s a simple cheat for it. Build bus stops. Don’t build subways. Can’t lose.
- ralphael 3y agoI love SimCity, never forget the first time I played it on an Amiga 500. Then one day my friend lent me his 512KB ram upgrade and it was a different game :-)
- neals 3y agoA time before micro payments. Games built by artisans that loved their product and gave it their everything. Great times.
- zokier 3y ago00s were imho the most corporate era of gaming, being after the 90s when the likes of Wright, Sawyer, Carmack et al managed to succeed with only small teams, and before 10s when "indie" gaming made its rise. Lots of good things can be said about SC4, but artisanal is not one of those.
- kome 3y agoIt's quite amazing that Aspyr did a intel 64-bit version and a version for Apple Silicon; it's great to keep it alive
- yreg 3y agoI might be a bit younger than the average commenter here, because for me the favourite citybuilder was SimCity 3000, not 2000. Anyway, I miss the isometric grid. Yes, it's less realistic, but it's so pleasing. The thing I'm most annoyed by in modern sim games is placing roads and paths. They never look quite right. It's the same with Rollercoaster Tycoon -> Planet Tycoon. I'd like to see some new games which embrace a grid.
- lvl102 3y agoI’d really like to modernize Simcity 4. Throw some AI on it for simulation. Stable diffusion for one of kind buildings. I just realized you can do so much with AI to make old games interesting now. Who knows, maybe that will be a big trend in the near future.
- rubslopes 3y agoWhen I was a kid I loved SimCity 2000, and then SimCity 4. I spent hours on them. Sadly I can't get myself to play them anymore, I just keep thinking these are games you need to invest too much time to have fun and I just have too much to do. I miss not worrying about that.
- grepfru_it 3y agoI'ma let you finish, but the Original SimCity by Maxis was the best citybuilder of all time mic drop
- lazylion2 3y ago$2 (90% off) on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/SimCity_4_Deluxe_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/SimCity_4_Deluxe_Ed...
- jcarrano 3y agoThe only issue for me was that sims would choose the shortest path, not the fastest, leading to traffic problems which were very hard to solve. This I learned later from the Internet, at the time I didn't know it and I was just perplexed as to why they wouldn't take a newly built highway. Otherwise, excellent game.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoThis was fixable with a very basic mod. There was a heuristic value which basically determined how far out of the way the traffic simulator would look when trying to find a path. But it was a trade-off for simulation speed. The mod changed this value and allowed the sim to try more paths, but made time move MUCH slower, even with the game speed set to max, once your city started getting large. It was worth it though to see your highways and public transit actually get used.
- tgtweak 3y agoI don't know - the Cities series is taking the next steps on what a city building sim should have progressed as. The last SimCity game was an afront to the series and should never have been released in that state. I say this as someone who's early commandline experience was typing sc2000.exe from dos. I have hope that there is an online massive Sim world where Sims and SimCity players can co-play and create some amazing real-world scenarios. I agree that SimCity 4 was the peak of the series but there are many hardcore simcity players that claim 3000 was peak SimCity. Just look at Magnasanti city for some proof of the dedication.
- racl101 3y agoIs there a way to play this on Mac today?
- chillycurve 3y agoAlready mentioned in another comment, but they just released an Apple Silicon version: https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-How-to-access-the-Apple-Silicon-update-on-Mac-Steam-SimCity-4-Deluxe-Edition https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H...
- nilptr 3y agoEh... I loved SC4, but the peak of the franchise was 2000 and 3000 (either one is fantastic). SC4 trended heavily towards unnecessary complexity.
- guhcampos 3y agoThere's so much consensus in the community that Cities Skylines is the actual greatest, that I'm inclined to believe this is an intentional clickbait from RPS. They grabbed this thing which isn't even a thing and turned into some buzz.
- zamadatix 3y agoWhen I was growing up I obsessed over this game for a few years. Of course, being very young, I didn't quite understand how the game intended you to launch it... it was a 2 disc install (for the deluxe edition at least) and there was something about the disc order. It was either something like "1 -> 2 -> auto launch on completed install but 1 -> launch after" or the other way around "1 -> 2 -> auto launch on completed install but 2 -> launch from desktop after" or something silly for the DRM. Regardless, young me decided it would be easier to uninstall the game with "keep saved games" checked and re-install the game every time I wanted to play. And that's precisely what I did, hundreds of times. I'd come home from school, boot up the computer, start the install, go do other things, and then that night play Sim City 4. One day I came home and couldn't find the case the game came with, the case that held the product code. After searching around for a while I couldn't find it, and never did )it likely got tossed cleaning up one day). I figured I might as well try to remember what the key was and typed out: 25MM-TNK4-EH6A-6V6K-KHWN. At this point it's nearing 20 years and it's still living rent free in my head, albeit the last 2 groups may be swapped around... would have to try it to be 100% sure. Not too many months into doing this did I figure out what I was supposed to do with the discs, and then later how much easier it was to play a cracked version of the game in the first place. The rest of my history with the game was trying to fit far too many mods into 512 MB of RAM. All that history and love for the game aside, I do think either Sim City 4 or Sim City 2000 were the greatest city builders relative to when they came out. On the other hand, I think Cities Skylines is the greatest City Builder of all time as an absolute. The shear scale without having to hop between simulations in a region, the more freeform nature of what you can build, and the additional gameplay systems (like flowing water) all on top of being a more modern game with a more modern interface make it shine. Of course, no two city builders focus on exactly the same gameplay so some may feel differently depending if they e.g. want to care about details like transportation along the way or just want to see the city grow. Also, given this is HN, if any of the modding folks responsible for things like NAM/SAM/NWM/CAM/etc are around thanks for all the additional free fun those many years ago :).
- leononame 3y agoThanks for sharing, great story. Thinking back, for me it's incredible just how much more energy I spent as a kid with computers and games. That patience really allowed me to discover and explore much more than I do today. If I play a game today, I just get straight to it. I don't wander around too much in the open world or try to game the mechanics for some weird bugs or try the same thing over and over again.
- cheeselip420 3y agoThe soundtrack to SC3000 is a straight banger. I wish they'd make an exact port to the iPad (instead of that gimped version they released years ago that didn't have subways or highways or anything like that)
- hexane360 3y agoAnyone who has nostalgia for SimCity should definitely give a listen to its amazing soundtrack: https://youtu.be/PSv37HwwojU https://youtu.be/PSv37HwwojU Jerry Martin, the composer for most of The Sims franchise, is a legend. The music is like vaporwave before vaporwave.
- q_andrew 3y agoAlong the same lines, the best thing to come out of Sim City 2013 is Chris Tilton's orchestral soundtrack. It uses musical tropes from 50s/60s Hollywood futurism and adds some modern atmosphere to it. Somehow the composer manages to keep the 'camp' of old movie soundtracks without it being cheesy. As with any good OST, music changes with the context. New skyscrapers will trigger sweeping full pit orchestra music. There are nighttime mixes for each song that lean into distant acoustic bursts. Also I love that when building hospitals, the music incorporates rattling pill bottles, jingling metal instruments, and clanging beakers. So fun!
- syngrog66 3y agoSimCity (the original) had a big influence on me as a young budding game designer/programmer. In a way my latest game [SB] is a kind of simulation of our collective future, and how we try to live in the absence of the modern US/Western-style city infrastructure and services we take for granted now. Of the kind which SimCity models and brings to life so well. --- [SB: welcome to look in my bio here if curious]
- Quindecillion 3y agoHere to add my voice to the 3000 crew. My first and only deep foray into the Sim genre, and man did I sink countless hours into that game. I've tried other games of that ilk and none capture the kind of magic that 3000 evoked. Dat soundtrack...