SimCity Societies

[sachmo71]

Anyone heard anything about the upcoming SimCity Societies? I saw a bit of an impression here (http://kotaku.com/gaming/eyeson/sim-city-societies-impressions-277661.php), and I'm intrigued. It looks like something that could give the game more flavor, something that I have been looking for, but it may turn off the pure city builders.

[Flasch186]

Ask the creator of Hollywood Mogul for his impressions...

Welcome to Hollywood

[Young Drachma]

Yeah, there has been quite a bit of hell raising on the Simtropolis boards about this. The consensus among the Sim City die hards is that this is death of the series.

I think the new game will be a whole new dimension to SimCity, but it'll be totally different than what we're used to seeing from the game. But...I'm intrigued enough to check it out.

I won't delete SC4 off my machine anytime soon though.,

[Young Drachma]

Here is an interview (http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=368&threadid=89604&enterthread=y) with a guy from EA about the game, posted on the simtropolis boards.

[MikeVic]

I'm looking forward to it. Should be a nice departure, since I actually haven't played a SimCity game since 3 I think... and that wasn't very long either. I'd like to see a change.

[sachmo71]

I'm really excited about this. Often when I would build a city, i would play around for a while and then sort of drift away, with no real connection it. I'm hoping that this game will add more of a bond between the city and the player.

[King of New York]

I'm looking forward to it a lot. I tried to get into SC4, but I always felt completely detached from the cities. I zoned, I sat and watched things unfold for long stretches of time, I plopped down a building every once in a while, and that was that.

The team that is working on SCSocieties already has put out some other city-building games such as Children of the Nile, which I might check out some day.

[Anthony]

I'm really excited about this. Often when I would build a city, i would play around for a while and then sort of drift away, with no real connection it. I'm hoping that this game will add more of a bond between the city and the player.

exactly. that's why SC has never had much of an appeal to me. always felt like i was playing a game/toy, and never felt like i was building something where "actual" people were living. i always found myself zooming in really close and just watching the people, just wondering where they were going to and what their life must've been life. this Societies aspect of the game is much more likely to draw me in (if i were to get this game, which is unlikely unless i can buy it at a discount). i want to have a connnection to the people living in my city, not with the city itself. a city isn't buildings and zones - a city is people and the buildings/zones they need to live their lives.

[MikeVic]

exactly. that's why SC has never had much of an appeal to me. always felt like i was playing a game/toy, and never felt like i was building something where "actual" people were living. i always found myself zooming in really close and just watching the people, just wondering where they were going to and what their life must've been life. this Societies aspect of the game is much more likely to draw me in (if i were to get this game, which is unlikely unless i can buy it at a discount). i want to have a connnection to the people living in my city, not with the city itself. a city isn't buildings and zones - a city is people and the buildings/zones they need to live their lives.

Well said.

In the last SimCity game I played, it looked like the cars in the streets for some of my roads were going in circles. I would build more roads to get rid of the traffic, and would wonder where the people were going or if they were pissed about my stupid streets. I don't think this game will allow that, but it's getting closer to it. :)

[Izulde]

I like that they got rid of the micromanagement of water pipes and electricity grids. Allows you to really concentrate on the important aspects of the game rather than minutae.

[Synovia]

I like that they got rid of the micromanagement of water pipes and electricity grids. Allows you to really concentrate on the important aspects of the game rather than minutae.

I liked the minutae.

[Young Drachma]

I like all of the details. I don't really like building pipes and power lines. But given there were easy ways around it, it wasn't as if you had to do it and so...I think that given how far the game had come with regions and all of that..I can see why they changed it up to reach 'casual' players. But a lot of physics of how stuff worked like cars going places, actual tracking of city statistics and all of that was done EXTREMELY well in SimCity 4.

A testament to how well the game worked is that it's over 4 years old and there is still a huge community of people developing tons of add-ons and plugins for it each day. The sheer quality and volume of what they've been able to do for that game is really remarkable to me.

So it would've been nice to see them expand on that. But at the same time, I can see how it might not sell to folks who enjoy playing The Sims for reasons other than building houses (as I do) or games like that.

I think this will be a new facet of gameplay, but I tend to agree with the school of thought that this is a remarkable departure of what a lot of us were waiting for in regards to what we hoped would be SimCity 5.

But since SCS will be released in November or around Christmas, we won't have much longer to wait to find out whether Tilted Mill can pull this off and the game can sell.

[Critch]

So the whole region thing has gone from the new version?

Looks like a different game, a merge of Children of the Nile and City Life, but given the SimCity name to sell it.

Not that that means it will be a bad game.

[SackAttack]

Having seen it twice in the last month, it is very different from what's come before, but it's mostly in a "you're not a fucking moron" way.

The idea is "look, this stuff we've always made you do before? You're not a fucking moron. You'd do it anyway, so we'll just assume you would have done it, do it, and get it out of your hair. YOUR job is to build your city and design it in whatever image you see fit. Leave the water, the power, and the trash to us."

[Anthony]

that's pretty logical, i would agree with that line of thinking. my interest level in this game has now increased to 10%. maybe 14%.

[Young Drachma]

Looks like a different game, a merge of Children of the Nile and City Life, but given the SimCity name to sell it.

Not that that means it will be a bad game.

That's precisely what it is. And no, it doesn't mean it's going to be a bad game. But it's not going to be Sim City.

[sachmo71]

That's precisely what it is. And no, it doesn't mean it's going to be a bad game. But it's not going to be Sim City.

How is that? Maybe I'm missing something, but you still decide on what you want to build. But now, instead of having the basic effect of raising or lowering your property values or making it easier for your sims to get to work, a new building or structure can affect the mood and lifestyle of the people around it. It seems like the logical progression of the SimCity line, where your decision actually affect the lives of the Sims rather than just their wealth and migration patters. It seems like the spirit of the game is intact, but evolved.

[sachmo71]

New trailer...doesn't show too much as far as game mechanics, but my warm fuzzy feeling is growing.


http://kotaku.com/gaming/clips/simcity-societies-285565.php

[MikeVic]

Sweet.

[Sgran]

I bought SC4 and wanted to love it. I loved the terraforming at the beginning, even if nothing I did looked realistic. And I played and played and played and everything took so long to develop that I stopped playing. A friend said I needed to get the expansion pack, but it was to late. For me, they needed to do something different to make it more personable. Maybe this is it.

[wade moore]

The team that is working on SCSocieties already has put out some other city-building games such as Children of the Nile, which I might check out some day.

You can drive down the road and have my Children of the Nile that I bought for my fiance and she spent 10 minutes with ;)..

I'm only joking, she'd kill me.

[Sgran]

EA press release: http://www.ea.com/article.jsp?id=simcityseries

no word about on-line play.

[Young Drachma]

How is that? Maybe I'm missing something, but you still decide on what you want to build. But now, instead of having the basic effect of raising or lowering your property values or making it easier for your sims to get to work, a new building or structure can affect the mood and lifestyle of the people around it. It seems like the logical progression of the SimCity line, where your decision actually affect the lives of the Sims rather than just their wealth and migration patters. It seems like the spirit of the game is intact, but evolved.

Too much like The Sims for me. But I can appreciate the evolution of the series and respect that it had to go in a different direction. I'm just not particularly interested in that sort of sim. I'll probably still buy it, because I enjoy building cities and the aspects of being able to get more engrossed in the 'culture' of each city rather than them being clones of each other, would be fun.

But I don't care about the citizens.

[lcjjdnh]

So, this game is coming out in about two weeks. Has anyone preordered it?

[Young Drachma]

I will probably buy it, being a SimCity devotee and all. But...no way I preorder it. I'm not excited about it, just...curious to see how much they changed it.

[Buccaneer]

The Impressions Historical City Building games (Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, Caesar - even though I never bought the last) have been and still is my 2nd favorite series of all time (after Civ of course). I was eager to play Children of the Nile since it was done by the orignal Pharaoh designer. But they evolved it to a society-building game which, in my opinion, didn't work. As someone said, they tried to merge two disparate gameplay styles and for those traditional/hardcore city builders like myself, it was a turn off, unfortunately.

[A-Husker-4-Life]

No Maxis = No good

[Greyroofoo]

Impressions/Tilted Mill > Maxis

[Abe Sargent]

My issue is not this game, but that SC still had a lot of directions you could develop it.

If you've read my dynasty, you know what I fan I am of SC in general and SC4 in particular. (If you haven't, what are you waiting for? http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=51381)

Some of the comnplaints people make about SC's franchise can;t be made of SC4, because it changed them. For example, in SC4 you can follow around individual sims, and they will tell you issues in your city before your managers and grids will, at the early stages. You can do missions. There's more than laying zones and waiting until buildsing emerge, and you can speed it up for that to happen instantly.

The intricacy of the game is simply staggering, and I still would not consider myself a master of it, today.

SC still had room for development, that's why I'd prefer that another entry be made with even more of it, instead of soemthing else. I have nothign against this game, and I will try the demo and see what I think, but it's not SC.

It'd be like Jim releasid FOF: The Fans, with a small sim abnout living as a pro fan. It might even be an alright game, but it ain;t no FOF.

[Bonegavel]

I've been purchasing SimCity since the very first and I love franchise. Up until now. I can't see how they can slap the Sim City name on this. Shame on them. I can see this being an off-shoot of SimCity, which it appears to be with the Societies tag, but I don't see a SimCity 5 on the horizon and that upsets me.

[Eaglesfan27]

I haven't preordered this simply because there are too many good games coming out in the next 2 weeks, but this will be on my christmas list.

[Young Drachma]

My issue is not this game, but that SC still had a lot of directions you could develop it.

If you've read my dynasty, you know what I fan I am of SC in general and SC4 in particular. (If you haven't, what are you waiting for? http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=51381)

Some of the comnplaints people make about SC's franchise can;t be made of SC4, because it changed them. For example, in SC4 you can follow around individual sims, and they will tell you issues in your city before your managers and grids will, at the early stages. You can do missions. There's more than laying zones and waiting until buildsing emerge, and you can speed it up for that to happen instantly.

The intricacy of the game is simply staggering, and I still would not consider myself a master of it, today.

SC still had room for development, that's why I'd prefer that another entry be made with even more of it, instead of soemthing else. I have nothign against this game, and I will try the demo and see what I think, but it's not SC.

It'd be like Jim releasid FOF: The Fans, with a small sim abnout living as a pro fan. It might even be an alright game, but it ain;t no FOF.

No kidding. The fact that Simtropolis.com folks spent the past five or so years developing every kind of mod you could imagine to tweak that same particular game lets you know that there were a million things they could do with it. But they've stopped catering to the real gamer and are going after people who buy The Sims franchise.

I only bought that game so I could build houses in it. And nothing else at all.

[sachmo71]

No kidding. The fact that Simtropolis.com folks spent the past five or so years developing every kind of mod you could imagine to tweak that same particular game lets you know that there were a million things they could do with it. But they've stopped catering to the real gamer and are going after people who buy The Sims franchise.

I only bought that game so I could build houses in it. And nothing else at all.


So you can't build houses anymore? From what I was reading, I came away with the impression that you could build individual houses now.

[Young Drachma]

So you can't build houses anymore? From what I was reading, I came away with the impression that you could build individual houses now.

No no..i was saying I only bought The Sims 2 because you could build individual houses. That was the only thing I used the game for. You still can. It just gets old after a while, was all. I was being confusing...

No, my reasons for liking Sim City over the years was due to the amazing depth of the game and just what it offered up -- as evidenced by some of my past dynasties and just...the sheer amount of stuff you can do.

I imagine the new one will be high on the gloss factor and slight on the options and depth. But we'll see.

[Alan T]

This feels to me that it will be like the Trains! game that was put out where it was a dummed down version without as many features but "prettier". I bought it anyways, but it lost most replayability quick...

I want a Sim City 5 that has the ability to do even more things, not something dummed down and glossed up.. I fear I am in the minority these days based on what software companies are designing though.

[Young Drachma]

Here's a SimCity Societies preview from simtropolis.

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=368&threadid=92085&enterthread=y

[Young Drachma]

And here's CityLife, a game that I haven't played..but looks SimCity-purists ish to me...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/citylife/review.html?tag=tabs;reviews

Anyone here played it?

I don't like the fact that it looks too out of the box. I want a game where I can get a map and do whatever I want like SC4 allows me to do.

[Drake]

This might be the first version of SimCity I actually pay for.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

FYI.....good deal on a pre-order for Sim City Societies. $25 pre-order at Toys R Us. Only good for today and tomorrow (11/9-11/10).

http://slickdeals.net/?pno=10658&lno=12&afsrc=1

[Critch]

Early review for SimCity Societies and it isn't good.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=87312

[Young Drachma]

It's like The Sims, City. But worse. Maxis dropped the ball giving this one away.

[Critch]

And here's CityLife, a game that I haven't played..but looks SimCity-purists ish to me...

There's a CityLife sequel coming out some time next year, may be worth holding off and waiting for that instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_Unlimited

[Young Drachma]

I think I'm just going to fire up Sim City 4.

[Emiliano]

Did anybody get this one? Should be out in the US. Impressions? I was interested at first, but after reading some reviews it seems that the whole concept is "pointless".

[MikeVic]

Maaaaaan. I really wanted to play this. :(

[sachmo71]

Yuck.

[Izulde]

Well, that's one thing I don't need to put on my list!

[chesapeake]

I loved the Caesar series, and was hoping that this would be a worthy successor. I'm disappointed that it appears that it may be a dog.

[Young Drachma]

Ok..So I dogged this game pretty bad in this thread and at simtropolis. But the past week or so, I've wanted to get back into SimCity 4 again. Well, I lost my copy -- as I've done four or five or six times before -- and was going to get a new copy from Wal-Mart. But before I did, I wanted to see if SCS was out and to read a few more reviews from non-Sim City loyalists like myself.

After I did, I decided that this game wasn't going to be the old Sim City, no one purported it to be and that it would satisfying OTHER curiosities I've had over the years of building my monstrous cities.

Things like "what's going on down there? What are the people doing? What does that building look like? Let's make it look more like a real place..."

The thing with SimCity 4 is, without cheating and lots of mods, it wasn't THAT great a game. I mean, it turned out to be downright amazing once you did all of the tweaking, but out of the box..it would get really old after a little while. In the later years, that's all I ever did with it. I played essentially in Sandbox mode, I built cities and tried to create a variety of them across a region that had a different flavour/character.

To me, SCS looks like the building elements of The Sims plus some city building aspects of SimCity. If they do it even half right, it might be an enjoyable enough experience to warrant the purchase (and for most, when the price comes down, that is..)

Not that this Societies will be amazing or anything close. But given that SC4 came out in 2001 and this game is released now, given how much better computers are now, etc., I imagine that if nothing else, it'll be a lot more interesting to LOOK AT for hours.

So...I'm going to check it out and I'll post some impressions here after I've messed around with it for a while, it'll probably be all weekend.

Strange turn of events, I guess. But...I enjoy the game enough to give it a chance and there isn't anything out there that's a suitable replacement that could convince me to do otherwise at the moment.

So...we shall see.

[Young Drachma]

Here's another review of the game from a SC4 vet, that convinced me to give this one a chance.

http://www.thesporum.net/smf/index.php?topic=1822.0

[Young Drachma]

Initial impressions:

Man, it sure is pretty. My initial impressions is that it's The Sims, City, is accurate. Even from the way that you build your cities, it's very much like The Sims and bears no resemblance to Sim City at all.

It's obvious where they wanted to go with this from the start.

Did I mention that it's pretty?

It's relatively easy to setup stuff like windowed mode and even customizing the way that you view your city, but it's not intuitive and takes a minute or two adapt/adjust to it all.

It's pretty customizable as well, so once the mod community gets to work, I'm sure they'll be able to tweak away with this one.

I haven't gotten much further than dancing around the landscape of my initial city, but..I should have some screenshots before too long.

The initial map sizes are too small, but there are ways to expand that editing the xml file that control the map size, too. I haven't gone there yet. I'm still trying to digest it all, because there is a lot and it's new.

[Abe Sargent]

See, some of the things he says in that review are reasons I DON"T want the game. For example:

"Because as far as I can tell, there are no expenditures. In SC4, everything you placed in your city to provide you Sims with some benefit cost you a bucketful of money each month. The game essentially discouraged you from building big. In SCS, as far as I can tell, there is no cost to maintain a police station, fire station, hospital, school, whatever. All you can do is make money (by having happy Sims that go to work). This is really nice, especially for people like me who played SC4 and went in the hole within a matter of 30 minutes. 3000 was even worse since the money cheat sucked. (SCS has an Unlimited Money mode, by the way. Yahtzee!)"

It's like SCS is just a sandbox, and that's what this guy wants, but it ceases to be an actual SIM at that point, its just painting.

[Young Drachma]

No, the things I love about Sim City 4..especially if you've read any of my SC4 discussions on threads or my most recent baseball dynasty that surrounds the game, this has NONE of those elements. I'm not imploring anyone to buy this on the strength of its...well, anything related to how well it models the old game in any way, shape or form.

The only thing -- so far -- that I can get from this, is that if you want a more "birds eye view" of the city and you spend tons of years playing SC4 like a sandbox, than this will take that experience elsewhere.

But save for that? It's not going to do anything for the person who enjoyed the mechanical stuff that made SC4 what it was. Over the past few years, I never built pipes, I didn't do any gridding. I did when I first started, but after a while, I just wanted to get to my city, build what I wanted and then get down to seeing how it all worked. The regions in SC4 were huge for me, because it was a lot more like real life.

I just built metropolitan areas and that was it. I did enjoy the sheer complexity of how it all worked. But I played with cheats because I was just trying to hurry up and get to the point and that game never liked to let you do that. Or to make decisions about where stuff went.

But it was a very 40,000 ft. view of everything. This is more like..ground level and that it's too.

It's simplified to the nth degree and is cookie cutter and doesn't appeal to the hard-core gamer, nor the person who really enjoy the specificity of particular details in their simulations.

SCS isn't a simulation, it's a city builder that's not overtly complex.

I just wanted to clarify where I'm coming from with it. I changed my approach to what I wanted. But if SC5 were to be released and went back to the basics and enhance the product..even if it were just SC4 with 3-D and a few other bells and whistles, that'd be a buy in my mind.

SCS doesn't even have road complexity and so, it's kinda haphazard what they tried to focus on and seems they really tried to get it out of the door.

But it's entertaining. Worth its current price? I'd say no.

[Young Drachma]

I built my first city. It was intended to be a small town. I read a review on a message board while I was waiting for the game to install that lamented the fact that the game is all about plopping stuff and that it doesn't naturally "evolve" over time.

I get what he means now. I can't expect my rural town to emerge into a city automatically as I would in an old version of the game, it's all up to me to evolve it naturally.

While this doesn't have to sound as dreadfully boring as it is in my head....it would get old. My first city had about 1,600 people in it.

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/Baerston_1.jpg
http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/Baerston_2.jpg
http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/Baerston_3.jpg

My resolution isn't that great, so it doesn't look as good as it would on a higher end machine, but it still looks good.

That said, it's all plop and play. The game has no real lasting playability and will only keep you engrossed for a little while. They really dumbed the game down (as most of the reviews have pointed out..) and the audience that seems most excited as fans of The Sims, who are the only ones I've seen on message boards who are outwardly HAPPY with this version.

SC4 loyalists and those who grew up on the game as kids from SC1 all the to SC3000 are grumbling over the obvious alienation by EA in this iteration of the game.

An hour or so of this game and while I will still play it, I won't deny that I miss SC4. A lot.

Like, there isn't a contest -- not that I expected one -- but I didn't expect to play this for an hour and wish that it was Sim City 4. It's just too simple, too easy, too silly and not interesting enough to warrant any serious gamer pouring their time into it.

It's a decent time waster if you ignore your expectations about what SimCity was for over a decade and try to take it as face value...and if you -- like me -- bought The Sims solely because of house building or something that and wished there was a city builder in that game at all, you've got it right here.

[Emiliano]

DC, thanks a lot for the impressions.

[wade moore]

Let me know if you get any impressions - with all of it's faults, as a hardcore Sims fan my fiance my really like this game.

[Young Drachma]

Let me know if you get any impressions - with all of it's faults, as a hardcore Sims fan my fiance my really like this game.

If she's a Sims fan, this might be close to heaven for her. It's a chance to build an entire town for Sims, in a much more robust way than The Sims allowed you to build locales in either version of that game.

I mean, its far more "plop" worthy than what The Sims was, where you could build houses and give the individual buildings character. This doesn't have that out of the box (though the game can be modded) and so, it wouldn't offer you hours to play and try to waste time on that stuff.

But it does offer a sandbox mode (what I'm playing in) that's called 'free mode' that allows you to ignore all of the silly 'energies' the game has for you to contend with (a few of the reviews out there go into more detail about those...) and all of the various challenges intended to help you unlock stuff.

I think if one were interested in playing the game the way the designers intended, it might be a decently interesting challenge for a fan of The Sims series. But without that under one's belt or just a desire to plot and try different scenarios, it might get needlessly dull.

I'm going to fire it up today, try to expand my map size editing a file that allows you to do that and see if that makes it more interesting and try to build my first real metropolis.

I'll post screenies and maybe it'll be at least a little interesting. I'm not "over it" yet, as far as this new one is concerned, but...it's a real exercise in "checking your expectations at the door" to say the least for now.

[Young Drachma]

This morning, I expanded the map from the 256 to 512 by editing the XML file and it gives you a lot more area to work with and (so far) no discernable slow down. The textures and such would look a lot better on a desktop with a serviceable video card would look a lot better than the laptop I use.

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_9.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_7.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_8.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_6.jpg

All of those screenies are from the same map. But I started up on the hill, first building a windfarm and what will be a rural community, before building a more metropolitan area by the lake.

So far, this does for me what I always wanted from SimCity out of the box and that's a place that looked like a real place. I mean, this is a little cartoony to be sure, but it's kinda fun to be able to build and see your city up close and personal.

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_10.jpg

The camera angles are funky, but setting it to "free" in the options tends to help some. It's still strange to navigate, but no stranger than The Sims 2 tended to be for housebuilding.

[wade moore]

Thanks for the update!

[Young Drachma]

I spent about 2-3 (or more, I lost count) hours this morning playing the game. It's still just as I said before, not as engrossing (if you can believe that..given the time I just cited) as SC4, where you could go an entire day and realize you hadn't eaten, but...it's still new, so I attribute it mostly to that.

Some new elements I discovered today:

- CO2 levels affect your city skyline. So if you had all road in a city, with no buses or subway, it'll get harder and harder to see your city skyline. I'm not fond of the overemphasis on weather, but given global warming is the soup de jour these days, I guess I understand why they did it.

But it's not extremely well implemented.

- One of the things I loved about the Rush Hour add-on in SC4 was the way you could name segments of town, streets and all of that. So you could create segments of town like a real place.

SCS doesn't come to close to allowing for that or at least, not that I've seen yet.

I did intentionally just create a segment of town that's a slum, just to see how that worked and sure enough, the vagrants come out if you put a welfare office, some bars and pubs, a mission, a lot of churches and little else in an area.

The game isn't every good it seems about keeping that confined to that area, making the entire city suffer for the one vagrant neighborhood, but...I'm still investigating.

The most recent screen shots I have are of the slum area I created and during a period when smog was bad in town. I've fixed the problem now, though.

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_16.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_18.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_15.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc113/Dynasty_DC/SimCity%20Societies/LakeArrian_17.jpg

[Young Drachma]

My final suggestion is (I just spent another little while on it and I'm sure I'll play it to get my money's worth out of it, but...) wait until the price goes down. This isn't a must have and I'm not even sure that a die-hard Sims Fan or a kid would get a ton of enjoyment out of this, because the casual fan will be confused by all of the random micromanaging you have to do, that's sorta esoteric and not really related to anything.

Once the price goes down, I could see checking it out..but I wouldn't encourage anyone to run out and get it now, even if you're super curious, because it'll likely just annoy/disappoint you.

Just my .02

[Abe Sargent]

Thanks again. Great stuff.

[sabotai]

I picked this up too. I bought through EA's online store. Direct Download, a blessing and a curse.

The Good: It is very pretty.
The Bad: Once you start building up your city, it really effects FPS. Moreso than it really should. I mean, I have several skyscrapers, and a healthy amount of other buildings, but I was taking up maybe a third of the map size (default map size, did not touch XML) and it had become a crawl. My system is decent (not great) so I'd expect I would have to turn down the graphics some, I just hate having to change Graphic settings based on where I am in a game. Imagine having to slowly turn down your graphic settings the further you got in other games like Doom or WoW. Annoying.

The Good: It does still feel like SimCity to me, and least the city building part.
The Bad: It also feels like The Sims, and while I did like The Sims for what it was, the mixture of game play elements just doesn't quite feel right.

The Good: The Buildings have more personality than in the SimCity games. Without mods, the cities in SimCity all pretty much looked the same to me. There's a good bit of diversity in this game and can make your city look pretty much how you want it to.
The Bad: For some buildings, they are too different. Plopping down a building with the art design of "capitalism" into an "authoritarian" city is an eye-sore. It would have been nice if the building's appearance also changed with the style of the city.

The Good: It is fun...
The Bad: But I don't really know what I am supposed to be doing. If the game is supposed to be an open-ended, do-whatever-you-want type game, then that's what it is. My problem is that's all there is. I can design the most functionally (pardon the PC-incorrectness) retarded city, and it'll "succeed". I am a huge fan of open-endedness in games, but there still should be laws effecting the game world. The game world in SimCity Societies seem to be absent any kind of restraints, except for some at the very extremes. There doesn't seem to be much of a "game" here. Almost....I feel like there is a great game in there somewhere, but I just haven't found it.

So I pretty much agree wiht Dark Cloud. It's a fun game, it's a good time waster, but I don't think it's worth the price. At $20-$30, probably worth it for a nice, easy going gaming experience for when you want to relax.

[Young Drachma]

Funny, I found my copy of SimCity 4 today and have spent the good part of the afternoon downloading mods to get back into that.

[Cringer]

Got this today and have messed around with it some. I ran a check of my laptop to see how it lived up to the requirements. Passed the minimum easy, but fell short on recommended (video memory). I opened it anyways. The only problem I am seeing though is that when I want to scroll around it seems to jump. It is kind of pissing me off actually. I knocked down the graphics and it seemed to improve the overall game performance, but it didn't take the jumping out. Not sure if it's my laptop not being able to handle it with the way it is acting.....

So far it seems interesting. Will check it out more when I get on the road for sure.

[korme]

Playing video games and driving a truck... Bad Idea Jeans

[Apathetic Lurker]

There's a CityLife sequel coming out some time next year, may be worth holding off and waiting for that instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_Unlimited

The first one had starfarce included.... yuck ...Monte Cristo is a dinosaur when it comes to anti-virus security.

[Passacaglia]

Playing video games and driving a truck... Bad Idea Jeans

Were you even alive when they aired Bad Idea Jeans?

[Abe Sargent]

I picked this up since the price dropped, and have been thoroughly disppointed. I was hoping it'd be better than I feared. It is not. I'll play around with it a little more, but not too much.

[Bonegavel]

I picked this up since the price dropped, and have been thoroughly disppointed. I was hoping it'd be better than I feared. It is not. I'll play around with it a little more, but not too much.

Whew, I dodged that bullet! Everytime I saw it at Best Buy I would pick it up and read the back of the box, but would always put it back.

[Apathetic Lurker]

I'm still gonna buy it though... I like tilted mill games

[Cringer]

I was disappointed with it. It made me feel bad because it was a gift as well, so it ruined it even more for me since I felt like I had to play it. Part of my problem was my laptop doesn't handle it well for some reason. It just needs more power then I have so not far into the game it slowed down too much.