Remember this?
Yeah, that's classic, right there. That's what SimCity used to be...and the great thing about it is that that's all it had to be. Zones are square and placed individually? That's amazing! Only one type of street that can only be laid in two different directions? Awesome! No freight rail? No problem! You learned to love it, you learned to deal with it, and you learned to appreciate it.
Nowadays, though, if it doesn't have 5,000 options, it's no good. No choosing the specific bus routes? Blasphemous! No HOV lanes in the highway? Preposterous! No laying down sewer lines? Nothing doing! Nowadays, if you want to get anywhere with this crowd of city builders, you have to give them the options right out of the box, or they'll move on to greener pastures...ones with St. Augustine, Lemongrass, Fescia and Bamboo all in the same field.
Heh heh...it sounds like I'm about to go on a rant that sounds like it should begin with "Why, when I was your age...." Truth is, besides actually being 'your age' (or perhaps even younger), I very much identify with the above group of fanatic custo-mongers. I mean...I don't really need to lay down my own sewer system, but I wouldn't mind having a few extra street and road options to play with. Still, the point is that we're looking for something to give us every single thing that any single city might have somewhere in its limits, because this is what we're almost able to do with the SimCity 4 we have today.
In other words, SimGoober killed the urban simulator.
That's right, I said it! We, the ST crowd, the core fans of the genre, have been spoiled rotten by all the great custom content makers: SimGoober, the NAM Team, BSC, Pegasus, NDEX and Tonkso, NHP, BLaM, PDA, Goldiva, wouanagaine, SOMY, NOB...all of the stunning custom content they create and all the game-breaking modifications they've made to SC4 have created a game that has no equal in the genre, and may never get one. You can almost literally think of a place in the world you'd like to emulate in your own way, and you'd be able to get a satisfactory representation of your ideas and dreams into the game. You can use the exact same custom content as someone else and come out with cities that, were they to exist on Earth, would be separated by thousands of miles and perhaps an ocean or two.
This is the SimCity we know now. This is the standard by which all other city building games, past, present and future, will be judged upon. And this is why the genre is in serious trouble.
The bar is set so high thanks to what we're able to create now that even [Sergei Bubka] would have trouble clearing it. Almost everything we can do now in SimCity should be possible in any new game, or at least possible for us to easily add it on. It would take more than just getting rid of the grid and giving us true wall-to-wall buildings; it will have to be almost absolutely customizable, hold attention easily yet be challenging enough to not seem patronizing, and be able to stand the test of time that SimCity 4 already has (last year, in its fifth year, it was still among the 10 best selling PC games for the year). It's almost absurd to think any game can match what we have...heck, SimCity 4 can't match what we have anymore. But that's what we, the core fan group, will demand of our future games, and that's what those games will have to provide if they want to even approach SC4's level of reverence. This is what SimCity: Societies didn't do; this is what SimCity Creator looks to be lacking; this is what everyone is hoping Cities XL will finally be able to provide. How the latter two will fair has yet to be known, but you can be sure that they, like SC:S will be judged against the SC4 that we all know and love today(NAM and all). Of course, everyone knows it's ultimately in vain; I can't even imagine what type of game it might take to usurp our game as the king of the city-building genre.
So yes...thank you, SimGoober and Ill Tonkso and Pegasus and Jeronij for creating content for this game that make it so awesome that it's virtually untouchable. Thank you Wouanagaine and Tarkus for making tools and mods that let us do things we should've never been allowed to do for another 2-3 years. And thank you, oh spoiled conscience of mine, for wanting to have the option to customize every single flyover in my highway interchange in any way I desire, no matter what the situation.
Heh heh...customizable highway interchanges. Another thing that we can do in SC4 now that we shouldn't be able to. When did it become that specific? Remember when we didn't even have highways at all? Remember when there were only about 30 different buildings all together? Remember when one of the most exciting things of the game was getting your first C-TOP and R-TOP?
I do. In fact, I still play SimCity Classic from time to time....
But I play SimCity 4 Deluxe oh so much more ;).
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