SimCity 2000 – 1993
Cities: Skylines – March 10, 2015
For those of you unfamiliar with these franchises, these fall under the genre of city builder simulation. Both of these games aim to create a representation of a god-like perspective of being a mayor, if that mayor suddenly ran out of magic power to instantly erect hospitals and eliminate plague every time there was not one thousand dollars sitting around.
In generality, these games premise is extremely similar even though there are 22 years, different platforms, and a complete change in gaming scene separating them. Simcity 2000 was released in 1993 for the Playstation 1. It received a place in gaming hearts as well as what can be considered the test of time in old gaming recognition by being made available on gog.com (good old games). Cities: Skylines released March, 2015 on steam for PC, currently has a 93% approval rating on steam, an 85 Metascore on Metacritic, and prior to its release was rumored to have the possibility of being the “spiritual successor” to SimCity 4, the sequel to SimCity 2000.
Each game follows the same basic flow when played under there “most likely” to be used mode. The player first starts a map under what functions as “God Mode.” During this mode, the map can be altered in any way at zero cost. Landmasses can change shape our size. Rivers, lakes, and oceans can be created and in the later of the two games covered here, flow can be directed. Mountains, ravines, and valleys can be created, and again in the latter of our two games we see a difference. We see the consequences of what 22 years can bring us, a physics engine. A physics engine may not be the biggest component to be implemented in a city builder, but it was objectively an innovative choice. As much as city builders are a blank rectangular canvas, Cities: Skylines went a different direction. Other than aesthetics and minor advantages, this was the first time that city planning had a new dimension that mattered, orientation. With this direction of flow, it was now important to have input water for a city come upstream and the output sewage happen downstream; otherwise, you would be pumping waste sewage into the “fresh water” pipes of your city.
The next similarity, the truly city builder mode. In both games, once “God Mode” is turned off, it is locked for good. This is the main portion of the game. This is where the player makes decision of where to build roads, how to zone housing, commercial, and industrial areas, and where place schools, hospitals, etc. This is the whole mayor aspect of the game. Both games offer a top-down view of the city. Both maps take scrolling around to see the whole thing. The point is to grow your city to be healthy, prosperous, and most importantly, big. The complications are vast. This crime to manage, fire hazard to keep down, children, teenagers, and adults to educate, water to provide, and power plants to build. Again, vast, it takes a lot of foresight and understanding to plan a successful city that can take up an entire map with no glaring issues.
Although these games have a lot of the basics in common, 22 years does leave a lot of room for improvement. Did you ever think you would want to build curvy roads in a city builder game about Utopian efficiencies? Yeah, neither did anyone else, but damn did Cities: Skylines prove us wrong. This is one of the big and obvious differences in the two games. Cities: Skylines went a different route and took the grid off the grid. This game gave the player to have the free-form drawing ability in a genre that was all about perfect rectangles. This was a bold move, and it worked. This was a shallow learning curve for the players, and it was met with resistance, but it has since been decided that in order to build cities and neighborhoods, we really should be keen on the factory that the world isn’t built with perfect rectangles, and know we know that it just makes sense.
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