Going Retro

[nacho]

Something happened in the intervening 20 years, eh?

Extreme video game violence! Wolf3D, now, feels roughly on par with an ages 4 and up My Little Pony game these days.

[Reginald McGraw]

I had a similar thought when a friend brought up the Intellivision & Colecovision plug and play systems (it's the controller from the system with a few games inside, you just connect to your tv; note: I have the Atari 2600 one). For a minute I thought, "Nice! Classic gaming!" But really...who wants to play that when we have new shiny beautiful games?

[monkey!]

I'm waiting for Super Rape Simulator Fist-thousand.

[nacho]

I've been watching gameplay footage of Homeworld Remastered -- the 1999 mega-hit that consumed hours and hours and hours of my life. It's probably the first game I played straight through, and replayed over the course of the following few years.

It's basically BSG: The Video Game. And it has that same sort of addictive storytelling.

All that's been remastered are the graphics and the UI... And it looks amazing. I love that the majority of the reviewers and gameplay footage people sit there and allow the cut-scenes to play... I don't think I once tired of the cut-scenes when I was playing, even the third, fourth, fifth time around...

I have a feeling I'm going to go bonkers during the Steam summer sale...

[monkey!]

I think I may need to buy a PC.

[nacho]

I went insane and got Cities: Skylines, because I've been craving an updated city builder since Simcity 5 was announced...and the disastrous disappointment of that release really let me down.

I only had about an hour to play last night before I was called into action for domestic duties, but my first impression is that the game is fucking hard... Which is great. It seems very well balanced. You can't rush anything here, because you'll pay for it in the long run. You simply must start out on the village level and build slowly, evenly, calmly... It's easy to zoom up to 1000 people within a few minutes, but that backfired on me catastrophically.

The details are amazing... Traffic is fucked if you build industry along the highway -- trucks need to stop, and they'll tie up traffic when they do so. Traffic jams have a sort of accordion effect, too. Very cool, very well thought out.

Managing services -- water, trash, power, emergency personal -- is well laid out, and also enjoyably difficult. It's again set up to control and check your expansion. You can't go and paint a whole swath of zones as residential because people will move in randomly and then you'll be stuck with having to quickly expand your services (adjacent zones feed each other, in terms of power, so there's no need to build a zillion powerlines unless you overstep your expansion).

Trash pickup and emergency services can get screwed by traffic. If there are slow roads and ambulances can't get to sick areas, then the sickness may spread. Same with fires. Everything is sort of working together -- water has directional flow, so you have to be careful where your sewage outflow is going. You have to pay attention to your surrounding zones -- will a reasonable spot for sewage outflow totally destroy an adjacent zone that you may eventually want to expand into?

I didn't get far enough to have worries about governance, pollution, education, etc... But it's all very cool. The Simcity we deserved! 

[monkey!]

Want.

[nacho]

Guy builds a town with just one house...and then relentlessly stalks the occupants.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-strange-tale-of-a-cities-skylines-town-with-only-one-house/

[nacho]

Got big enough last night to build a hydro dam... And, again, the attention to detail. The dam changes the contours of the rivers. Done wrong, the river downstream of the dam gets too low and any water pumps down there won't work. If a section of the city that was riverside suddenly finds itself looking into a dry gully, the land value plummets.

Meanwhile, upstream can flood if you haven't done things just right. Low-lying riverside businesses and houses get swamped out.

Made it up to 17,000 citizens. Traffic hasn't plagued me too much, but I've invested hours, and many loans, and much of the city budget to upgrading roads, creating no truck zones, and building up public transport.

One touch I love is that my public transport suffers from accordion effect. Brilliant. And then there are public footpaths...which people and workers use! I have one long public footpath that links a bunch of high density apartments all the way iover a highway and into a second section that I bought to build up a hellish industry town. Droves of workers choose to walk to work (which improves health and happiness, since the walk is lined with parks and trees). The more accessible work areas are by foot, the better the traffic. I've solved traffic bottlenecks to commercial areas with a single cheapie gravel footpath connecting nearby neighborhoods.

My current struggle is pollution... Once I get my university system in full motion and educate my town, I'm thinking I may nuke my industrial sectors and just start plugging in high-rise offices. Or just buy an adjacent grid and turn it into a giant farm.

[nacho]

Skylines has really taught me, as a sad American, to appreciate the power of the roundabout.

[monkey!]

All bow to The Roundabout.

[Reginald McGraw]

So many in England...and I kept trying to go the wrong way...

[nacho]

I got past 60k citizens and then realized the joy of tourist dollars. I built a center city tourist district with various sites to behold, and then built a faraway harbor for luxury liners to dock, forcing tourists to take my now extensive metro system to the city center and commercial district. I think I just created the first subway system in the world that's wildly profitable...all on the back of hideous inconvenience!

I use my ill-gotten gains to build vast low density housing districts on seashores and mountains with small, polite office blocks next to them. Enclaves of the well to do who now, amusingly, level up through the five house levels within about 10 minutes. All while tourists offload at Faraway Port and ride the longest subway line ever to go to an opera house (and complain bitterly about the commute).

I'm getting a touch bored with this city now... I've figured out all the right things to do, so the core of my city is just annoying and needs a major makeover.

Things I love as the game progresses -- the demand for industry goes down as the population becomes more educated. They want nice, friendly offices. I have a far away mining "town" that's making tons of money, but most of the industry that used to be the backbone of my city is now tree-lined plazas and glittering glass high-rises.

I love that the sims prefer public transport and walking to work. And they go about it in a rational, normal way where you're not like, oh fuck, Cathy Sim is too far away from her job and is tired.

These guys live as close to work as they can afford (and house affordability is a minor factor depending on education level and location), and they'll take advantage of every public transport route you offer. If you build footpaths, they'll gladly walk to the stores and to work.

It's certainly possible, if you build strategically, to have a pedestrian only downtown. Though you still need roads for service vehicles.

I'm amazed at how death is a factor. Your population ages out -- and, yes, this is controlled by school districts. My first well-to-do enclave project didn't have any schools. I lured out a bunch of high class people and, when they had babies, they moved! And then they got old and started dying in droves.

Death also needs to be managed on the services side... Crematoriums and graveyards send out hearses to collect the dead. Too far away? Traffic is horrible? The services are overloaded? The dead lie around...and disease starts to run rampant if you let that go for awhile. (Yes, I made a zombie town at one point.)

[monkey!]

I should buy a PC to play this game.

[nacho]

I've been watching gameplay footage of Homeworld Remastered -- the 1999 mega-hit that consumed hours and hours and hours of my life. It's probably the first game I played straight through, and replayed over the course of the following few years.

It's basically BSG: The Video Game. And it has that same sort of addictive storytelling.

All that's been remastered are the graphics and the UI... And it looks amazing. I love that the majority of the reviewers and gameplay footage people sit there and allow the cut-scenes to play... I don't think I once tired of the cut-scenes when I was playing, even the third, fourth, fifth time around...

I have a feeling I'm going to go bonkers during the Steam summer sale...

And, yes, it was one of the first games up for the sale. I got it and am already on the penultimate mission and it's awesome and beautiful. Just one of the great storytelling games out there.

It's also interesting how complicated games have gotten. In 1999, Homeworld was cutting edge and really kind of tough. In 2015, you can breeze through each mission in about 15 minutes and there's no real strategy required because the AI is 1999-dumb. With the interface upgraded to not be as finagley as the original version, most of my games have been 1) Send in the forces and distract the bad guys, 2) sneak in the salvage corvettes from the side and steal all of their capital ships.

As soon as capital ship missions started showing up, I just stole them all because they would obsessively attack my capital ship. I only built one destroyer and now my fleet has three carriers, 7 destroyers, 3 missile ships, and 3 heavy cruisers -- all hijacked during battle.

But I still love the storytelling, and the whole BSG vibe. They've trimmed back a few of the cut scenes, though. The Junkyard Dog -- so frightening and terrible in the original -- really lost quite a bit. Not just cutscenes, either. They nerfed that whole level. There are a few other nerfed levels, too.

But, at 60% off, I don't regret it at all.