Which is the best city-building game, please? I especially want to be able to drive around the cities, and view them from street-level. It's years since I've played a Simcity game, and I've never tried any of their competition (Cities XXL, etc) so I've no idea what the current games are like. I don't mind how old or new the games are, but obviously I'd lean towards the newer since I'd prefer a visually good depiction of the city when driving around. Thanks for any replies.
I don't really know a city building game where you can drive around, but my favourite city building game is Sim City Societies along with Cities XL. People seem to bash Sim City Societies, but if you don't want a simulation, but you just want a fun city building game, I recommend that. The optimisation is unfortunetly horrible.
Streets of Sim City lets you bring in cities from, I think Sim City 2000, and drive around in them. Other than that I got nothing.
Does SC3000 have a driver's view in it? I have tried Streets of Sim City!a long time back - I had it years ago, and to me it's a real contender for the worst game ever. The theory is great, being able to drive around the cities that you build, but SOSS is so bland and badly done, for example, it only has one pedestrian model (and you never see two or more pedestrians together, and the one pedestrian you see seems to walk sideways), the buildings look unconvincing, and you get little feeling of movement in the game, from what I remember. Worse are the bugs - you can drive straight over some rivers and parts of the sea, but others cause your car to explode. Sometimes the camera view is blocked by a building, so that all you can see is the side of a house instead of your car, and other times (when the camera view is not a problem!) you can see through buildings. I seem to recall other bugs, like the car suddenly somehow facing the opposite way to the way you were driving, and the car handling very badly. And the game gave no feeling of taking place in a living, breathing city. Thanks for the suggestion, but unless Streets of Sim City was patched (or actually re-built from the ground up!) then I don't think I want to revisit it at all.
Sim City on the SNES for ease and accessibility. Sim City 2000 for PC. Don't bother with newer games.
In my opinion, Simcity 2013 is horrible. Even with all the bugs fixed, I don't like it. It's playable, but it wasn't enjoyable and it was just a waste of time for me.
I liked 3000 and 4, they were both good. I've not yet bought the new one because it has tiny little towns. And didn't have offline single player for a year.
I personally had lots of fun with SimCity 4. Then I bought SimCity (2013) on launch day - biggest mistake ever. It has made me not want to buy online-only games on launch day ever again.
Shit like the SimCity 2013 launch (remember it didn't work at all for a lot of people for a few weeks) just makes me less likely than ever to pre-order a game.
What about Sim City 64? I'm talking about the 64DD game. I've never played it, but it seems interesting, mainly just because it's on the 64DD.
It's in japanese and that may be a problem for a lot of people, they won't even try the game if it's in Japanese.
Yeah that it does or was it Simcopter? Alternatively if you prefer the console interfaces, the Playstation port of SC 2000 (and probably the Saturn port) has a mode that lets you drive around the cities as well. EDIT - Sim City 4 and its expansion has missions to get more money or reputation and a free drive option that lets you drive various vehicles around the city as well.
I think the bigger issue is that it's on an extremely rare and obscure console that was only released in Japan. My Japanese is pretty basic, but I might be able to understand parts of it. I would like to own it (along with all of the other released 64DD games), just to mess around with it, if nothing else.
My personal favourite is still Sim City 4. For a surprisingly addictive newer game try Banished. It is indie but very well made and polished. There is something soothing about that game, until all your citizens die. And even then it is still somewhat soothing.
Banished is fun, but very frustrating. You can have like 95% of your population working producing food and at some point you'll still run out of food anyway and everyone starves to death. I've basically quit the game since I'm tired of putting in hours and hours trying to build up my town only to have everyone starve to death and for the game to be basically over. I swear the game is designed like this, otherwise it would be too easy since there's no enemies or anything.
SOSS was pretty bad, but then again Will Wright didn't complete any work on it in any capacity. I had it a while back, and it was definitely as rough as you were saying. Also to my knowledge no patches have been released for it. SimCity 2013's launch was an absolutely mess. The kicker was people discovering that only one line of code needed to be changed for it to be able to be played on single player, despite EA's PR claiming always-online was a necessary feature. Coupled with the absurdly small town sizes, the broken traffic patterns and the overloaded servers, SC2013 will always be one of the dark spots of the series, besides of course SOSS.
Well, you can play Streets of Sim City or you can play the de Playstation version of Sim City, that have some sort of 3D mode where you can drive around the city in 3D. Like the 3D mode of Transport Tycoon but much worse.
