SimCity was released in 1989, was originally called Micropolis and was designed by the infamous Will Wright. For those that don’t know Will Wright, its suffice to say he’s one of the most popular and influential game designers of our time. SimCity, TheSims, SimAnt, SimFarm and Spore are a few of his hits and TheSims has taken many records since its original release.
Wright had trouble finding a publisher for a game in which you couldn’t really “win or lose.” Turned down by Broderbund, Wright eventually pitched the idea to Jeff Braun of Maxis. Maxis agreed to publish Simcity as one of its first two games.
When near complete, Wright and Braun took the game back to Broderbund to clear the rights for the game. Broderbund executives Gary Carlston and Don Daglow saw how addicting the game could be and signed Maxis to a distribution deal. Four years after initial development, SimCity was released for the Amiga and Macintosh platforms, followed soon after by the IBM PC and Commodore 64. On January 10th 2008, the SimCity source code was released under the GPL license as… Micropolis!
The objective of the game is simple, build and design a city. Though the player could focus on building a highly efficient city with an ever growing populace, it was by no means required. In a sense, open ended, the player was free to design the city as they chose.
Included in the city building experience was the possibility of natural disasters such as flooding, tornadoes and more. Pre-designed scenarios were also included in the game such as the Boston 2010 nuclear meltdown, or mass coastal flooding of Rio de Janeiro of 2047 … even a Godzilla attack of Tokyo in 1961.
In the years to follow, the SimCity franchise would continue to expand with greater detail as SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999), SimCity 4 (2003) and a host of other “Sim” games and until the release of “The Sims” in 2000, the SimCity series was the best-selling line of games made by Maxis.
In Fall of 2008, EA will release the next child in the SimCity family, SimCity Creator for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. And thus, history continues!
Quake Live Getting Subscription Option
If I were a subscriber, I’d leap at the chance to be a Human Hunter, but … no. Just… no. Every time I get the urge to play World of Warcraft, I realize I’d be grinding again, trying to find parties, deal with 10 year olds, etc. and I’m instantly cured of the desire to play.
Previous expansions didn’t get me back into the game (and if anything, made the default game feel less worthwhile to me), so… no. This won’t win me over. (But in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never stayed with any one MMO long enough to run out of unfamiliar content, so the whole MMO expansion issue is a moot one for me personally.)
On an unrelated note, I believe it was called “fog of war,” not “cloud of war.”* (At least where Warcraft II was concerned. Also, disabling didn’t show you where the people were, it just stopped indicating [via shading or lack thereof] how far you could actively “see” at any given moment. [Unless you’re referring to the cheat that revealed the entire map. Which you couldn’t use during multiplayer anyway.])
(* – Though it should be noted that Warcraft III had a quest called “Cloud of War”, which is probably why it’s referred to as such in World of Warcraft, even though I don’t recall there being such an effect in the MMO. [This clarification add after some brief Googling…])
In Regards to the Question of the Week
I have a few friends that play WOW, but the question for me is: Is this enough to make you buy WOW?. Yeah =/ I missed the boat on that one. The Reason wasn’t that I dislike the game at all, I think blizzard is a awesome game developer, I just got caught up in another MMORPG which took a couple of years to get out of the addiction. The game was indeed runescape (pretty bad ay). Why I choose cutting wood and Crit for 41 instead for 4100 I don’t know. I guess the main factor was RS and WOW is a very time consuming game and I didn’t want to Start such a massive game from scratch so late. I’m a little hesitated to start another MMORPG cuz I don’t know if I have the time anymore and forever evolving game are hard to beat or be satisfied with your character. But then again is WOW better than playing Final fantasy/fall out for 100’s of hours by your self?
So my question to you is: Is WOW a experience that I should experience? and what are your Pros and Cons about the game? In the mean time I’ll will hold my decision and paly fire fight ={)
The difference between 100 hours of Fallout 3 vs. 100 hours of WoW is that you’ve got a very impressive character after 100 hours of Fallout 3. (WoW, not so much. Unless you’re a veteran of the game [in which case, include THOSE hours], or are helped out by someone else with a ton of hours logged.])