SimCity (time well spent compared to Civ?)

[MattyBoy]

I gather that SimCity has similar addictive qualities to Civ games. I loved the latter, but have never tried the former. Beneath all of this is a fear that I'll spend Civ-like hours on a game that is not as good.

Given that my life is already going down the toilet, should I steer clear of SimCity as a dangerous time sap?
Or am I simply missing out on a wonderful experience?

[General Ludd]

I can't imagine anyone being addicted to Sim City.... It's an OK game, but there really isn't enough to it to keep you interested for long periods of time.

[Eli]

Exactly.

Once every half a year or so I spend a few days on building a huge city, but after a certain point I lose all interest in the game.

[MosesPresley]

I love Sim City, I don't play it as much as Civ or a few others, but I'm always returning to it, just give another tweak to my city. It's also fun to run a deliberately mismanaged city.

[Skanky Burns]

I'd equate it with the Sims. Then again, I do like the Sims...

[MattyBoy]

I work in a pretty big city centre and yesterday I was looking and taking in how everybody's little efforts go to make it all work and how it's all built on layers of technological foundations.

That's what got me thinking about enjoying Civ's city view and wondering about Sim City.

[MattyBoy]

Hey, welcome back Skanky.
I agree, I'm over being snobbish about sophisticated games for the moment. They are only games, after all, and never as broadly challenging as RL.

[Space05us]

Its a fun game in the sense that a board game is fun. you can play it every now and then and get full enjoyment out of it, but its not a game you can sit down and play for hours on end and day after day.
I say give it a try, and dont get frustrated when your first 2 billion cities fail or you have a perfect city and all of a sudden it turns to crap

[MattyBoy]

Which version should I try?
My PC is about 4 years old.

[Space05us]

sim city 2000

[MosesPresley]

I ran sim city 3000 unlimited on my 233 mhz mmx 96 mb ram, 16 mb video card pretty well. There were some slowups, but nothing devastating.

[Space05us]

SimCity3000 likes to turn everything into little blue blocks and those 'hangups' are frequent.not to mention you dont get the newspaper

1.59ghz
256mb ram

i dont know about my video card let me go find it

edit: 64mb GeForce2 MX

[Leonel]

Yeah, that little block think in SimCity 3000 is kind of irritating but no game is perfect, though it would be great if it were.

I like SimCity 2000 Special Edition 'cause I can use the tilesets which are really cool. THough I wish there was a tileset based on SimCity 3000 for the Mac 'cause I found it for the windows version.

[Space05us]

it's kinda irritating when you cant see the building thats on fire.

Ive never played SimCity2000SE, whats special about it?

[Rasbelin]

On Matty's original message...

SimCity is the Civ of city level strategy gaming and micromanagement, when Civ is the opposite on a larger scale (= the rest of the World).