Every few years I'll break out this game and build myself a megalopolis. There are a few rules you should follow to hit 500k: - no island maps, no maps with a high percentage of water - rails only, no roads - nuclear plants only, no coal - all industrial zones/airports/seaports on the edges of the map so a portion of the pollution will be off-grid and won't get counted - put commercial zones between industrial and residential zones to provide a pollution/crime buffer - rails touching every zone - LOTS of police stations with budget at 100%, only one fire station - bulldoze all hospitals and libraries once you max out on the gifts that they create, and replace them with regular zones - put park squares into empty spaces, especially near industrial zones - stop building everything when a brownout starts and save all funds for another power plant - building some donuts are good to put in gifts and police stations, but double rows are the most space-efficient method - PLAN AHEAD on spacing. Use the cursor to count spaces before placing zones and rails, and especially when placing larger things like airports, seaports, stadiums, etc. You want to minimize (or eliminate) any dead space on the map and avoid having to bulldoze zones and rearrange them for better spacing. Following those rules will make a megalopolis very achievable. There are many other strategies if you want to push for a million residents, but the most I've ever gotten was about 940k with almost all zones topped out and no place left to build. And after you get your Mario Statue for 500k there isn't anything else you can achieve except a higher population number.
I only ever played the PC version of this game, but i spent HOURS AND HOURS playing it. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Good to remember where city builder games have come from as we prepare to enter the CS2 era.
I could get to 500,000 people as a kid. The instructions that came with the game had clues for the "donut" method, but I had to figure out the zoning myself. I liked to mix donuts for residential and the other method for commercial and with industry all around the outside. The first time I hit 500k happened late at night. The megalopolis music was amazing.
I can show you how to (legitly, more or less) get a population over 1,200,000 on Freeland. and at least a million sims on a map like #61, 137, or 728? I forget, but..... sounds impossible right? not with zone stacking the right way. it s a method to bulldoze the little houses on new R zones and then put down new zones in their place. you can put down R zones in the new slot and one of the zones will develop fully. then you can bulldoze the undeveloped zone and put a fresh one, and it too will develop. you can also put down C zones and I zones and stack them together this way. with a well-thought out column or row design with this technique, you can literally free up another 100% of the map's original space, just about, thus allowing you to double a normal maps population! get to thinking and cranking and have fun! :P
Honestly that nostalgia hit is one of my favorites. The music going on for long hours in the background watching my dad play is an oddly fond memory of this game as a child.
Going to college in St Louis and, later, in Northern California in the early 1990's, I can say that crime was a serious problem in both urban and rural areas. People don't realize that the 1990's saw a crime rate that was three times higher than it is today, and lead pollution was off the charts (the two are highly related). It's no coincidence that so many dystopian urban movies like Escape from NY were so popular around that era (1980s to 1990s). SimCity (which I played on the Commodore64) very much reflected the perceived urban crime wave..
If money is an issue I remember there is a cheat you can do to get I believe $999k. As a kid I would always do that to never worry about money and just build the city for fun. I spent so much time on this game it was a blast
One of the most intuitive videos I've seen on TH-cam! I've just come back to this game on a pre owned snes classic I got for Christmas. Not played it since I was a kid. I'm 40 now and I'm in nostalgia land! Thank you for the tips.
you brought back some memories showing that old windows version of SimCity Classic that I grew up playing on our very old MS-DOS based PC that we had to start up Windows 3.1 just to run some of these games. That is the OG Sim City that I remember since I never owned SimCity on the Snes surprisingly enough. Not sure why but it just was not a common game to find.
I used to play SimCity on the computer all the time, but then played the SNES version way back in the day and never went back. The SNES version is one of my favorite SNES games of all time.. SO FUNNNNN!
This is so nostalgic! I had the version for Amiga CDTV, you were able to choose between 4 eras (medieval, western, contemporary and futuristic) and the music was amazing! It's the game that made me fall in love with city builders, when I was just 7 yo...
Oh my gosh, great choice! I love the SNES version so much! It’s my preferred version and the one I played first, as well as the first SNES game I asked my parents for as a kid. It’s so nostalgic and cute, and I love all the charm. I can’t wait to see this video when I get a chance, this game truly is amazing and has such a great soundtrack with so much personality.
The soundtrack was such a vibe. I included some of the original music in it and it was sooooo good, but I sped up a lot of the gameplay so I couldn't include it through the full video.
I played simcity on a 386 IBM monitor/cpu combo my aunt gave me when I was a kid. It was 1992. As a kid coming from a very turbulent family it was like an escape for me to have a world where I was in control. I felt like a God...sometimes a very naughty God. I made Lori Lightfoot look like Rudy Giuliani 😂
I think the first version of SimCity I played must have been on the Macintosh (SE 30), but I honestly can no longer remember. Point is, I **am** that old, to have played one of its originally released versions. I also replayed it recently in a browser version (don't remember which version was being emulated, though), and I agree with you -- I was surprised at some of the depth the simulation itself had, despite the necessary crudeness of the presentation and interface. I also miss the ethos that your brief foray into the PC version brought up: "software toy". Maxis wasn't making a game. It was making a toy, with infinite replay-ability, and maybe a little bit of gamification in the form of special buildings and the like. I kind of wish this distinction of "software toy", a coinage of Will Wright himself, had stuck.
Honestly I’d love it if you made this like a series of you making older city building games and trying to get to a certain population , should try out simcity societies (holiday destinations is the main one) love the content either way! 😊
I reall don't know why yet, but I just LOVED this review. Really like how the text is delivered, the story of your playthrough and the songs you've chosen, they are all really flavorful and kept me interested all the way.
This video should get more views but then I'm a biased 90s kid. I grew up with my older brother constantly renting the game from our local Videos 4 You store. It is indeed a slow burn with resources, he would be in front of the TV for hours, slowly building more things while also slowly waiting for the next year's paycheck only to immediately blow it on fixing problems just to wait again. It was simple but also complex as mentioned in the video, I would see him spend a lot of time picking a new map only to bulldoze certain spots or trees to make his ideal location. The music, again this is partially nostalgia but it really is just calming music to go along with building your city. The sudden alarm music when shit happened, that congratulations theme when something good happened and even Wright's theme whenever he offered advice are burned into my memory. I still have the SNES soundtrack on a playlist on TH-cam whenever I want to remember better times. I may have found it boring as a kid in favor of my RPG's and fantasy/action games but looking back I really do appreciate how quaint this game was and still is. I know for sure my brother got a lot of time out of it until we finally got a computer and he discovered SimCity 2000. Over 4 hours in one sitting, I know streamers nowadays go for much longer but it still blew my mind back then that he found a game that engrossing. Just the power of city building games I suppose.
I know I'm a month late BUT there are 2000 maps in the game! You can access alternate maps by picking the number of the map you want to use, then going back to the main menu, and returning to the map select screen!
This unlock so many incredible memories from my childhood. I wish I could play this on Nintendo Switch nowadays, the soundtrack and the graphics aged so well...
I played this back on my Commodore 64 when I was MUCH younger and it had just released. One of my all-time favorites. Thanks for the walk down memory lane in a wonderfully fun, charming manner. Earned a sub for sure. Looking forward to watching your C:S content!
I recently got a rom of this. I still have my snes cartridge but it would be cumbersome to hook up everything etc. This game is such a classic. I have a simple 32inch vizio and a snes9x emulator which allows me to use wide screen and full screen. These little 16bit snes games look surprising great on my television in this way. Especially SimCity. I got a city started to were it was making a profit and I just went to sleep and let it rake in the money. It's so fun how having a rom allows for different gameplay experiences. Great video. 🍻
I've been playing this game off and on since its original release. I can easily get to Metropolis level without the max money cheat, though I do take advantage of a "feature" that may not have been intended. And still I've never reached Megalopolis level. (I build rail straight, with no interactions, while the game is paused, and then immediately build power lines over them. I can then connect cross ways between them without creating an intersection tile that prevents a power line being placed over it. And then I drop transportation budget to 0 in the taxes. Normally road and rail can degrade from lack of funds, but tiles with power lines are exempt. Which is 100% of what I use. It does mean no water building of road/rail though, which is a minor constraint you otherwise don't have.)
While SNES Simcity doesn't run super fast, there are some ways to make it more manageable: 1. The game runs slower when you're actively doing things, so if you're just watching, it's better to take your hands off the controls. 2. Gifts are exclusive to the SNES version and generate revenue in addition to raising land value. The most notable of these is the Casino, which you can have up to 5 of and they give you $300 a year each. You get two casinos by having a certain number of hospitals and schools in your city (these spawn automatically in residential zones) and the rest by having a certain number of roads (300, 400, and 500 respectively). Once you get all the casinos, money mostly stops being a problem unless you play *really* fast. 3. Use roads in the early game. Besides being necessary for the aforementioned casinos, roads are half as expensive both in up front cost and maintenance cost compared to railroads. Personally, I don't use any railroads until I have all 5 casinos.
I still have the original game and manual that I bought when I came out. I’d love this game are used to play it all the time sit there for hours, playing it every night.
One of Top 5 games of all time for me. Can't even imagine how many hours I spent playing this. Still have the original cart I bought with my allowance money way back in probably 94 lol! I still play the game to this day, every now and then(slthough not the cart, because the battery is old).
This was one of the games we got when we got our SNES in 1992. At the time the bulk of my gaming was platformers and arcade style games so it was a big departure from my comfort zone. But I put a bunch of hours in this though I never got quite to the megalopolis status no matter how I tried. Compared to the original DOS it has a lot personality that keeps things amusing during the down periods. A top 10 SNES game for me.
One of the most interesting things that this shows is how well the old simulation still does hold up, but also the weaknesses. With this type of simulation, each cycle is essentially an estimate based on what's on the board. Then, the simulation processes the current state, applies changes to the simulation (say, turning a residential area into a house if the demand is present) and then the overall state is reevaluated. That's one of the reasons you'll see such large swings in population; it's really just an estimate of how many people could inhabit a city of the current state. Similarly, traffic isn't based on cars, but based on the density of buildings around the road. This kind of estimate is enormously faster than the agent-style simulation we have today. On the other hand, with agents, we get fun AI problems like flying cars. Still, this makes me want to dust off something like SimCity 3000 Unlimited and see how it holds up!
@@CitiesByDiana A way to think about it is that this game uses the same (literally, the same) methods city planners would use. If I'm planning a new downtown, I need to make sure the roads are the appropriate size for the expected population. So first I estimate how many people I think will be living in the area when it's mature. Then I make a grid, and based on zoning, I estimate how the people will be distributed. Finally, I estimate what percentage of those people will be on the roads at peak times. With that information, I choose the type of road and speed limit that can handle that much traffic. In SimCity 2000 and 3000 it's more obvious, because the game then overlays car graphics based on how busy the road "should" be. What's fascinating is that the shift to agent based simulation has already had a huge impact on how we think about cities and problems like traffic. Agents now RESULT in high traffic, instead of high traffic estimations spawning congested road animations, and intricate problems that the old algorithms couldn't simulate now arise naturally from the system. I'm a software engineer, so I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.
I wish I could find the version of this that I played when I was a child. It was on a computer that my uncle brought over that didn't have Windows on it, it would just boot into DOS and run a script that ended with a menu where we could press a key 1-7 to play one of the games he loaded on it. One of those games was a version of this OG SimCity. It was entirely black and white and the controls and menus were cumbersome compared to this. I dont think it was the Mac version I've seen, but we're talking 25+ years ago so my memory's starting to get a bit fuzzy. Either way it was the same game as this underneath, and I loved it so much that I got some graph paper at school and started planning cities and maps I'd make when I didn't have time to play. Incredible nostalgia. Thank you so much for taking me back. Now I think I'll drop into modded Cities 1 for a bit and spend some time enjoying the amenities of the future that I never imagined when I was a child.
I entered the franchise with SimCity 2000 as a kid, so though I didn't have as much nostalgia as possible, it was still fun playing an online version of SimCity later. I don't think I ever explored the SNES one, but watching you play it was fascinating. I'd also never heard of TheoTown!
Yep, the city builder that started it all for me. Simcity3k is my favorite of the series. I enjoyed my time with Cities: Skylines, but it was just missing the charm that Maxis had around the Simcity franchise. I reached Megalopolis once and it was tough run. Everything had to be optimized right down to the last detail. Many of the maps make it impossible. A re-imagining with some quality of life changes and adjustments to the some of the simulation numbers would be fun; have schools and hospitals contribute to land values, schools could even contribute to lowing crime so you're having to build so many police stations, nerf the negative effects of traffic or buff rails by lowering their cost slightly, and as many suggest increase the speed of the fastest setting of the simulation. Excuse me while I"m off to dig out my SNES and this game now.
I still have my cartridge. I remember being the only kid in my elementary school that loved Simcity. Everyone else I knew that played games thought it was too slow. I'm 37 so this was back before everyone played games of course when it could still be considered nerdy and undesirable. It's crazy how different society is now.
I used to read that book when I was a kid and I thought the "example cities" they talked about were real places and I really wanted to go to "Hoocares, Florida"
I remember this game having a million dollar cheat code. Unlimited money or something. You'd have to do something with changing the taxes to zero for a year and hitting some random buttons.
I played on a C64/128. I would leave my city running while reading my encyclopedia Brittanica's as a child, as the money slowly built up. (I would work on a city for months) I played again in my mid-20's, using an emulator. I believe the processing power, or something made a difference, as I didn't have to wait so long to build up a city as I did when I was a child. Or maybe I had just gotten better at it through playing the more advanced sim city 2000, that is when better computers came out. sim city 2000 also integrated with sim copter where you could fly a helicopter through your city, doing missions like catching criminals and putting out fires. it wasn't a DLC though, it was its own separate game. you would just load your city file into sim copter. If you didn't have sim city 2000, you could still play sim copter you just would play the cities that came with sim copter. there are actually all kinds of Sim games that will wright designed under maxis. the absolute best games of my life. then "the sims" came out and it was the end of all of it. EA bought out Maxis, and pushed The Sims, so to continue building city builder games other companies stepped up to the plate, with Cities XL for example. EA came out with sim city 3, but it was horrible IMHO. Without Will Wrights vision, city builders may not have become a thing. To me he was more of a visionary than Steve Jobs.
I got started with the original SC on my uncles monotone display Mac in 1989, loved it. Later got it for SNES, loved it even more. Played (almost) every version since (I saw SC Societies and said screw that). Protip: December of each year, crank up taxes to max, collect money, then drop it back down in January.
I still have the original super NES version the same one I had when I bought it with the original instruction book and everything along with my original, super Nintendo I bought when I first came out love playing this game as a kid
I used to never do roads, only rails. What I really remember is spending the city's whole budget in January and then having to wait for the next year before I could do anything again. Also, don't feel silly about building an airport in 1906; I would build nuclear power plants even before that!
My favourite SNES game by far. Though I always stuck to the "default" play mode rather than the scenarios. My biggest oroblem is that the map you choose can lock you out of Megaopolis- including map 999. 😅
There's an unreleased prototype of SimCity for NES. It's complete, just wasn't released. It was suppose to be released at the same time or slightly before the SNES version having been programmed at the exact same time as the SNES version and even advertised in Nitendo Power as an upcoming NES game along with the SNES version. However it was scapped for released when it came time to actually release it. I read somewhere it was due to wanting to instead put the full marking resources of SimCity into the newly released SNES system as they felt at that point the NES was going to quickly lose popularity to the new 16 bit SNES system at the time. I have a rom of it. It's almost the same as the SNES version, but it was a little more relaxed with it's music and had 8 bit graphics. There's TH-cam videos by a variety of people of the NES gameplay of it.
I had this on Snes and played it that much that eventually, the battery backup gave way and I could no longer save my game and lost all of my saves. 😭 That was the end of a wonderful time.
1:00 I played that version of SimCity when it was newish. FWIW that is "correct" and not a bad emulator version or anything, computers were just garbage back then.
Had to check here jic you did a full episode. Such great memories. The SNES version made become a full blown console player until RCT. I know this version had a max money cheat but idk if it would work w ab emulated version. And u need the controller. But im sure u can find it online if your gonna go all out and do a full city
With the delta emulator, leave it running on the background while watching videos, makes it less slow. Great game, I’m much more smarterer than I was at 5 years old but I’m still trying my best to learn and play the game. I’ve almost taken half the map over. Love the game
Its crazy how good people are at modern city builders, but we once were here at sim city. I blame sim city for my grid style building I have such a hard time breaking away from. Even if I try and build different, its bascially parts of grids all jammed together. Sim city... man..
I miss so much the old Maxis Games that went to the SNES... Sim City, Sim City 2000, Sim Ant... even Sim Earth, although I couldn't understand what was going on, it was so cool! Thank you so fucking much, EA games, for killing such an awesome company. I wonder what Will Wright is up to right now, he is one of the few people I'd consider an idol. I'll try sending my CV to him again lol...
it is good. However, the largest problem is just how much the game hates roads. I wish they added to the road infrastructure. I didn't like the binary either road or rail. I wanted more degrees of road network. Cities skylines does this well with the road nodes, and how you can easily transition from a 3-lane highway to a 2-lane highway because there is an exit ramp here. yeah, I really like that about roadways and the fact that it was ignored here is a big problem for me. Just do rails... that's boring though
how can you post images on here? I got a neat pic of a c-5 mid and a c-5 low together, shows people how to get these rare zones. believe me I have perfected it. lol.
The game was slow when it cam out. So slow that I always used the cheat to get a bunch of money in order to just build as I wanted without having to stop and wait.
Played this with my dad, now he is gone for almost 20 years.
Miss him!
The music in this game has ingrained itself into my core forever. Theres something oh so special about it. Thanks for covering it
It's the best 😁
It is extremely special! I've actually put this on a few times before while working out or doing other things.
@@PunmasterSTP Hey, when the Metropolis theme hits you know you can make that last killer rep
@@LucaEnzoMost definitely
There is a money cheat to then no need to wait I have the Japan version and USA one
Every few years I'll break out this game and build myself a megalopolis. There are a few rules you should follow to hit 500k:
- no island maps, no maps with a high percentage of water
- rails only, no roads
- nuclear plants only, no coal
- all industrial zones/airports/seaports on the edges of the map so a portion of the pollution will be off-grid and won't get counted
- put commercial zones between industrial and residential zones to provide a pollution/crime buffer
- rails touching every zone
- LOTS of police stations with budget at 100%, only one fire station
- bulldoze all hospitals and libraries once you max out on the gifts that they create, and replace them with regular zones
- put park squares into empty spaces, especially near industrial zones
- stop building everything when a brownout starts and save all funds for another power plant
- building some donuts are good to put in gifts and police stations, but double rows are the most space-efficient method
- PLAN AHEAD on spacing. Use the cursor to count spaces before placing zones and rails, and especially when placing larger things like airports, seaports, stadiums, etc. You want to minimize (or eliminate) any dead space on the map and avoid having to bulldoze zones and rearrange them for better spacing.
Following those rules will make a megalopolis very achievable. There are many other strategies if you want to push for a million residents, but the most I've ever gotten was about 940k with almost all zones topped out and no place left to build. And after you get your Mario Statue for 500k there isn't anything else you can achieve except a higher population number.
Interesting - I was never able to build a megalopolis either
Nice!
I only ever played the PC version of this game, but i spent HOURS AND HOURS playing it. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Good to remember where city builder games have come from as we prepare to enter the CS2 era.
The PC version is not the same as the SNES. They are similar enough though, but they got some stuff different and the music is all new.
I just had flashbacks of my childhood. I'd love to play this on my phone. EA needs to release this game. Let's all start a petition
I started with SimCity 2000, but the original does also give me a bit of nostalgia.
Shame that Nintendo had to pull it from the Wii eshop when EA released a newer version
@@nickelouscageDamn that is a shame 😥
I could get to 500,000 people as a kid. The instructions that came with the game had clues for the "donut" method, but I had to figure out the zoning myself. I liked to mix donuts for residential and the other method for commercial and with industry all around the outside. The first time I hit 500k happened late at night. The megalopolis music was amazing.
I can show you how to (legitly, more or less) get a population over 1,200,000 on Freeland. and at least a million sims on a map like #61, 137, or 728? I forget, but..... sounds impossible right? not with zone stacking the right way. it s a method to bulldoze the little houses on new R zones and then put down new zones in their place. you can put down R zones in the new slot and one of the zones will develop fully. then you can bulldoze the undeveloped zone and put a fresh one, and it too will develop. you can also put down C zones and I zones and stack them together this way. with a well-thought out column or row design with this technique, you can literally free up another 100% of the map's original space, just about, thus allowing you to double a normal maps population! get to thinking and cranking and have fun! :P
SimCity on the SNES was just incredible.
Such an amazing soundtrack and completely unique vibe
Honestly that nostalgia hit is one of my favorites. The music going on for long hours in the background watching my dad play is an oddly fond memory of this game as a child.
Going to college in St Louis and, later, in Northern California in the early 1990's, I can say that crime was a serious problem in both urban and rural areas. People don't realize that the 1990's saw a crime rate that was three times higher than it is today, and lead pollution was off the charts (the two are highly related). It's no coincidence that so many dystopian urban movies like Escape from NY were so popular around that era (1980s to 1990s).
SimCity (which I played on the Commodore64) very much reflected the perceived urban crime wave..
If money is an issue I remember there is a cheat you can do to get I believe $999k. As a kid I would always do that to never worry about money and just build the city for fun. I spent so much time on this game it was a blast
One of the most intuitive videos I've seen on TH-cam! I've just come back to this game on a pre owned snes classic I got for Christmas. Not played it since I was a kid. I'm 40 now and I'm in nostalgia land! Thank you for the tips.
you brought back some memories showing that old windows version of SimCity Classic that I grew up playing on our very old MS-DOS based PC that we had to start up Windows 3.1 just to run some of these games. That is the OG Sim City that I remember since I never owned SimCity on the Snes surprisingly enough. Not sure why but it just was not a common game to find.
I used to play SimCity on the computer all the time, but then played the SNES version way back in the day and never went back. The SNES version is one of my favorite SNES games of all time.. SO FUNNNNN!
This is so nostalgic! I had the version for Amiga CDTV, you were able to choose between 4 eras (medieval, western, contemporary and futuristic) and the music was amazing! It's the game that made me fall in love with city builders, when I was just 7 yo...
Detroit crime💀
I played that scenario too....it's something...
Oh my gosh, great choice! I love the SNES version so much! It’s my preferred version and the one I played first, as well as the first SNES game I asked my parents for as a kid. It’s so nostalgic and cute, and I love all the charm.
I can’t wait to see this video when I get a chance, this game truly is amazing and has such a great soundtrack with so much personality.
The soundtrack was such a vibe. I included some of the original music in it and it was sooooo good, but I sped up a lot of the gameplay so I couldn't include it through the full video.
I played simcity on a 386 IBM monitor/cpu combo my aunt gave me when I was a kid. It was 1992. As a kid coming from a very turbulent family it was like an escape for me to have a world where I was in control. I felt like a God...sometimes a very naughty God. I made Lori Lightfoot look like Rudy Giuliani 😂
OMG. The music. The sound-effects. Right in the memories. I'm 13 again. Thank you!
I played a bit of SimCity and lots of SimCity 2000 when I was a kid. Lots of memories (good and bad 😅).
This was a fun flashback!
I think the first version of SimCity I played must have been on the Macintosh (SE 30), but I honestly can no longer remember. Point is, I **am** that old, to have played one of its originally released versions. I also replayed it recently in a browser version (don't remember which version was being emulated, though), and I agree with you -- I was surprised at some of the depth the simulation itself had, despite the necessary crudeness of the presentation and interface.
I also miss the ethos that your brief foray into the PC version brought up: "software toy". Maxis wasn't making a game. It was making a toy, with infinite replay-ability, and maybe a little bit of gamification in the form of special buildings and the like. I kind of wish this distinction of "software toy", a coinage of Will Wright himself, had stuck.
Honestly I’d love it if you made this like a series of you making older city building games and trying to get to a certain population , should try out simcity societies (holiday destinations is the main one) love the content either way! 😊
I second this
I third this 😭
Ive only played snes version and loved it as a kid haha + the soundtrack is amazing.
6EQUJ5! The original Sim City was, like, the very first video game I ever played on my IBM PC-XT!
Amazing! The game was pretty old by the time I played it but I was very little and had an SNES that I played it on.
I reall don't know why yet, but I just LOVED this review.
Really like how the text is delivered, the story of your playthrough and the songs you've chosen, they are all really flavorful and kept me interested all the way.
I love how you can just place rails instead of roads.
It's such an underrated feature
This video should get more views but then I'm a biased 90s kid. I grew up with my older brother constantly renting the game from our local Videos 4 You store. It is indeed a slow burn with resources, he would be in front of the TV for hours, slowly building more things while also slowly waiting for the next year's paycheck only to immediately blow it on fixing problems just to wait again.
It was simple but also complex as mentioned in the video, I would see him spend a lot of time picking a new map only to bulldoze certain spots or trees to make his ideal location.
The music, again this is partially nostalgia but it really is just calming music to go along with building your city. The sudden alarm music when shit happened, that congratulations theme when something good happened and even Wright's theme whenever he offered advice are burned into my memory. I still have the SNES soundtrack on a playlist on TH-cam whenever I want to remember better times.
I may have found it boring as a kid in favor of my RPG's and fantasy/action games but looking back I really do appreciate how quaint this game was and still is. I know for sure my brother got a lot of time out of it until we finally got a computer and he discovered SimCity 2000. Over 4 hours in one sitting, I know streamers nowadays go for much longer but it still blew my mind back then that he found a game that engrossing. Just the power of city building games I suppose.
This game is basically my childhood.
I know I'm a month late BUT there are 2000 maps in the game! You can access alternate maps by picking the number of the map you want to use, then going back to the main menu, and returning to the map select screen!
This unlock so many incredible memories from my childhood.
I wish I could play this on Nintendo Switch nowadays, the soundtrack and the graphics aged so well...
I played this back on my Commodore 64 when I was MUCH younger and it had just released. One of my all-time favorites. Thanks for the walk down memory lane in a wonderfully fun, charming manner. Earned a sub for sure. Looking forward to watching your C:S content!
I recently got a rom of this. I still have my snes cartridge but it would be cumbersome to hook up everything etc.
This game is such a classic. I have a simple 32inch vizio and a snes9x emulator which allows me to use wide screen and full screen. These little 16bit snes games look surprising great on my television in this way. Especially SimCity. I got a city started to were it was making a profit and I just went to sleep and let it rake in the money. It's so fun how having a rom allows for different gameplay experiences. Great video. 🍻
I've been playing this game off and on since its original release. I can easily get to Metropolis level without the max money cheat, though I do take advantage of a "feature" that may not have been intended. And still I've never reached Megalopolis level.
(I build rail straight, with no interactions, while the game is paused, and then immediately build power lines over them. I can then connect cross ways between them without creating an intersection tile that prevents a power line being placed over it. And then I drop transportation budget to 0 in the taxes. Normally road and rail can degrade from lack of funds, but tiles with power lines are exempt. Which is 100% of what I use. It does mean no water building of road/rail though, which is a minor constraint you otherwise don't have.)
While SNES Simcity doesn't run super fast, there are some ways to make it more manageable:
1. The game runs slower when you're actively doing things, so if you're just watching, it's better to take your hands off the controls.
2. Gifts are exclusive to the SNES version and generate revenue in addition to raising land value. The most notable of these is the Casino, which you can have up to 5 of and they give you $300 a year each. You get two casinos by having a certain number of hospitals and schools in your city (these spawn automatically in residential zones) and the rest by having a certain number of roads (300, 400, and 500 respectively). Once you get all the casinos, money mostly stops being a problem unless you play *really* fast.
3. Use roads in the early game. Besides being necessary for the aforementioned casinos, roads are half as expensive both in up front cost and maintenance cost compared to railroads. Personally, I don't use any railroads until I have all 5 casinos.
I still have the original game and manual that I bought when I came out. I’d love this game are used to play it all the time sit there for hours, playing it every night.
One of Top 5 games of all time for me. Can't even imagine how many hours I spent playing this. Still have the original cart I bought with my allowance money way back in probably 94 lol! I still play the game to this day, every now and then(slthough not the cart, because the battery is old).
Loved this game so much as a kid.
This was one of the games we got when we got our SNES in 1992. At the time the bulk of my gaming was platformers and arcade style games so it was a big departure from my comfort zone. But I put a bunch of hours in this though I never got quite to the megalopolis status no matter how I tried. Compared to the original DOS it has a lot personality that keeps things amusing during the down periods. A top 10 SNES game for me.
One of the most interesting things that this shows is how well the old simulation still does hold up, but also the weaknesses.
With this type of simulation, each cycle is essentially an estimate based on what's on the board. Then, the simulation processes the current state, applies changes to the simulation (say, turning a residential area into a house if the demand is present) and then the overall state is reevaluated. That's one of the reasons you'll see such large swings in population; it's really just an estimate of how many people could inhabit a city of the current state. Similarly, traffic isn't based on cars, but based on the density of buildings around the road.
This kind of estimate is enormously faster than the agent-style simulation we have today. On the other hand, with agents, we get fun AI problems like flying cars.
Still, this makes me want to dust off something like SimCity 3000 Unlimited and see how it holds up!
That's interesting I didn't know rhat
@@CitiesByDiana A way to think about it is that this game uses the same (literally, the same) methods city planners would use. If I'm planning a new downtown, I need to make sure the roads are the appropriate size for the expected population. So first I estimate how many people I think will be living in the area when it's mature. Then I make a grid, and based on zoning, I estimate how the people will be distributed. Finally, I estimate what percentage of those people will be on the roads at peak times. With that information, I choose the type of road and speed limit that can handle that much traffic. In SimCity 2000 and 3000 it's more obvious, because the game then overlays car graphics based on how busy the road "should" be. What's fascinating is that the shift to agent based simulation has already had a huge impact on how we think about cities and problems like traffic. Agents now RESULT in high traffic, instead of high traffic estimations spawning congested road animations, and intricate problems that the old algorithms couldn't simulate now arise naturally from the system.
I'm a software engineer, so I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.
I wish I could find the version of this that I played when I was a child. It was on a computer that my uncle brought over that didn't have Windows on it, it would just boot into DOS and run a script that ended with a menu where we could press a key 1-7 to play one of the games he loaded on it. One of those games was a version of this OG SimCity.
It was entirely black and white and the controls and menus were cumbersome compared to this. I dont think it was the Mac version I've seen, but we're talking 25+ years ago so my memory's starting to get a bit fuzzy. Either way it was the same game as this underneath, and I loved it so much that I got some graph paper at school and started planning cities and maps I'd make when I didn't have time to play.
Incredible nostalgia. Thank you so much for taking me back. Now I think I'll drop into modded Cities 1 for a bit and spend some time enjoying the amenities of the future that I never imagined when I was a child.
I remember in some monochrome computers with DOS, SimCity will revert to a monochrome version that has no mouse support.
I entered the franchise with SimCity 2000 as a kid, so though I didn't have as much nostalgia as possible, it was still fun playing an online version of SimCity later. I don't think I ever explored the SNES one, but watching you play it was fascinating. I'd also never heard of TheoTown!
I loved this game as a kid. One thing the slow paced game and similar games of that genre. Teaches is patience. A skill that is long lost these days.
I never played SC1 so this really got me really hooked. Thanks so much for going through the sketchy parts of the internet to find this gem!
It's such a lovely game, really worth playing
I still have this for SNES in my basement. Still have so many fond memories.
Yep, the city builder that started it all for me. Simcity3k is my favorite of the series. I enjoyed my time with Cities: Skylines, but it was just missing the charm that Maxis had around the Simcity franchise. I reached Megalopolis once and it was tough run. Everything had to be optimized right down to the last detail. Many of the maps make it impossible. A re-imagining with some quality of life changes and adjustments to the some of the simulation numbers would be fun; have schools and hospitals contribute to land values, schools could even contribute to lowing crime so you're having to build so many police stations, nerf the negative effects of traffic or buff rails by lowering their cost slightly, and as many suggest increase the speed of the fastest setting of the simulation. Excuse me while I"m off to dig out my SNES and this game now.
I just started playing this again and yeah, it’s every bit as good as I remember it. Great just before bed kinda game.
I still have my cartridge. I remember being the only kid in my elementary school that loved Simcity. Everyone else I knew that played games thought it was too slow. I'm 37 so this was back before everyone played games of course when it could still be considered nerdy and undesirable. It's crazy how different society is now.
The game guide that this had was literally a BOOK! I love SimCity.
I used to read that book when I was a kid and I thought the "example cities" they talked about were real places and I really wanted to go to "Hoocares, Florida"
I remember this game having a million dollar cheat code. Unlimited money or something. You'd have to do something with changing the taxes to zero for a year and hitting some random buttons.
Folks always looked at me weird when I said Sim City was my favorite ones game. Thank you for a trip down memory lane!
I have been recently playing Sim City on an Spectrum Emulator and the memories, plus a different City Builder to play while waiting for CSL2 :)
I remember figuring out the "doughnut blocks" when I was like 8 and thought I was a genius.
I played on a C64/128. I would leave my city running while reading my encyclopedia Brittanica's as a child, as the money slowly built up. (I would work on a city for months) I played again in my mid-20's, using an emulator. I believe the processing power, or something made a difference, as I didn't have to wait so long to build up a city as I did when I was a child. Or maybe I had just gotten better at it through playing the more advanced sim city 2000, that is when better computers came out. sim city 2000 also integrated with sim copter where you could fly a helicopter through your city, doing missions like catching criminals and putting out fires. it wasn't a DLC though, it was its own separate game. you would just load your city file into sim copter. If you didn't have sim city 2000, you could still play sim copter you just would play the cities that came with sim copter. there are actually all kinds of Sim games that will wright designed under maxis. the absolute best games of my life. then "the sims" came out and it was the end of all of it. EA bought out Maxis, and pushed The Sims, so to continue building city builder games other companies stepped up to the plate, with Cities XL for example. EA came out with sim city 3, but it was horrible IMHO. Without Will Wrights vision, city builders may not have become a thing. To me he was more of a visionary than Steve Jobs.
I got started with the original SC on my uncles monotone display Mac in 1989, loved it. Later got it for SNES, loved it even more. Played (almost) every version since (I saw SC Societies and said screw that).
Protip: December of each year, crank up taxes to max, collect money, then drop it back down in January.
I still have the original super NES version the same one I had when I bought it with the original instruction book and everything along with my original, super Nintendo I bought when I first came out love playing this game as a kid
I loved this game on PC way back in the day
I'm so old, I played SimCity on a Commodore 64.
Oh wow I think I saw one of those in a thrift store once 😂
Played this game a bunch of a kid but never knew what I was doing and got like 10k people at most. Playing it years later and I'm about about 200k.
I used to never do roads, only rails. What I really remember is spending the city's whole budget in January and then having to wait for the next year before I could do anything again. Also, don't feel silly about building an airport in 1906; I would build nuclear power plants even before that!
It's amazing how far and yet, how not that far city builders have come since then.
right? i was surprised by this game....
My favourite SNES game by far. Though I always stuck to the "default" play mode rather than the scenarios.
My biggest oroblem is that the map you choose can lock you out of Megaopolis- including map 999. 😅
There's an unreleased prototype of SimCity for NES. It's complete, just wasn't released. It was suppose to be released at the same time or slightly before the SNES version having been programmed at the exact same time as the SNES version and even advertised in Nitendo Power as an upcoming NES game along with the SNES version. However it was scapped for released when it came time to actually release it. I read somewhere it was due to wanting to instead put the full marking resources of SimCity into the newly released SNES system as they felt at that point the NES was going to quickly lose popularity to the new 16 bit SNES system at the time. I have a rom of it. It's almost the same as the SNES version, but it was a little more relaxed with it's music and had 8 bit graphics. There's TH-cam videos by a variety of people of the NES gameplay of it.
The SNES SimCity music is so nostalgic to me, even if playing SimCity with a controller was different.
This version looks much different from the original PC version.
yep its the SNES version
I had this on Snes and played it that much that eventually, the battery backup gave way and I could no longer save my game and lost all of my saves. 😭 That was the end of a wonderful time.
I've played every SimCity game, and I totally agree, SimCity Classic for SNES is somehow the best.
I remember back in the 90s i grabbed a starter deck of the SIM City CCG 😅 it was weird but fun
Wow this game is so cool! I've only played 3000, would love to see a video on that! Loved your stuff :D
1:00 I played that version of SimCity when it was newish. FWIW that is "correct" and not a bad emulator version or anything, computers were just garbage back then.
Oh man, the SNES version is so much better hahah
Had to check here jic you did a full episode.
Such great memories. The SNES version made become a full blown console player until RCT.
I know this version had a max money cheat but idk if it would work w ab emulated version. And u need the controller. But im sure u can find it online if your gonna go all out and do a full city
With the delta emulator, leave it running on the background while watching videos, makes it less slow. Great game, I’m much more smarterer than I was at 5 years old but I’m still trying my best to learn and play the game. I’ve almost taken half the map over. Love the game
Its crazy how good people are at modern city builders, but we once were here at sim city. I blame sim city for my grid style building I have such a hard time breaking away from. Even if I try and build different, its bascially parts of grids all jammed together. Sim city... man..
watching this is so cozy
Very direct video , I appreciate it
Thanks for the awesome video, i still play snes version now😂
I miss so much the old Maxis Games that went to the SNES... Sim City, Sim City 2000, Sim Ant... even Sim Earth, although I couldn't understand what was going on, it was so cool!
Thank you so fucking much, EA games, for killing such an awesome company.
I wonder what Will Wright is up to right now, he is one of the few people I'd consider an idol. I'll try sending my CV to him again lol...
It was made for the original NES as well, but never released.
I had Simcity on the Commodore 64. :)
I never played this one! I was more pc gamer back then... but it's an awesome city❤
Have a look at HC Bailey, especially if you want to get to Megalopolis!
This and CPP's retrospective videos are great :D
Ohhh I loved his CitiesXXL video
Played this on the Commodore 64! (Did I really just admit that?). 😅
I don’t consider this the original edition (given the 1989/1991 copyrights), but it is the best edition!
It definitely is the best one
It still holds up
When you put in the cheat code
it is good. However, the largest problem is just how much the game hates roads. I wish they added to the road infrastructure. I didn't like the binary either road or rail. I wanted more degrees of road network. Cities skylines does this well with the road nodes, and how you can easily transition from a 3-lane highway to a 2-lane highway because there is an exit ramp here. yeah, I really like that about roadways and the fact that it was ignored here is a big problem for me. Just do rails... that's boring though
Dumb question, how do you (or can you) save w/ this online version? Cheers!
The windows version you bailed on was far superior.
I remember a “cheat” to get 1 million dollars at the beginning of simcity
I'm old enough to know about this game's existence at the time but not old enough to have been playing it ahaha 🤣
I am JUST old enough to have played it when it was still in stores but I had SNES when everyone else had N64 😆😭
how can you post images on here? I got a neat pic of a c-5 mid and a c-5 low together, shows people how to get these rare zones. believe me I have perfected it. lol.
Was I the only one unleashing every catastrophe on my city after I hit my goal?
Hahah I remember unlocking the UFO at some point....
The start of a generation
Original Sim City is still the best one imo
i only recently discovered there IS an end to the game!
The game was slow when it cam out. So slow that I always used the cheat to get a bunch of money in order to just build as I wanted without having to stop and wait.
Build
More
Trains
😊
wonder what a direct 3d vertion would look like.
SimCity on the SNES has one of the best soundtracks ever, and you didn't even use it in the video 😭
Huge missed opportunity!
I used some of it! I couldn't get enough of it recorded to use it all coherently though 😕
"RICKROLL"
I used to play the original on the Amiga. Never owned a Nintendo as never liked them.
Can we have a simcity 4 video
maybe 😎