🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:16:56 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>* Cities Skylines (replay)
>I don't have much to say about Cities: Skylines' gameplay because,
>honestly, it isn't that much advanced from SimCity 2000, which was
>released 23 years ago. That's not a bad thing, of course; SimCity 2000
>was a seminal game and it's just as fun to play today as it was back
>then. It is somewhat disappointing, however, that the genre hasn't
>significantly advanced in two decades, but credit to the developers
>for matching that classic gameplay.
>
>I could say a lot more about the graphics though, because man is this
>game gorgeous. I caught myself firing up the game a number of times
>just to look at my cities, which are even more gorgeous with the
>"After Dark" DLC. User-created mods only increase the beauty even
>more.
>
>Of course, that's also the biggest weakness of this game; that the
>developers are either charging for features - weather, disasters, a
>day/night cycle - or depending on end-users to mod them in when they
>should have been part of the base game is sort of disgraceful, and I
>can't honestly recommend the game until the inevitable
>Game-of-the-Year edition is released that includes them all in one
>convenient (and affordable) package. While I understand the developers
>are a small cash-strapped independent team, this is the sort of sad
>nickel-and-diming that should never be encouraged, no matter how good
>the base game. 

I picked up City Skylines Deluxe Edition for $10.  It had been on my
wishlist for a long time.

The reason I did is because I made the mistake of buying SimCity
(2013) on Origin, and it reminded me of some of the fun I had with the
original back in the day.  It was so buggy that everytime I quit the
game I had to reboot my PC -- couldn't even get into Task Mgr to kill
things, and no other application has ever had that effect on this PC.
So that got promptly refunded, and it made me check the price of C.S.
which I had remembered got better reviews anyway, and it was on sale.

I had fun getting started with it (not having played a city sim in a
very long time and having forgotten most of what I ever knew), it was
instantly fascinating.  However these games do end up becoming huge
time vacuums for me, so I doubt I will ever give it proper attention.
Thankfully it was a tenner.

In terms of the DLC pricing model, I can kind of relate to what you're
saying but for folks like me their pricing model works well.  They
could have spent much longer developing the game before release,
including everything plus the kitchen sink, then charged a AAA price
for it, but they didn't, wasn't it originally only $30 or $40 upon
release?   So not long after that, the game was available for $15. The
folks who want all of the other content can easily get everything now
for less than a full price game.

In my case I probably won't ever get deep enough into it to touch all
the areas that the DLC goes.

One of my peeves with buying a discounted "complete" edition of a game
is that you often get smothered in popups telling you about all the
stuff that was just unlocked immediately after running the game for
the first time.  Stuff that there is no way you care about during your
first few hours with the game.