Morbx

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) posted a picture today about a spacecraft that "intercepts" and changes the path of incoming asteroids. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. I'm surprised nobody saw the second meteor (the one that hit russia) coming. I've read recently about the shocking number of asteroids found to be in binary or even multiple systems, and there's no reason this one had to be any different. I'm thinking maybe it was in a pair with the larger one we DID see coming, 2012 DA 14. Just a thought, though.

I don't understand what you mean..."look around my city". Are you saying you can actually get a street-level view of your city on a UDI mission? If so, I've never encountered that. The very few times I tried doing UDI, I just watched the car from a birds-eye view. For some reason I feel "Closer" to my city if I'm actually driving in it, and even though I'm aware it doesn't do anything more than me zooming in and looking at it manually.

This is Hoag's object, the prototype for ring-galaxies. That ring of black is true empty space, not gravitational lensing or some other weird thing. It's empty, intergalactic medium inside a galaxy.

I hate to admit it, but I do U.D.I. wayyyyy too much. I do some of the missions, but I try to avoid the ones that give you buildings that are too hard to get normally. Sometimes I will do free drive just to look around my city, or go over some huge bridge I just built. Other times, I just use cheats to unlock a tank and drive them around crazy mountains and hills.

Amtrak has free WiFi on all of its trains. And those are really the only train rides long enough for a good game of SimCity. And remember that while there may not be WiFi around now, it a few years that might change completely. (Universal free WiFi, anyone?)

That is the core of the problem. Most people here do not want another SimCity, they want The Simtropolis Game. Outside of this little space, SimCity is and always has been a game, based upon the simulation of a city. It is not about scale models of cities or ultra-realism. Having the best approximation possible of the functioning of a city (which Glassbox is aimed at achieving) is infinitely more important than being able to build 600 square miles of sprawl. Exactly. This is a city simulator. Cities XL is a city builder.

I agree with Xenocity here... The graphics have clearly been optimized for the best performance. And then, for those with the best computers, remember being able to change the graphics options. There will be a lot more processing power required for this game than other SimCitys, and Maxis would rather put that towards the simulations rather than graphics. And could we please stop quoting? Every new post is taking up more and more space on my screen.

On the subject of graphics, its hard to get good realistic graphics at a certain point. Especially in strategy games. I think the Cartoony graphics were a good choice to make the game look visually appealing without trying to do too much or being too hard on computers. Keep in mind that the textures aren't finished yet: They're still adding the finishing touches that will really bring them out.

I agree with you, Tianity. It might not be the dream game that everybody had in mind from SC4, but its still a nice addition to the series. Really, it is hard to go much better than SC4, and we'll have to wait until March to see if this game has or not.

I don't see why you would.... Even if this 1-hour beta is practically a scam, I'm still excited.

I saw that in another image - The one of the skate park. Look at the road in the bottom left corner... I am happy to see that they are using a similar street texture to SimCIty 4.

Not gaps like that. No SimCity has ever been close to the size of a real city, I'm always astonished when I compare my SC4 cities to real life cities, even though my cities do feel quite large. But these gaps are exceptionally bad. I understand the whole problem with making cities contiguous, but somehow I feel Maxis could have atleast patched it up a little bit; make it look a little more realistic.

For sure. I think it's fair to say they like bricks. And Western architecture. Which I personally think to be a bit ugly for the most part. The developments and screenshots looks pretty good. But from what I can tell there's not much cultural diversity in the architecture. It's too bad the only bit of that I can remember was the bonus package from pre-ordering the $80 version on Origin. I'd like to see this city zoomed out in relation to its "suburbs" Quote of the century above. xD I'm going to force myself to live with the new Simcity some way or another, but it would just be SO much easier to live with if cities could have suburbs. They've done some great things to regions with the new game, but only because of the spread-out city tiles, regions are much worse than SC4. Its a shame that something that small is going to ruin region gameplay, but it will. On the bright side, I do like that screenshot very much. It reminds me of all of the brown buildings in SC4, and we haven't seen any slums in the new game yet.

If only the tiles were contiguous to each other.... If only....

Well, they are kind of running out of time to get any serious testing done... March isn't too far away.

I've seen small towns with that much traffic before. You'd be surprised how clogged up the roads in a community of a few thousand can become at rush hour. It's also possible that a good chunk of those drivers don't live in the town, but instead only work there. They're trying to show off features of the game, it doesn't necessarily mean that a city that small will have that much traffic. (Although in a real-life situation, it could, as stated above)

I can't say I'm mad at Maxis for removing the subway system, I personally believe it almost made the game too easy... All you needed was a few extra bucks laying around, and then, you could solve all of your traffic problems forever. There was nothing you could run into with your subway track down there. I think that Maxis wants to make transit just a little more difficult, and eliminating all underground options is an excellent way.

I'm trying to make the point that it's still a game and its still SimCity without those things.... It's just not as good.

There are things that I don't like about the new SimCity, but I've truly been waiting half my life for a new one, and I could not stand knowing that somewhere a sequel exists. Not buying it would be crazy. I'm sure that most people feel the same way. I'm confident that this game will replace SC4 for me - at least for a period of time. We - the SimCity community - are being held up on the little features of the game that might be leaving or being modified. These are little things that we loved (Terraforming and subways, to name a few). Those are the small parts of the game. But no other game offers the same core simulation aspect that SimCity does. And now it's being expanded on and revolutionized with the Glass box engine, and people are really saying that they won't buy it? They won't even give it a chance? I find that hard to believe. It might not be the same game as SC4, but just because it is different doesn't mean it will be worse. Yeah, I'm not in love with EA either, I don't think that this will go down in history as one of the greatest games ever, but I believe that it will at least on the same level, or close to, that of SimCity 4 (Which isn't very hard to do when you're a sequel to a 10-year-old game). Yes, I will buy the game.

How do you figure that the largest region contains 16 tiles?

I especially like the second image with the stadium. (thats what it is, right?)

If you've ever looked at the concept art from Simcity 4, it does looks an awful lot like that. Like the bright and shiny part, at least. And there's absolutely no way that the last image is an in-game screenshot. That's the brightest and shiniest image, so I'm hoping the rest of it isn't that bad. As for the green spaces between the buildings and roads in the first screenshot, I'm still hoping that the zone isn't packed as tight as it can be (the second image is much better). And I hate to be overly negative, but why are all of the trams on the same track? xD

I never really used anything but the 2k-by-2k sized city in SC4... I mean, built a few successful cities on the larger tiles, but for the most part, my best cities were 2km. Yeah, I know that it's unrealistically small for a real city, (my town of 800+ people is barely larger than that) but It's what I've always worked with and I'm fine with it. I was thinking that the uproar (like this post) was due to the fact that the cities would be even smaller than in SC4 (like the small tile size there). I'm not appalled with the tile size, but more the fact that the tiles won't border each other, so you can't make a realistic metropolitan area like in SC4. I think that there should be larger cities than that, but I think there are more pressing problems with the new game.

Hold on.... Exactly how large were the medium tiles in SC4?