From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action


I don't know if you remember the hype for the 1999 city-builder,
"SimCity 3000" (SC3K), back before it released. Developed at the same
time as "The Sims", Maxis was making promises about how the two games
were connected; that you could build a Sim and home in The Sims and
import it into SC3K. Potentially, they said, you could custom build
every home and every person in the game, and then zoom in to watch the
little people do their thing inside the home you built and then zoom
out to manage your town.

IN reality, none of this ever happened. The best you could do was
name a few of the city-residents, but even then you had no control
over them and their actions were random. You certainly couldn't zoom
into the individual buildings and design and customize them to your
heart's content. SC3K was a fun game, but it was little more advanced
than its 1994 predecessor, and very little of the over-hyped promised
made its way into the game... or any of its successors for that matte.

WELL, it's 2026 and maybe we're finally getting that game promised
to us 27 years ago. Because with (the not-yet-released) "Metropolis
1998", you finally CAN design your own homes, and each inhabitant in
the city will have its own life; driving to and from jobs (and you can
see them doing their job while on the shift), going shopping, sleeping
at night, etc.

WILL "Metropolis 1998" live up to that promise? Well, there's no
way to be sure but the early-access demo is quite impressive in what
it allows you to do already. Visually, the game is definitely a
throwback; it's got a pixel-art VGA aesthetic, and it does lack some
of the more complicated features that games like "Cities Skylines"
offer (for instance, no curving roads, and much less complicate infrastructure). Whether this simplicity is intentional --possibly to
keep the focus on the custom buildings-- or just not implemented
remains to be seen.

BACK in the late 90s, the idea of a fully customized and livable
city seemed just around the corner. I remember the excitement when I
learned that "Flight Unlimited 2" (a flight-sim by Looking Glass
released in 1997) would feature 3D models for every building in San
Francisco more than five stories tall. If we could manage that on 1997
tech, I thought to myself, surely the idea of rendering EVERY building
was just around the corner... and once that was done, how much longer
before we'd have the interiors?

WELL, GoogleEarth fulfilled the first idea back in 2012, but the
second? We've still not seen that. Even in games like GTA5, most of
the structures are just hollow, uninhabited rectangles. So having the
idea finally implemented in "Metropolis 1998" is like a dream come
true.

OF course, for all the wowie-neato tech, whether the game will
actually be fun to play over the long-term is still debatable. The
demo is neat, but it looks like a game where extreme micro management
may be necessary (fortunately, you don't have to build EVERY
structure; there are numerous pre-fabs too). And while the SVGA-styled
visuals are fitting a game that fulfills a promise made in the late
1990s, the pixelated graphics do strain the eyes after a while.

STILL, this is a game I'm definitely going to keep my eye on.


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