Comparative Review: Americana Universalis

Cities: Skylines, though now supposedly defunct with the release of its buggy and bizarre sequel, was, at the time of its release, seen as a proper successor to Simcity 4. While more than a decade late to the debate (t. ) I thought it would be interesting to see how these games stack up. The first thing to note is that Cities:Skylines has actual individual citizens, who are "simulated." While it may be true that they are simulated, the degree to which they're simulated is debateable. For the most part, what is simulated is how they get around your city, driving from one place to another, which incidentally describes much of what the game revolves around: managing traffic. When citizens receive appropriate services (unlocked at specific city sizes) their houses level up. Simcity 4, by contrast, doesn't attempt to simulate individuals at all. Simcity 4, to use the word of the year for $CURRENT_YEAR-1, is best described as stochastic. A (random) subset of the population is simulated at a time, but never in any great detail. This made it possible to run it on the blazingly fast computers on 2003, when the game was released.

What you spend your time doing in a game has a large effect on how you experience a game, of course. In Cities: Skylines, you will spend most of your time staring at traffic, trying to get it to move better. In Simcity 4, by contrast, you will spend a lot of time (especially early on) adjusting budgets. Simcity 4's news ticker is also much better than the gay bird permanently affixed to the top of your screen, running through the same hundred odd messages, none of which are memorable or otherwise interesting, unlike Simcity 4's somewhat humorous news ticker with updates on llamas, or advice on how to play the game. This brings me to another point: balancing the budget, which you'd expect to be an important task. Cities: Skylines does not provide any challenge, here. You simply need to have enough people to cover your costs, and it doesn't take much to get to the point where money is effectively no longer a concern. Simcity 4 does not give you money in the same way, until you've got a reasonably large city, and even then, proper attention to the budgets of your education and health buildings will make a huge difference in how much money you make.

In terms of aesthetics, Simcity 4 is clearly superior. Simulating three different social classes, demarcated by how much money they make, determines the appearance of any individual building, based on the class of residents which live there. As you might expect, buildings for the poor house the most residents, while those for the upper classes hold fewer. All of these are beautifully modeled, whether it be the high end office buildings or long rows of poverty blocks. Cities: Skylines has a much smaller pool of building models, and their external appearance is based off of the mysterious "level" mechanic. Buildings with higher levels hold more people, and they generally grow some gay solar panels or other such bullshit. In terms of music, Simcity 4 has an amazing soundtrack, which I sometimes listen to on its own. Cities: Skylines has one which is best described by the word "existent." I've never paid much attention to it.

In conclusion, Skylines isn't worth shit. Play Simcity 4 instead, and get the NAM mod.