Cities: Skylines, plus fuck you.

[pinback]

I am downloading C:S right now. The desktop icon looks suspiciously like a dick. But I will report back on whether or not you should get it.

Also, I am killing it here lately, and you all are dropping the god damned durka durk. After I specifically asked you, sometimes for ten hours at a time, to NOT do that. That is what you are doing.

I might as well get the sysop password and rename it Ben's Blog, because that's what it's become.

So, to recap: 1. C:S. 2. Eat a gift-wrapped gold-lined bow-topped cardboard box of dicks.

[pinback]

C:S two hours in:

Took me three tries to figure it out enough to start the tiniest city well enough that it didn't go completely bankrupt within 10 minutes.

Seems a little "throwbacky" in that there doesn't appear to be a hand-held tutorial or pre-made scenarios, you just dive on in and do your shit. Refreshing.

The interface is good, if a little finicky, but once you work the finicks out, it's smooth.

Tilt-shift intensive, but you can turn that off if it's not your thing.

Painting zones with a broad brush is entertaining.

So far it feels...

...it feels right. I feel... young, as when the world was new.

It feels like a modernized SimCity 2000.

It is hard to imagine an old-school SimCity fan not enjoying the fuck out of this. You know who you are.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Agreed, all of you are terrible. I exempt myself because my evenings have been taken up with new house drama, text baseball (now over) and an inability to go where my computer is because the basement is too cold.

All of you should be ashamed at your treatment of Pinback.

[ChainGangGuy]

We're filth. Not one of us sprung for that Tabasco gift he had his heart set on. Not one.

Did anyone even offer to chip in?

[AArdvark]

If he's willing to trade some DR airtime I'm willing to throw a few bucks...Wait. Why does this sound like a TDarcos bargain? What levels of hell have we brought ourselves down to!



THE
FAUST
AARDVARK

[pinback]

Couple more hours in:

Just... Just wonderful.

Wonderful.

Everyone get it, seriously. I know I love everything, but seriously, this is... this deserves our support.

So great.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Pinback: Look, get Cities: Skylines, build a nice residential area, and you can pretend THAT'S your house!

Pinback: If it doesn't work out, fuck it, bulldoze it and build a new one!  Now THAT'S your house!


Ice Cream Jonsey: How about I play a game of DEFCON and ten minutes in, pretend one of the areas hit is the house.


Pinback: Then draw a dick on it.


* * *


Pinback: You know what my favorite thing in the game is?  Do you know?  I never knew this about myself, but my favorite thing ever is designing bus lines.


Ice Cream Jonsey: Oh yeah


Pinback: After having done the bus thing in Santa Monica on my trips, now I want to design bus lines.


Ice Cream Jonsey: I put a bus line in Fallacy of Dawn, and it was fucking fun.

Ice Cream Jonsey: I just to go to one of the stops and just wait for the bus to arrive.

Ice Cream Jonsey: And ride around the city.


Pinback: Bus lines, man.  That's our ticket outta this dump.


Ice Cream Jonsey: Possibly my favorite thing in making any of these shitty shitwares.


Pinback: That's it.  I'm making a bus line text adventure.


Ice Cream Jonsey: Hahhaha

Ice Cream Jonsey: “It was a pleasure to ride."


Pinback: BUSWARS RTS

[pinback]

These are some bad fuckin' ramps. But they work.

God, this is the greatest game ever.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

These are some bad fuckin' ramps. But they work.

God, this is the greatest game ever.

That image does not work!!!

[pinback]

Now it does! :D :D :D XD XD XD :D :D :) :) :/ :/

:/

:(

:( :(

X(

[RealNC]

﴾͡๏̯͡๏﴿

[pinback]

You can see downtown across the river. I named this little hamlet "Ferndale".

It's much like the real life Ferndale, CA, except the DJs at the local radio station will give you the 3 AM slot for an hour instead of being assholes about it and jeopardizing lifelong friendships.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Can you add a Rodo Dendra parade?

NOTE: I spelled that wrong but I'm so cavaleer I don't care!

NOTE:

[pinback]

Please shut this BBS down. There is no point anymore. I'm the only one who posts content anymore. Let's all move over to http://parrish.club

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Okay, I have purchased Cities: Skylines. I have zero time for such trivialities but I made an exception because I had Steam credit. I also got Lords of Xulima or whatever it's called because Richard Goodness said it was full of Richard Goodness.

[pinback]

It will be nice for you to have a way of experiencing residential buildings that do not fall apart as soon as you purchase them.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

/taps mic
/pulls collar
Ha HAA
/taps notecards
/taps mic
Err
/mimes being Space Ghost

[Jizaboz]

Looks like a neat game. I'm all out of RCT coaster building motivation. That's the only other "building stuff and watching it do stuff" game I got into for long.

[pinback]

One of the true joys of gaming, and there are very, very few of those, is when something you took for granted in a game, something you gave no thought at all, does something unexpected and spectacular.

Cities: Skylines provided me one of those this evening.

The game features rivers, you see. The purpose of the rivers, I assume, is to look nice, and give you a way to pump water into your city, and maybe give boats a way to get to your harbor. Fine. They're not the nicest looking rivers in gaming, but they're, you know, fine, for background scenery.

And then I built a dam.

Like everything else in the game, it looked very nice, and the little people and cars did their little people and car things on it, and it provided some extra electricity to the city, and everyone was happy. For about 30 seconds. That's when I saw a "warning icon" I'd never seen before, and it was over pretty much every building near the dam. Mousing over the icon revealed that these buildings were flooding. Flooding? Why are th---

The river that I had mistaken for background scenery had risen, due to the dam, and was now flowing all over the nice quiet residential area alongside it.

Now look, in any other game, this would be a matter of statistics. But in Cities: Skylines, the river is an actual flowing volume of liquid. There is no apparent "flooding method" being called in the code anywhere. The liquid is programmed to act like liquid. And so, when it gets high enough, it just spills into the city.

In a panic, I removed the dam, and the water acted just like you'd expect water to act... an enormous wave poured down from where the dam had been, sloshing about to and fro, eventually leveling back out further down the river...

The screenshot above was from a couple minutes later -- I was too busy being amazed to capture the actual thing as it happened -- but you can still see the ramifications of adding and then removing that dam. Looks like a goddamn wave pool.

And then it all settles back down, and the water -- being water -- eventually started to drain back out of the city, once the river level subsided.

An incredible amount of detail implemented for something seemingly so tangential to the whole thing. But that's how the whole game is implemented, so after a while, it stops being surprising, and you just smile.

An astonishing achievement.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What government authority controled the damming of the river, anyway?