Maxis: The Best to Worst

So, having picked up cheap copies of SimAnt and SimEarth today, I wanted to talk about classic Maxis titles.

SimCity and SimAnt were what got me into PC gaming, after learning that they debuted on the PC platform, since the SNES versions were favorites of mine. I was also excited to learn about the other sim titles, and while I own many of them, I have not taken the time to play them all in-depth even now.

Many seem to think SimCity and its derivatives were the signature titles and that the black sheep of the series, SimHealth, was by far the worst.

My two favourite sim games of all time are:

Sim Farm -> It just has a little somthing, dont know, really loved it so much as a kid.
Sim City 4 -> The best Sim City ever imo ( with the rush hour expension). Following sim city games diverted from the original concept and got tainted by the success of "the sims"

sims 2 > everything else done by maxis for me
dont know why i just like the sims 2 a lot

Sim sega16. Coming to an orbi near you.

Best - SimCity 2000
Worst - Streets of SimCity

Most Under-rated: Unnatural Selection

transport tycoon is the best I ever played. there is open transport tycoon now for years and it's even more awesome. anyone play it?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bultje112

transport tycoon is the best I ever played. there is open transport tycoon now for years and it's even more awesome. anyone play it?

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but that is not a maxis title
its a microprose title

I always wished they had made a proper port of Sim City Classic, the Windows port is lacking and somewhat unstable under newer versions of Windows,
and somehow the Atari ST/Amiga versions still seem superior..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bultje112

transport tycoon is the best I ever played. there is open transport tycoon now for years and it's even more awesome. anyone play it?

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I played TT a shitton and its awesome but yeah, not a Maxis title. I tried Open transport tycoon a couple years back back but the AIs didnt seem very mature yet.

^ ott is still an ongoing concern the latest version has been released this march
and its now a fully standalone free product

but anyway of maxis titles i like the sims 2 best

I think maybe SimCopter is the worst. When I played it, I never saw pink men dancing around tho...

I played SimCity 2000 for quite some time and had a huge city. Then I loaded my city in SimCopter. It was not fun for a few reasons...
- I played this after beating Jane's LongbowFX. Jane's simulators for helicopters are important to know because the controls for a helicopter are different than for a plane, even on the simplest of controls. As an example, a helicopter's rotors pull it in the direction you want to go. So if you want to go forward, you press forward on the joystick. This makes the nose of the helicopter point downward and the rotors pull the helicopter forward. Want to go backwards? Same thing. Sim Copter does not do this. Like MS Flight Simulator, it uses airplane controls for helicopters. Its very difficult to un-learn the correct helicopter controls and I couldn't just pretend it was a plane.
- When in my Sim City 2000 map, every plane that ever took off from an airport exploded because the city was 90% tall buildings. As a result... Flying in Sim Copter was extra difficult due to the amount of buildings. It wasn't very fun.

So Streets of Sim City were equally a problem. As the streets were very jagged and difficult to drive on. This is not apparent when playing SimCity 2000.

SimCopter isn't that good of a game, but Streets of SimCity is definitely worse.

Sim City is good (the old games). The Sims got boring and dull after the first one.

^ thats why there are expansion packs
and a billion mods ;)

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Originally Posted by KitsuneNight

^ thats why there are expansion packs
and a billion mods ;)

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Too much of the same thing for me.