The simcity games

EA has shut down Maxis Emeryville, the dearly loved and, much more recently, hated main studio behind the mega-hit franchises SimCity and The Sims, among other games. Famed game designer Will Wright co-founded Maxis in Q: Can students play SimCity on their Chromebooks? A: Origin requires either a Windows or Mac platform and will not function on a Chromebook. The only significant difference between Tropico 4 and Tropico 5 is the tech tree. You move through eras — Colonial, Great Wars, Cold War, and Modern — and learn to build new buildings and enact new policies.

SimCity 0. Select the world you want, and start right away at the very beginning. There are no terraforming tools in the game. If the game. You can play SimCity online here, in web browser, for free! Can you. It deforms terrain as you build to smooth, but it pops right. In fact, were it not for those launch issues, fans would probably be very split on the question of whether this is the best SimCity game to date. The graphics are beautiful, the simulation detailed and the musical score is a masterpiece.

Too bad the damage was already long done. Such disrespectful behavior from publishers towards their customers just cannot be easily forgotten. After such a failure, EA needed to make up for lost time and start making money. So they decided to capitalize on the next big thing: mobile gaming. This game quickly became one of the top grossing apps on Android and iOS thanks to its colorful and attractive visuals repurposed from the previous SimCity and its simplified yet engaging game-play, more reminiscent of… any other base management game on mobile systems than of SimCity.

Before the previous two entries was SimCity Societies, a game that tried to reinvent the franchise and launch it in a new direction more accessible for new players.

It was developed by Tilted Mill Entertainment and published by EA in with fully updated 3D visuals and simplified game-play that focused more on the society of your city than on city planning itself. While still a very fun game, SimCity Societies felt more like a spin-off than a main entry in the series due to these changes. Things like zoning and individual building development were put aside in favor of managing societal values through different means, and these values in turn determined what upgrades were available to you and what your city ended up looking like.

If only it was called SimSocieties…. Although it was considered mediocre by critics at the time, it remains a fun experience if you have a Wii laying around.

SimCity Creator was also released for the DS in the same year bringing a similar experience to portable devices. Unlike its other handheld predecessor, this game had better visuals and ran perfectly fine on the dual-screened device. Critics praised it for cramming so much content into a portable title, although the controls in general felt clumsy and lacking polish.

Sim City 4, along with its expansion Rush Hour, are probably the most detailed and complex SimCity games to date. It was developed by Maxis and published by EA in for PCs and Macs, and it shocked players with its updated graphics, day and night cycles, and interconnected cities. Every little detail can be controlled to affect the bigger picture. Regrettably, the game suffers from serious optimization issues that require it to be run on a monster PC to avoid lagging.

The traffic system is also somewhat broken making traffic jams unavoidable with even the most efficient roads. Years of love from the modding community have managed to fix these issues and improve on many features in the game.

It may not have the most detailed systems or the best graphics, but in it was a revolutionary game bringing a different experience to the video game market as a whole. This earned it several accolades and awards at the time. It was so successful that it allowed developer Maxis to start churning out a variety of other Sim games such as SimTown and SimAnt in a short amount of time, getting users hooked on the genre and paving the way for future titles.

In , four years after the release of the original SimCity, Maxis was at it again with another masterpiece.