Just found an emulator for Sim City 3000, (from 1999!) a game with happy memories, so I'm reacquainting myself with how to play it.
What Game Are You Currently Playing?
- Thread starter McMurphy
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Often, you need to mount an iso file for these games to workI tried to download Star Trek: Armada from a freeware site, but i can't get it to work.
How to Mount an ISO image in Windows 7, 8, and 10
Windows finally offers a built-in way to mount ISO disc image files on Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows 8. If you’re using Windows 7, you’ll need a third-party tool.
www.howtogeek.com
I love replaying old games. Hearing the music of certain games is so nostalgic for me, and brings back good times. I have over 250 vintage games in my collection, and I am not great at getting them to work on newer systems. I have kept old Windows (95, 98, 7) computers to play them on, but even that is a challenge as parts wear down and monitors change.
Overread
Searching for a flower
If you like old games go to GOG
www.gog.com
They legally get a lot of old games, but also patch them to run on modern OS systems! There's still some that won't run on some of the latest, but by and large what they get runs on modern computers without issue!
They even have Sim City 3000 ultimate and Sim City 2000
www.gog.com
www.gog.com
GOG.com
Download the best classic and new games on Windows, Mac & Linux. A vast selection of titles, DRM-free, with free goodies and 30-day money-back guarantee.
They legally get a lot of old games, but also patch them to run on modern OS systems! There's still some that won't run on some of the latest, but by and large what they get runs on modern computers without issue!
They even have Sim City 3000 ultimate and Sim City 2000
SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited
Create and control your urban empire with more power than ever before. With SimCity 3000
SimCity™ 2000 Special Edition
Now you can design any city you can imagine and SimCity 2000 will bring it, and its resid
Yes, that's where I got my Sim City from. May have a look through their list later - Manic Miner was a favourite, as was Elite and The Lords of Midnight/ Doomdark's Revenge...
I have found a few old faves on GOG, but have heard on my forums to beware of remastered versions in that they are changed from the original game (i.e. Atlantis 2). They are all quite inexpensive, it's not like I'm losing a lot of $ to try them. I guess playing a watered down version is better than not experiencing it al all.If you like old games go to GOG
GOG.com
Download the best classic and new games on Windows, Mac & Linux. A vast selection of titles, DRM-free, with free goodies and 30-day money-back guarantee.
They legally get a lot of old games, but also patch them to run on modern OS systems! There's still some that won't run on some of the latest, but by and large what they get runs on modern computers without issue!
They even have Sim City 3000 ultimate and Sim City 2000
SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited
Create and control your urban empire with more power than ever before. With SimCity 3000SimCity™ 2000 Special Edition
Now you can design any city you can imagine and SimCity 2000 will bring it, and its resid
Overread
Searching for a flower
Mostly all they do is patch them to run on a modern OS if possible. Sometimes expansion packs are missing if they can't get the legal licence to sell them; other times they bundle them in. Eg Dungeon Siege currently lacks expansions for the first and second game on GOG which is a huge shame, but its likely a legal matter and they do keep trying to get as much as they can.
Remasters are a different ballgame though and are typically a full remake of the old game. Often they are quite good on modern PCs because resolutions on modern screens are huge and a simple "HD Remaster" often allows you to play on more of the screen rather than a tiny window in the middle or having big blocky graphics that look ugly when blown up to full screen.
Remasters are a different ballgame though and are typically a full remake of the old game. Often they are quite good on modern PCs because resolutions on modern screens are huge and a simple "HD Remaster" often allows you to play on more of the screen rather than a tiny window in the middle or having big blocky graphics that look ugly when blown up to full screen.
Overread
Searching for a flower
Oh and in further game news - It's the ENDLESS WEEKEND!
That means all the Endless games on Steam are having a free-to-play weekend. This means that you can download the full game and play it fully with all features for the entire weekend (starts early Friday ends late Monday). During that time they are also on sale so if you decide you like them you can buy them and keep playing them after the free weekend. If you don't buy them then they disable in your account after the free weekend is over.
Endless games are beauties and very much in the full sci-fi fantasy market. They are typically empire building 4x games where you build a nation, research technologies, build units, conquer your foes and rise to rule. There's a lot of woven story elements and good fun within the games. Though as they are universe games you don't have to play the first games to understand them.
I'd really recommend checking out:
Endless Legend - a fantasy empire building game. Found your empire, capture the mythological magical dust and quest across the lands
store.steampowered.com
Endless Space 2 - a sci-fi fantasy game where you found your galactic race and fly through the darkness of space to conquer the galaxy. And yes this is real space-fantasy stuff with technological races, cyborgs, living trees, magical dust and more.
store.steampowered.com
Dungeon of the Endless - not as pretty, but a fun dungeon exploring and defending game. It's not one I've played, but its got solid reviews like the other endless series games.
store.steampowered.com
PS the team are also making two more games, Humankind which is a similar style as their other 4X games but is aiming to work on the real human world rather than their endless setting. And another dungeon game as well.
That means all the Endless games on Steam are having a free-to-play weekend. This means that you can download the full game and play it fully with all features for the entire weekend (starts early Friday ends late Monday). During that time they are also on sale so if you decide you like them you can buy them and keep playing them after the free weekend. If you don't buy them then they disable in your account after the free weekend is over.
Endless games are beauties and very much in the full sci-fi fantasy market. They are typically empire building 4x games where you build a nation, research technologies, build units, conquer your foes and rise to rule. There's a lot of woven story elements and good fun within the games. Though as they are universe games you don't have to play the first games to understand them.
I'd really recommend checking out:
Endless Legend - a fantasy empire building game. Found your empire, capture the mythological magical dust and quest across the lands
ENDLESS™ Legend on Steam
ENDLESS™ Legend is a 4X turn-based fantasy strategy game by the creators of ENDLESS™ Space and Dungeon of the ENDLESS™. Control every aspect of your civilization as you struggle to save your homeworld Auriga. Create your own Legend!
Endless Space 2 - a sci-fi fantasy game where you found your galactic race and fly through the darkness of space to conquer the galaxy. And yes this is real space-fantasy stuff with technological races, cyborgs, living trees, magical dust and more.
Save 75% on ENDLESS™ Space 2 on Steam
ENDLESS™ Space 2 is a Strategic Space Opera, featuring the compelling “just one more turn” gameplay, set in the mysterious ENDLESS™ Universe. As the leader of your civilization, will you impose your vision and build the greatest stellar empire?
Dungeon of the Endless - not as pretty, but a fun dungeon exploring and defending game. It's not one I've played, but its got solid reviews like the other endless series games.
Dungeon of the ENDLESS™ on Steam
Dungeon of the ENDLESS™ is a Rogue-Like Dungeon-Defense game, in which the player and their team of heroes must protect the generator of their crashed ship while exploring an ever-expanding dungeon, all while facing waves of monsters and special events as they try to find their way out...
PS the team are also making two more games, Humankind which is a similar style as their other 4X games but is aiming to work on the real human world rather than their endless setting. And another dungeon game as well.
.matthew.
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- Jan 12, 2020
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- 1,156
I want to love the Endless games (and keep buying them) but while they are beautiful, polished, and well thought out, the combat mechanics are terrible and the AI is the worst I've ever seen.
I played one game where the AI declared war on my ally on the other side of my space, warped over my territory to get there and constantly ignored me, even when I built up my fleet (which at the start of hostilities was zero threat to them) and began to take their systems. Even then they ignored me and kept sending additional fleets into my allies space where they just sat there for dozens of turns between each push.
They also tend to ignore the whole storyline objectives leading me to win every time regardless.
Also how many times do I have to listen to the communication message when I've literally turned down their science pact thing for the last 20 turns...
I played one game where the AI declared war on my ally on the other side of my space, warped over my territory to get there and constantly ignored me, even when I built up my fleet (which at the start of hostilities was zero threat to them) and began to take their systems. Even then they ignored me and kept sending additional fleets into my allies space where they just sat there for dozens of turns between each push.
They also tend to ignore the whole storyline objectives leading me to win every time regardless.
Also how many times do I have to listen to the communication message when I've literally turned down their science pact thing for the last 20 turns...
Overread
Searching for a flower
AI is one thing that has stagnated in games as far as I can see. At least for the smaller publishers. Blizzard have a great AI in their Starcraft 2 and its the only AI I've seen actually do scouting and flanks and attack and retreats. Thing is for a lot of games AI doesn't need to be that bright, shooters, racers and such; whilst in strategy games the AI's lack of forethought and planning become big issues whilst fast reaction times aren't really a bonus (or at least not the big bonus that having a plan is)
I've also returned to Skyrim. For Redfall, they should make the children killable, or non-existent.
Went for a slightly different approach to my usual builds, with a warrior, light armour, and a sideline in conjuration/destruction. Pretty powerful, to be honest.
Went for a slightly different approach to my usual builds, with a warrior, light armour, and a sideline in conjuration/destruction. Pretty powerful, to be honest.
.matthew.
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Indeed. I've been playing Total War Warhammer 2 the last few weeks and while I always end up buying the series when it drops to a reasonable price, I am never surprised by the lack of a decent AI. The only thing they do is increase AI bonuses to make it harder, which then causes the player to have to cheese it as the only way to win. It pretty much takes tactics out of it altogether.
The AI in that also only seems to factor in army strength to decide who is more powerful, leading to some random war declarations where they sit around and do nothing and wait for the larger side to build up new forces
The problem comes from AI being the most complicated part of the game to code, and financially it pays to work on the graphics and the flash than it does to create a proper challenge.
I will add, that despite the general stupidness of grand/4x strategy AI, Paradox's has gotten rather good at at least simulating human actions, even if it's still no real challenge for a real human player.
To be fair to programmers writing strategy games for home PC's and consoles, the reason the AI is the most complicated is because it is a very non-trivial problem for games like Total War. Purely from the standpoint of possible moves & actions, it would make chess look like noughts and crosses.
Here I'm talking about the tactical battles - the strategic side of the game, like all of Paradox games, is actually a "relatively simpler" problem and can give humans more of a challenge - although frankly the best 'strategy' these games have is to build up mega-stacks and just overwhelm you with numbers, usually
Now you can crack it with 'brute force' in the same way that chess was beaten. So Google's Deepmind, which uses at it's core learning neural networks, was trained to play Starcraft II and they claimed to have made it able to defeat 99.8% of all human players. One assume they could apply their machine to play Total War too...
....but, DeepMind is a serious piece of kit. Earlier they made a verion of it that, for the first time, defeated the World Go champion. DeepMind apparently required 1202 CPU's and 176 GPUs to achieve that. I have no idea what sort of computational power they use for the Starcraft challenge, but if one goes back to the single computer version of the program, called AlphaGo, and they used that, that was 1/25th smaller. So, 48 CPU's and 7 GPUs???
Now of course you wouldnt want to design the normal AI to be invincible
but I'd guess that even a lesser version would be out of reach of even a high end PC today, one assumes! My guess is that even a huge investment of time, programmers and money into trying to make a reasonable AI on a current average PC would give a miserable return of investment - possibly eke out a 'few percentage' increase in effectiveness, that will still be easily beaten by a human.However perhaps one day in the future if we can continue to make impressive advances in computational power, then we will all be getting regularly crushed by some descendant of DeepMind.
Overread
Searching for a flower
Yeah true AI is way beyond the home pc and game developer team. What we can hope is that things like the use of bigger AI in games like Starcraft 2 will produce understandings of how AI think and work which can be built into smaller systems for games. A trickle down effect that will sadly take time to branch out from just Blizzard/Activision having the technology.
Many years ago, I used to play a tactical boardgame called Advanced Squad Leader but always lacked opponents. So, when the publishers released a solitaire module, I bought it. In amongst the extra rules and charts, it had a kind of flowchart that said stuff like ‘if x happens, then the response is y’. I guess this was/is a kind of rudimentary paper AI and I wonder how much of computer based AI is based on a flow of possible events and subsequent responses.
Overread
Searching for a flower
Quite a bit I would suspect. PC game AI also often build things in specific orders predefined by the designers and often don't have to manage resources in the same way the player does. With many you can even see the specific base building, unit hiring and then unit movement pings when they attack at almost timed intervals along the same pathways with similar units every few moments (increasing the number to reflect advancing through the game etc...).
I played Haven Moon ( a very short game ) yesterday. It was a typical first person puzzler, but I found the challenges poorly clued. I decided my next game will be SF, so I installed Prominence. So far, so good.
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"Hey, look at me! I'm an obnoxious child, and I'm not afraid of you!" Oh, to be able to Fus Ro Dah the little darlings over the horizon. There also seems to be a problem with the vampire-hunting add-on, where random vampires show up and start killing vital NPCs if you don't get on with it. But it is such a large and entertaining game. Even this time around, I'm still finding new places to see.
