I had a long post written about game designers who add things to their game that undermine the elegance of an earlier design. I was referencing SimCity, American Civil War and Neverwinter Nights II.
Then I clicked the wrong button and lost the whole thing. So you’ll have to wait for my on-site review of Beyond the Sword to learn where I was coming from.
If you have more than one window open, kids, save what you are doing. Save a lot.
Heh, I know how that goes. I can remember once I was writing something in Word and apparently I did not have the save every XX minutes on. I was typing madly, firing on all cylinders, when one of my dogs beneath my desk rolled over and shut my computer’s power strip off.
Needless to say from that point on I make sure autosave is on, and just because I’m also paranoid with a dose of OCD, I manually save every couple of minutes.
I know the feeling. I’ve lost too many posts in the same way you describe.
When it comes to entering text into web editors, I’ve gotten into the habit of composing everything in an external editor and then copy/pasting it into the browser editor for formatting.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the development of the SimCity franchise… I loved the first one but haven’t messed around with the others much at all, but I’ve wondered if the series has been getting better or not…
My thoughts aren’t especially original. Like many, I suppose, I think the series started getting out of hand really quickly with features and add-ons. Even SimCity 2000 – widely considered the best of the bunch – loses a lot of the fun of the original title by forcing me to manage the water lines. I didn’t even bother with the most recent one.
I think that a lot of the positive reaction to City Life and my own excitement about SimCity: Societies are grounded in frustration with the direction the series was going in, with making things more elaborate instead of more interesting.
I’ve been using Windows Live Writer lately and I’ve become a fan. It’s a offline blog tool that hooks up to a bunch of different services, including wordpress, the tool I use for my blog.
http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas
I liked water tiles, for many reasons.
Among others, there’s the whole “remains of ruined city” effect, where after a series of earthquakes/alien attacks/etc, everything ends up in a rubbly/burned crisp on the top layer, but underneath, you see what used to exist. Like an archaeological dig! :)
Second, water was rather simple – run some mains along main streets and the city can do most of the work linking up everything else by itself.
The ‘decay’ of power and water plants, forcing you to manually rebuild them, though, was something I’ll agree they could’ve done without – an auto-rebuild/renovate function was sorely needed.