I liked how SimCopter actually used the same systems as SimCity 2000, with cop cars coming from police stations and fire trucks from the firefighters. Well thought out SimCity maps actually made your life easier, rather than being window dressing.
I wish someone would bring back the concept. There was a SimCopter mod for Cities: Skylines back when it first released, though I think it was abandoned. That would be the perfect game for it, since half of SimCopter was dealing with traffic and Skylines had an amazing traffic simulation.
Mostly, I just liked the Apache helicopter you could use to blow everything up
Until you hit a nuclear power plant and it wiped out half the city (and probably fried your copter too) once it burned down.
UFOs would also start spawning when an Apache was present on the map and start abducting civilians and blowing up buildings until you shot them down. I think that was the only other disaster the game simulated?
I believe the last pre-Paradox build is still available under Steam Betas.
It's a damn shame what Paradox did to the game. It turned from a near-perfect sim with excellent optimization and stability into a laggy, buggy mess with loads of DLCs that both fixed and introduced more bugs. So the usual Paradox product, where stability is completely random based on which DLCs you own.
Hey, I just wanted to say I bought Lunacid right after your comment and finally got around to playing it. I'm only at the Catacombs, but so far it's excellent and a great throwback to Kings Field (though I miss having armor; with only weapons and rings there's far less exciting loot).
For anyone wondering, it's controlled by the existing top-level Send Technical And Interaction Data toggle in the privacy menu that's been there for ages, so most users who care about privacy have probably already opted out.
I think the birther nonsense is more key to his current state than people realize. I think that, rather than just being a con man playing rubes for fools, he genuinely fell down the right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole like so many others and his world view ceased even remotely resembling reality. He fits the typical conspiracy victim archetype: dumb or poorly educated (his professor called him the worst student he ever had) but thinks he's smart, and desperate for validation and respect due to his father's abusive upbringing. Surrounding himself with people who'd call him a genius and truth-teller for whatever random nonsense he spouted broke his filter on reality and he dove right in and soaked up their approval.
In other words, he's every moron you see on Facebook, just with a louder voice and more reach. And being nothing special is the worst fate imaginable to a narcissist like him.
Edit: it also makes him far more dangerous, unfortunately. A con man will back down when their con starts unravelling, but if he genuinely believes the shit he's spewing, he'll keep pushing far past the point where he hurts himself and everyone around him. Which is what we've been seeing.
There's a much cheaper model, the Zero, that's good enough for messing around with and performing simple server tasks like PiHole. Even it has had its price increase multifold over the years, though only to fifteen bucks from an original price of five.
It's also much smaller than the already tiny Pi, being able to fit in a standard orange pill bottle. Though the downside of that size is smaller and fewer ports, so you need a USB OTG adapter (preferably a hub) and micro HDMI adapter to plug things into it if you don't want to run it headless.
Due to all the registry and group policy changes I've made to decrapify Windows, I'm legitimately worried that every major update will brick my install. Luckily so far they've only make it worse in the ways that Microsoft intended.
Roberts was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for his role in the Moonrock caper, as well as a separate offence of stealing dinosaur bones from a museum in Utah.
I'm afraid to ask what he did with the dinosaur bones!
Apparently Rockstar paid around $5-10k per track for GTA IV, so it wouldn't take much of a boost in sales to be more significant than the licensing fee income.
Music licensing for games is so dumb. You'd think the studios would remember the Guitar Hero effect, where having your back catalog featured in a game introduces it to a new generation and brings sales and new fans.
If anything, they should pay the devs for the exposure rather than the other way around. It's not like I bought Hi-Fi Rush for the music, but I ended up enjoying and seeking out a few tracks due to it.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
"We've almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!" The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
Wasn't the in-movie explanation for that that all modern tech was secretly based on reverse engineered alien tech?
Did you look them up just because of their username?