Destructoid Changelog - Build My Mansion

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Hey there! It’s the first Destructoid Changelog Newsletter of December. It’s that time of year to remember I haven’t started Christmas shopping and don’t know what to get the people in my life, and panic a little each time I think about it. Thank goodness for socially mandated consumerism.

I actually enjoy the holiday season, as cynical as I may sound. That’s probably because my parents always made a big deal about it, so I have plenty of associated warm memories. We also got our first heavy snow, which is usually a mood-lifter for me.

December is always the quietest time of year for us. Most developers want their games out before the holiday spending season, and most publications have a cut-off date for game-of-the-year considerations in early December, Destructoid being no exception. A couple of my favorite games of the past few years (Happy’s Humbler Burger Farm and Against the Storm come to mind), but unless My Winter Car or the expansion to Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer [sic] surprise drop, I don’t see that being the case this year.

However, that does give me some opportunity to pick up some of the weirder games I’ve set aside throughout the year. Hopefully, I can help keep things interesting until 2025 starts.

Here are the obligatory reminders for the week. If you want in on our radical monthly special edition of the newsletter, you merely have to convince/trick a friend into signing up via the provided link below. Each month, I do an interview with a cool developer. Last month was Feverdream Johnny of Elsewhere, MI fame. I haven’t reached out to anyone this month, but I should really get on that. I have plenty of ideas on who to tap.

If you need to be reminded about how great this newsletter is, you can view past issues at this link here. We also have a list that gets provided to new signups with over 90 games that have been mentioned at least semi-positively here and where to get them, if applicable.

Cool, I’m going to assume a sponsor link is going to going to follow somewhere here, and then it’s onto the week.

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SimCity 2000/3000

I’m a wiz at Cities: Skylines. Okay, that’s overselling it a bit. I can make big cities without much difficulty. I understand the central concepts of designing an urban area, including transportation and balancing a budget. However, I’ve been playing City Builders since either SimCity on Super Nintendo or SimCity 2000 on PC. I’m not sure which I encountered first as a child.

As much as I’ve played SimCity 2000 somewhat frequently growing up, I was never very good at it. In fact, I was terrible. Straight up into adulthood, I couldn’t make a functional city without cheating. But the last time I played was before getting into Cities: Skylines, so I decided to try again. Well, that’s not quite true. When the GOG Preservation Program launched, one of my questions about it was if they’d update the version of SimCity 2000 on their storefront from the DOS version to the Windows one. They didn’t, but when I started it up to check, I wound up getting sucked in.

I’ve made a breakthrough. I was actually able to keep the budget balanced and create a sizeable city without cheating. The city of Misery has grown past 80,000 at the time of writing. I still pluck away at it, trying to get it to the 120,000 required to unlock arcologies, but I’m running out of room for activities, and things are starting to look very grid-like.

Despite it being a lot simpler and more abstract than Cities: Skylines, I think my advanced future knowledge was still applicable on some level. For example, the transportation model isn’t very advanced since there are, y’know, no actual cars on the road. However, I still placed highways, bus stations, and subways where it made some sense and was able to keep things from getting too clogged up. Whether it got any commuters to the furthest ends of the city, I have no idea. But still.

That’s fun. So, I decided I’d check out SimCity 3000, which I had skipped when I was young, instead shifting straight to SimCity 4. I always thought SimCity 3000 looked ugly, which it does, but it’s fine aside from that.

The issue I ran into was that I hit around 50,000 people in the city of Despair, and it stopped growing entirely. No matter what I improved, the census wouldn’t budge. As it turns out, there’s a bizarre concept in the game: population caps. Apparently, your city will only grow so far until you put down certain buildings which will raise the cap. I had been holding off on building my house. I wanted a nice spot for it, and I had built closer to the edge of the map rather than on a coastline. I thought plopping my stately mansion down next to the river might give me a nice view of nature and not the squalid hole I was growing.

So, the issue people were having in my city and why more would not move in was that the mayor did not have a house. I don’t know who has concerns like that. I can’t imagine people saying, “Oh, we can’t move to that city. The mayor doesn’t even have a mansion, can you imagine?” I’m sure mayors would want you to believe that. I’m sure mayors would love to justify spending taxpayer dollars on their own homes because no one wants to live in a city where their municipal leadership doesn’t sit on gold-plated toilets.

Tying population growth to the presence of my house is a pretty strange mechanic, but I get it. If you’re concerned about the stagnant growth of your city, consider writing to city hall to suggest they build me a mansion.

Elsewhere on Destructoid

No Man’s Sky achieves very positive Steam status after 8 years

It’s hard for me to really care about No Man’s Sky’s “redemption arc” because I don’t really like the game. It’s not that I don’t find it impressive to some extent, it’s just that every time I pick it up, I find that it feels so artificial that I drop it after five hours or so.

But it’s pretty cool that it still gets buzz these days. I remember the hype building up to it and the subsequent disappointed outcry. Eight years later, it has finally hit the “very positive” rating in Steam user reviews. It was an uphill battle, as many of the negative reviews originate from 2016. There’s a lesson in overpromising here, something we should have already learned from the cautionary tales of John Romero and Peter Molyneux.

Sony PlayStation officially turns 30 years old

I was there 30 years ago. Actually, I wasn’t, since the PS1 only launched in Japan in 1994, it wasn’t out until 1995 in North America, but I was, at least, alive at the time. At that point, I was mainly a Nintendo fangirl, but one of my best friends at the time got a PS1, and we spent a lot of time playing it. I now own that PS1. Damn, the history soaked into that machine. The stories I could tell. It makes me feel rather old.

When retro gaming actually became retro gaming, and I started to fall into the identity of being a retro gamer, initially hated going back to PS1 games. The texture warping always looked really ugly to me. More recently, I’ve started to actually enjoy the aesthetic and prefer it over the N64’s blurriness. Problematic texture mapping or not, the PS1 is one of the most influential consoles to ever exist. It’s just hard to believe it started 30 years ago.

Original versions of Warcraft and Warcraft 2 are being delisted from GOG this month

This is lame but somewhat unsurprising. Blizzard recently released the remastered versions of Warcraft and Warcraft 2. Ignoring how terrible those remasters seem to be, they also have the original versions on Battle.net, and I guess they don’t have any interest in GOG continuing to sell the ones that they maintain. That’s a bummer, considering GOG had added them to their Preservation Program. However, this has made them amend their preservation promise to say that the company will still continue to ensure that games are compatible with current hardware, even if they get delisted from the storefront. Which is a nice consideration, considering they won’t be able to make any money off of it.

And this is your heads up that the games will be delisted as of December 13th. If you want to get it before it’s gone from GOG, you can get $2 off with the code MakeWarcraftLiveForever. This isn’t a sponsored thing; I’m just passing it along.

Reviews for review this week

Fantasian Neo Dimension

I always thought Fantasian looked cool on Apple Arcade, but when I had a free trial to the service, I never used it. I’m just not a mobile gamer. Now it’s on consoles and PC, which is pretty rad, but whether or not I get around to playing it is another matter. You’re in luck, though, because Steven “Handstand” Mills played it, and has reported back with a review. Sounds pretty fab.

Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 – The Dead King’s Secret

Speaking of being happy that someone picked something up, Kristina Ebenez has a review for us for Dungeons of Dreadrock 2. From what I understand, it’s part two of a planned trilogy. While I hadn’t looked to far into it aside from a short glance, it sounds like a pretty great follow-up to an already well-received game.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop

I’ve had Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop for about a month now, and I still haven’t fully completed it. Came close, though. It’s brutal. It throws new things at you all the time, and quite a few of them have a habit of blowing up in your face. That said; love it. It’s hard to stay mad at it because it has a sharp, vulgar sense of humor and its tactile diagnose-replace-repair gameplay is expertly handled. I just hope you’re good at following a manual.

The Thing: Remastered

I’ve had The Thing: Remastered for a month, as well. It’s why I finally got around to watching the movie. I knew it was going to be stealth-released, but I ain’t no snitch. It’s a great remaster, but the game is hilariously bad. Its gameplay is accommodating enough, though, so it’s one of those awful games that are worth playing. Although, don’t exclusively take my word for it. The original release developed a cult following, so there are those who legitimately like the game, I just wouldn’t say I’m one of them.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I still can’t get over Troy Baker’s voice coming out of Harrison Ford’s face. It’s just not right. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer it over some hackneyed AI facsimile, I just don’t know how hard it is to do a Harrison Ford impression. The dude who did it for Rogue Squadron 3 absolutely sucked as an actor, but he could at least do the voice.

Anyway. What? Right, Steven “Vac-Man” Mills was able to fit in some Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and it sounds like he’s not as bothered by the Indy simulacrum and say that it stays true to the source material and, barring some pacing problems, has a high level of polish.