Streets Of SimCity can now run on modern PCs thanks to fan tinkering
Vroom vroom!
Remember Streets Of SimCity? No? Wouldn't blame you, mate. Back when SimCity was taking over the world, Maxis were having some bright ideas of how to capitalise on that. Thus, you had games like Streets Of SimCity letting you drive about your own SimCity 2000 world in a gun-toting Volkswagon. It was neat, but it was a bit naff, too.
Aleksander "Alekasm" Krimsky's SimStreetsX brings the ageing motor spluttering into 2019. Streets of SimCity might not be a cherished classic, but hey - at least you can now bounce around a chunky interpretation of your favourite town on Windows 10.
SimStreetsX builds off Krimsky's work bringing SimCopter up to snuff three months ago. Helicopters being objectively better than cars, SimCopter is probably more worth your time 20 years later.
Like Streets, SimCopter let you port a Sim'd City over and fly around a metropolitan mess of your own making. It's still janky as hell, but SimCopter lets you put out fires, blast evacuation warnings from a megaphone, and run around as a wee man on foot. Brilliant stuff, that.
Streets of SimCity also never had a questionably-homophobic easter egg generating dozens of speedo-wearing "himbos" flaunting fluorescent nips as a protest against working conditions at Maxis, so there's that.
Both games use very similar codebases, making Streets of SimCity a little quicker to bring to Windows 10. SimCopter took three months to update, responding to a four-year-old challenge by YouTuber Lazy Game Reviews. Streets, for comparison, only took a week to pull apart - the months between releases largely spent making Copter's modern update better.
It's properly impressive that SimCity left such an impression that plug its cities into entirely different genres was seen as a worthwhile endeavour. There's something quite lovely about the idea of taking a low-res urban area and pulling it into a chunky 3D space, even if it does turn out sterile and broken. Victims of their time, really.
It'd be lovely to check out my Cities: Skylines sprawls from ground-level. With the way my cities keep falling to viral outbreaks, it might even make a worthy successor to Left 4 Dead.