Quoting: CatKillerThe traffic is a fudge

That's a fair point. I mentioned that my system can't run it with mods now, and that's the most frustrating part. The Traffic Manager mod is way more essential than any DLC.

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Quoting: LinasNot a builder-gamer myself, but I am curious to try it out. Is it any good without the DLC's?

Yeah, it's great. Unless you want disasters (which I know a lot of people consider an indispensible part of SimCity), you absolutely don't need the DLC to enjoy it.

Beware that the recommended specs given on Steam are laughably inadequate these days, though. When it came out, I could run it comfortably in 4MB. Today, it struggles with 8 (which is to say that it's playable, but only with smaller cities, and forget any mods).

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This is quite surprising, I will admit.

I think we have a contender for GoL Understatement of the Year. :)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It's part of how they (briefly) won the browser wars. It is not how they got rid of Lotus 1-2-3, for instance.

Fair enough, but my point was really that the precise EEE strategy is just a specific manifestation of a general mindset at Microsoft.

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Quoting: BoldosJust a sidenote: If this is some kind of a long-term strategy of MS's, such a thing as an immediate adoption might not be really important.

That. I think it's important to bear in mind that “extinguish” doesn't necessarily mean the elimination of competition; it's about the elimination of the threat. Microsoft EEE'd the Mac with Windows. Apple's still there, the Mac is still around, but the existential threat it posed to Microsoft's DOS business in the late '80s is no more. MS even owns part of it.

Think of EEE more in terms of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer than a T-Rex devouring everything in its path. And yes, in the same way that (I believe) Valve wants to make Steam OS the best way to play Windows games, I suspect this is part of a move to make WSL the best way to develop Linux software. Or something like that.

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Quoting: dpanter

Quoting: DuncThe NES wasn't really a thing in Europe.

It most definitely was a thing.

When I say “a thing”, I mean it wasn't the phenomenon it was in Japan or North America. 6 million sales is nothing compared to the 34 million it sold in the US.

The video game crash of 1983 [External Link] hit USA hard, but didn't register much in Europe. The massive NES sales [External Link] in USA (34 million) was a turning point in history where the western video game industry exploded back into life.

The crash did register, but it didn't hit as hard. The European games market had already begun turning away from the first-generation consoles towards 8-bit computers by 1983, and North America's difficulties just accelerated that shift. At the time, it felt more like a generational change rather than a catastrophe. And, with little competition from either the US or Japan, the mid-'80s were actually the European games industry's gold-rush years. Ocean Software (now Bandai Namco UK) and Infogrames (now Atari) were founded in 1983. By '85, Ocean had the Konami arcade licence as well as a bunch of major movie tie-ins. Business was booming.

It's actually possible that if Nintendo had launched here in '83 or '84, soon after Japan, they might have found an even more receptive market than the US, but I doubt it. The main impact of the crash in Europe, although it's hard to believe today, was that consoles were seen as a thing of the past. Remember, computer games were being sold in filling stations and newsagents for pocket money prices at this stage. Why buy a console when you could get 20 games for the price of one cartridge? (And convince your parents that a computer would help with your school work, too. :D )

The NES launched in EU late 1986, over three years after Japan and nearly a whole year after USA, and the next generation was already looming. The belated launch, distribution issues, lack of marketing, being second fiddle to Sega in the market did nothing to boost sales.

Eventually Nintendo stepped up to properly distribute the NES in EU, but by then it was the 90's and the SNES was knocking at the door.

Yes, that's pretty much it. By late 1986, the Japanese consoles had a well-established, highly talented, indigenous European industry to contend with. And the next generation of home computers looming on the horizon. They were just too late.

The best way I can describe how the NES and Sega Master System were seen by the European market is that they were a bit like the “PSOne” that Sony relaunched after the PS2 came out: outdated technology for younger kids who might not care that it wasn't the latest thing. Toys, really. (Which seems ridiculous when the whole market is games, but if you remember the PSOne, I hope you understand what I'm saying.) Less so with the SMS, because Sega was smart enough to emphasize is arcade connections*, which is possibly why Europe is one of the few markets it “won”. But both had to deal with the pricing problem, the established European developers (what good is a machine you can't play Starglider or Paradroid on?), and the rise of the 16 bit computers.

Sure, both had managed to save some face by 1993, and there's no doubt that the 16-bit generation very firmly re-established console gaming in Europe (assisted by the collapse of Commodore and Atari), but the 8-bit consoles always played second-fiddle to home computers.

*The only 8-bit console game I've ever played on real hardware was Space Harrier, back in 1987. And yes, it was better than any of the computer ports. (Although, much to my disappointment ever since, the friend who owned the console didn't have the 3D glasses. :( )

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Quoting: TechieInAKAt some point, I'll have to check out GTA from the Epic offer this past week. I was wondering whether that would work through Lutris or not. I was a bit hesitant to invest the time and space to download and install it.

It might work through Lutris, but I've just spent 24 hours downloading it only to find that it doesn't work in straight WINE. :><:

(The Rockstar Launcher flashes up a window then just closes. No error messages. Looking through the Lutris script, I tried installing the Arial font, but to no avail.)

Update: I finally got it working through Lutris (I think it's probably the patched WINE Patola mentioned, rather than Lutris itself), but it refuses to run in anything other than 800x600. Even in fullscreen/borderless, with the settings clearly reading 1280x1024, it sits in a little 800x600 window in the corner of a black screen. :huh:

Oh, well. As I said right at the start, I'm not too bothered. I'll sort it out eventually.

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That's pretty impressive. The video thumbnail of the title screen doesn't do it justice.

(Now someone do the C64 or Spectrum. :) The NES wasn't really a thing in Europe.)

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Quoting: CreakIn return, an average folk will buy the so-called "Windows" Edition because he's on Windows and once it is bought, he won't be able to play with a friend on Mac, or Linux, or on a console. In a world where Fortnite is completely cross-platform, I find this strategy outrageous.

In fairness, it's called the “Bedrock” edition, but I can't disagree.

I remain convinced that a condition of Notch's sale to Microsoft was that development of the Java PC edition be maintained, and MS just said, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” then upgraded the Pocket Edition to the default for Win10 and consoles. I can't find a recent comparison of all the versions, but I know a year ago when total sales topped 175 million, the original PC edition “only” accounted for 30 million. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the vast majority of current players are on Bedrock, or Bedrock-based, versions (given that hardly anyone will still be playing the entirely separate XBox 360/PS3 codebase, which boosted sales massively when those versions came out).

Note also that although the Raspberry Pi Edition was also based on what eventually became Bedrock, it has never been updated. The last release was in 2013, before the MS takeover. When asked about it in 2016, Tommaso Checchi (who works at Redmond, not Stockholm) said, “Win10 runs on the Pi so you can run the Win10 version there!“

And people try to say EEE is a thing of the past.

Oh, Microsoft <3 Linux. :sick:

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Yeah, that's fair enough. The danger is that developers will just point to Proton whenever anyone asks for a Linux version without really trying, but actually supporting it, almost as if it was another version of Windows, is absolutely fine. Kind of what I hoped would happen, actually.

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