This is funny. Had to learn Cobol at school - lab still had a punch card machine and that was late 1980s.
Basic, obviously.
ZX Spectrum (Z80 assembly) - dissassembled and adapted a word processor for Czech - drew the extra characters and made up a printer spooler - that was the most fun with a computer ever, also I was young and had time. Also hated re-typing on a typewriter.
First thing (literally the first thing) after the iron curtain dropped got a PC and tried Pascal, databases and web-development but dropped out of all that in early 90s.
Doom, Quake, Civ, Sim City. Mostly scripts with some disassembly and poking around. Various scripts are the only programming I do now.

Ive now been slightly obsessively reading and discussing quantum computers with friends (including a couple clever and informed ones) for two weeks and the theoretical possibility of one day feeding the traveling salesman to a QC is about the biggest real excitement that awaits us in the medium term (decades). Hence my Sim City comment. Seriously there is very little information and a lot of exaggeration in this video. I know great things are expected from QC I just dont believe 98% of whats in the vid has anything to do with anything.

What EA did to Sim City was a crime against humanity.

How was this shot? Helicopter? Drone? I thought I was watching SIM city play out for a moment.

Your video, Cities: Skylines Review (What SimCity should have been!), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Monkey Island. That along with the original Sim City were my absolute favorite games when I was a teenager.

I'd love to go back and play Monkey Island one of these days. If only I could free up some time from all my videosift watching time.

3 years designing the ultimate Sim City has been added as a related post - related requested by Fantomas.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/3-years-designing-the-ultimate-Sim-City

Both @Chairman_woo and @Rawhead are 100% correct.

Traffic behaves like a wave. Canceling the amplitude (not stopping and going all the time, rather going a constant speed) reduces the chain reaction.

If you really want to know the chain reaction happens because people are no machines. They need time to reaccelerate once stopped. This time adds up.

Here is an example of this: http://videosift.com/video/Traffic-Jam-Simulation

@scheherazade it's not about keeping space in front of you. It's about going a constant speed. You're parking lot theory seems to stem from playing Sim City too much.
I do realize less cars = less traffic. But jams will still occur. You just need two cars.

I swear, Dubai is no different than a Sim City creation.

@aimpoint @FlowersInHisHair Ok, it's hard for me to argue against faulty gameplay. Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but after what I saw in the beta I was pretty sure they would fuck this game up (from the perspective of a fan of the series). It's just how modern industry works, EA was trying to get a huge new user base, so they made the game more appealing to casual users. By doing that, it was almost inevitable to fuck up for the old fans of sim city. When I heard that you only need about an hour to fill the city space, I was goddamn sure they fucked up. It's now this game for the typical call of duty player, who doesn't want to put to much thought in his projects, all that matters is that his city looks good. If I remember correctly, I had to start Sim City 4 over and over again before I learned how to build a city.

I'm not saying EA couldn't do otherwise. For example this is the same thing I thought modern game industry would do to X-Com, but Firaxis did a wonderful Job reinventing the series and they brought a new simpler aspect into turn-based strategy. It also had some really frustrating bugs (especially if you played with only one save game) they fixed up later... But since this is EA (I don't say maxis for a reason, because they are part of EA) I wouldn't bet a penny that they fix all these issues, at least not for free. I would predict that in about halve a year you'll see the "Bigger Cities" DLC for 5-20 $.

I just wanted to point out that the whole sim city launch is not worse than for example the diablo launch, what made it look much worse was the way EA handled the situation.

Also, nobody forced you to buy the game. Problems like the restricted city size or the pathfinding were pointed out by many players who had access to the beta. And you can find these issues in almost every serious review to sim city, so it's not like you didn't have the chance to know that before you bought the game.

@FlowersInHisHair @aimpoint. In my opinion there are two major issues that caused the game/launch to be such a disaster. I am not speaking of technical reasons or gameplay, which are solvable through patches and more game servers. I'm speaking of the one thing you can't change and thats the first impression.

First of all, they advertised the game wrong. They focused on the glass box engine, the general look and in the early stages made it look just like a very good reboot of the series. But old fans of franchise don't get you that many new customers. So they jumped on the social game train, in hopes of acquiring a new set of potential customers. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that. Players who just wanted to play the game on their own could do just so, just like players who want to build a huge city together with their Facebook friends. At least this was what the marketing made us believe. In hindsight they should have marketed the whole game as some kind of sim city online. Which would have set the right expectations into customers and prevented a part of the huge shitstorm that followed.

Secondly, and this rule should be written in caps, DON'T LIE! Or at least DON'T GET CAUGHT LYING! If you say it needs always on DRM, you better make sure your game only works online.

Saying that DRM is the reason of the Sim City debacle would be very far from the truth. Sure there is a love-hate relationship between players and publishers, especially regarding DRM. But in the end of the day the urge to play the game is bigger than the personal objections against the "evil" publisher.

Because to be honest, this is neither the first game to have an always-online DRM, nor is it the first to have server issues after the launch, nor is it the first game that wasn't as bug free as the user might wish. After that being said, in my opinion firing EA's CEO (which happened this monday) was damage control at the wrong end, they should have sacked the whole PR department.

If you gave EA money for this abortion, you are part of the reason why some publishers (EA, Ubisoft, Activision...) want to treat PC games as $60 rentals, and you are most definitely part of the problem. There are an ABUNDANCE of better, cheaper PC games developed by companies who want your business and won't treat you as just an open wallet. Sim City was a great franchise once, but just like Diablo, Crysis, and anything from Bioware nowadays, it's been consolized, socialized, and/or monetized into crap that most PC gamers want nothing to do with.

This "real cities do not exist in a bubble" is just corporate blathering to justify the always-on DRM, as if fans of the series have forgotten it has always been, first and foremost, a single player game, and a very enjoyable one at that. It is ABSOLUTELY IDIOTIC to force such a drastic change in gameplay/genre into a game that has been so defined by it's gameplay/genre over the years. Same thing when EA remade Syndicate as a FPS. A FPS Syndicate ISN'T SYNDICATE! I don't want to play with anyone else. I don't want my fucking savegames on your shitty server, even if it was an awesome server. If I give you $60 for your game, it's now MY game, and you leave me the fuck alone!

AAARRG! It's like PC game developers are all being run by fucking console kiddies and greedy shitstain corporate types who never played NetQuake or DWANGO, or Heretic, or System Shock, or X-Com, or any of the Black Isle or pre-Dragon Age 2 Bioware stuff, or any Diablo without a "III" behind it, or Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, or the Ultimas, or the Roberta Williams adventure games, or Wing Commander, or Tie Fighter, or MechWarrior. Deus Ex! A full fucking Deus EX play-through would be required before I'd even THINK about hiring your ass to develop a new PC game! On second thought, play it three times, once for each ending!

uuuuugh... so... anyway... yeah, fuck EA.

Ok, fine. Rage.