Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
One of my absolute favorite features about the most recent (and most loathed) SimCity game were the Instagram-tastic filters you could apply to your game in real-time. They made for some great screenshots, but after playing for a few hours (some of us did actually play for a few hours!) they were also pretty good for giving your eyes a break and changing things up. You could look at your city with a new coat of paint, in effect, which is why I was a little bummed to hear that Paradox Interactive's Cities: Skylines had borrowed just about everything that made SimCity appealing, but left its visual filters on the cutting room floor alongside multiplayer regions and horrendous launch issues.
Thankfully, Cities: Skylines is an exceptionally moddable game that sold 250K copies in its first day on the market. It's therefore no surprise that it's already gathered an active community, which means that plenty of other players who have been pining for those filters have put that pining to good use. In amid all the maps and turnstyles and town saves there are currently about 100 color correction mods on the Steam Workshop for Cities: Skylines. Here are five of my favorites:
1977
Steam user KiLL3r has been painstainkingly recreating Instagram's iconic photo filters for use in Cities: Skylines, so if you're not sure where to start their Workshop page might be just what you need. You'll find everything from Brannan to Valencia there, but for me 1977 will always win out. It's my go-to filter when I load up the app, so of course it would be my go-to color correction mod, too.
Toy Film Camera
This tweak from Steam user Malugre imitates the classic Lomo look with yellowed highlights and hyper-saturated colors. It might be a bit of a strain on your eyes to keep this one active for too long, but combined with the game's built-in depth of field/tiltshift effects it certainly makes for some great screenshots.
B&W Photocopy
There are a few black and white color correction mods out for Cities: Skylines but tabu_niw's color correction, designed specifically to look like a low quality photocopy, is at the top of my list. It's perfect for taking the kind of pictures you might see in a local paper or an old middle-school geography class handout about city planning. For something a little less intense, you may also want to check out Gotham. Black and white mods may make it rather tricky to play the game given how much it relies on color to communicate information, but they still look striking.
Sepia LUT
It's actually shocking how few sepia tone mods are currently available. Come on people, sepia's a classic! This one from Krakkenh will get the job done if you're desperate to look at your town through an extremely vintage lens.
FuturisticLUT
Need help picturing Matt Damon or Keanu Reeves or some other stone-faced actor trying to escape a dystopian police force in your very own virtual city? LawnReality's filter of blown out whites and cool blues might be for you. Then again if FuturisticLUT's a bit too vanilla and you don't mind a little extra eye strain, the 80's Future color correction mod will kick the futurism up a notch and give you a cityscape worthy of the most ridiculous sci-fi films you can imagine.
If you want to try any of these mods for yourself, just hit the Subscribe button and Steam will automatically load them into your game. You'll then be able to find them under the Graphics tab in the Options menu, in a dropdown labelled Color Correction Override. Then voila, your virtual cities will be picture-perfect. Happy modding!
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This game is amazing. It's the true spiritual successor to Sim City 4. While the degree of complexity is huge, it's also fun to play.
Posted by: GoSpeed Racer | Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 02:20 PM