Plenty of good building games around from the 90s to today.

Gool Ol' Games offers plenty of classics if you haven't played them. Ceasar 3, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Pharaoh / Cleopatra, Stronghold Crusader... all DRM-free and less than $10 each.

Dwarf Fortress is free as well with an awesome following. If you can get over the ASCII / tileset thing, its a good game.

Well, that's awesome if you're into that, but personally I like games that leverage the abilities of modern graphics card. I'm not afflicted with a lot of nostalgia, though, either.

Actually, there are already games similar to Sim-City (we could call them city building simulators) such as http://www2.citiesxl.com/ or http://www.worldoftropico.com/us/index.php

I definitely with the strategy you bring forward. Just let the Sim-City franchise (it is only a name at this point, Will Wright and the majority of original Maxis crew are out), any other studio can get a better game with less stupid DRM.

Cities XL tried the same thing EA was pulling. Their launch was also a debacle, everyone got mad at them, and they had to shut all their online servers down for lack of money, leaving people with a functional single-player game but a fraction of the functionality they had anticipated (for example: no railroads, subways, or anything like that.)

Which is a bit of a shame, since _City Life_ (the predecessor) was an okay game.