SimCity 4

Rating:
Summary: SimCity 4 is GREAT!
Review: SimCity 4 is great! I admit, it's been a bit more difficult for me to start off compared to the previous games in the series, but that just makes the game more interesting.

I was disappointed about there not being auto-disasters in the game. There are mini-disasters which kind of make up for it, but it just seems strange not having an earthquake or something which used to happen occassionally. The fires happen and destroy things if you let them go long enough, but the mass destruction is no longer a chaotic force - it's you! Good for the people who wanted more control over disasters; Bad for people who liked random disasters. I dreamed of having a city built at the foot of a volcano, but there is no option to have it randomly active... it's dormant until you tell it to erupt.

If you're looking for micromanagement... this is the game to have. 9 different tax categories; local adjustments available for each individual service building; more building types to plan for; different kinds of airports and train stations; and the list goes on.

Overall... I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who has enjoyed SimCity in the past or any similar development/strategy games.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome graphics and music, but gameplay suffers...
Review: Having owned every SimCity game since their inception, I naturally purchased SimCity 4. The graphics are absolutely stellar and the music is - wow - to say the least. The cities can be built much larger than prior versions with the "region" form of gameplay. This also allows you to build several cities in one huge geographic region.

Now for the shortfalls - as a result, the game is incredibly more complex than prior versions. Your city grows at a painstakingly slow pace. You now have to factor in joblessness, etc to the life of your residents - on a granular detail. Instead of having one police station, there are "small" and "large" stations. You are required to pay for every reward you receive, and your funds will build very slowly. When you try to zone land, the game tries to add in streets for you, whether you want to place a street or not. Lastly, I have not heard of an unlimited spend cheat code for this one yet, which was cool with the other versions.

Finally, The box says "recommended 1GHZ or faster, 256mb or more RAM and 32mb Direct3D video card". If you want to have a "good" experience with this game, DOUBLE all of the above.

If you want to see the next evolution in SimCity, check it out - but make sure your system has the horsepower to back it.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing leap forward but marred by serious problems
Review: I for one am absolutely thrilled to actually get this game. I for one remember how much I enjoyed playing SimCity 2000 but after losing it to a computer crash and the CD-Rom by unfortunate circumstances, I decided to get "SimCity 4" and I have to say I am absolutely thrill yet disappointed at the same time.

By playing style, "SimCity 4" Follows the same patterns in a lot of ways like the SimCity 2000 games. You lay down zones; let it be industrial, commercial, and or residential. You also have to manage the city's fiscal status as well, by making sure your city doesn't fall into the pits of debt, passing ordinances that benefit the city...at a cost, and making it thrive by fighting crime through police stations and jails, fighting fires by building fire stations and dispatching fire engines, and educating your citizens with schools, colleges, and museums along with numerous other things.

On a positive note this game is a HUGE quantum leap forward from SimCity 2000 in almost every way. There are two main reasons for this. First, the actual details are stunning! Now buildings, and houses look like real structures and the street systems are much more realistic instead of looking like a hodgepodge of shapes like some of them did on SC 2000 from many years ago. The landscape looks so incredibly amazing too. Now it looks like a real actual landscape whether it be hilly, a peninsula, or plains, it's absolutely amazing! My favorite is elevated plains (I.E. Texas Panhandle) right next to large mountains (Going from Amarillo to around central New Mexico). Absolutely amazing!! The best part of this game too is not only the improvements on the graphics and landscapes but the background music. Although some may write it off as background music but some of the music for this game is so good that I would go the distance to say that it's actually rip-worthy! I never thought computer music would actually sound this good!! It sure sounds light years above the cheap pop fluff that most corporate recording studios seem to throw out like hamburger packaging. The sound effects too are absolute amazing to listen to as well.

Unfortunately, "SimCity 4" suffers from some serious problems some of which eat away at the ratings I give this. The manual instructions are very inadequate, and only scratch the surface of the scope of this game. Also the game itself runs incredibly slow, even on the more advanced computer systems. The best way to temper this problem is to set the details to "low". The greatest fault I have with this is how some of the streets actually lay out. For example, It's a real pain trying to get a good street system because of problems trying to make them diagonal. Plus trying to get certain railroad crossings is absolutely a pain in the neck! the other one is the appearance of those much dreaded "No Job" tags that appear over my buildings (Indicated by a suitcase in a red slash circle) and I had to unleash a tornado to wipe them out as oppose to see them go neglected and abandoned. I don't mean to sound like a "Twisted Metal" game maniac but I'd rather see a whole neighborhood reduced to total debris from tornadoes or burned down to the ground than to sit there with those exasperating "No Job" zots hanging over the structures.

The disasters are the usual although there are a couple of new ones. My favorite is the "Robot Attack" where you can send down a ten story alien robot on your unsuspecting Sims when they start getting out of dodge and throwing giant explosive dinner plates. It's especially a riot when the exploding dinner plates actually fly off the edge of the city and crash wwwaaay down below in some unknown dimension!! The other new disaster is the volcano. Hey if you love the 1997 movie "Volcano" you will love this one too!!

I have come to really understand the anger that this game has inflamed due to the massive memory requirements for this game to run and let me tell you, this game has had problems even on the most state of the art home computer systems and even a friend who got a brand spanking new computer for this game had problems with the game running at a cold molasses pace even when other programs were dumped off the computer. The same problems are what killed "Civilization III" for me after the dynamite "Civilization II" which I thought was and still think is a really awesome game. I've had the same problems with this game to the extent that I can't help but feel rather disappointed with this because the unacceptably slow pace just takes the fun out what otherwise have been the greatest game in the universe.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful but boring
Review: Let me just say that I love SIM games. I have them all. I was looking forward to SimCity4 coming out. I even pre-ordered it.

It loaded fine. I've had no crashes, etc.

Pros:
-The coolest graphics I've ever seen. Seeing the little guys actually build their houses is cute.
-The sound effects and music are wonderful. (Some of the backround music could be sold as separate CD's, it's so good.)
-The terrain building mode is enjoyable.
-The disasters are beautiful. Love those volcanos!!

Cons:
-Aside from the graphics, there is nothing really new here.
I was bored after 2 hours. I've tried playing 3 or 4 times for a few hours each time hoping for some actual entertainment, but I haven't found any. Once your city is built, then there is little control over anything. You just sit back and watch... la la la.
-There's no way to control your economy (bring in new businesses at any kind of decent rate) to generate money.
-After you create the animal habitats for your new city, they disappear. They run around for a while, then run off of the edge of the city, never to be seen again. The only place I've ever seen them is in "God" mode, never in the "Mayor" mode. What's the point of that?

Overall, I regret shelling out $.. for this game. I could've waited and gotten it for $.. in a month. My only hope is that Maxis releases some sort of expansion pack that allows for more activities the player can do in the game.

Rating:
Summary: Sim City 4!
Review: Well, what can I say? Sim city 4 has to be the best Simulation game in the Sim City franchise so far. The gameplay is very similar to its prior versions, however vastly improved. Various new options include new advisors(they really help you for a change), new areas to explore and lots more.

The graphics are superb. Its not like a simulation anymore, its more of a reality. You can actually see sims move around, talking to eachother, cars overtaking and having accidents, aircraft's taking off and landing in exactly the same way they do in reality and cruising over the clouds. Its amazing. There are also night and day effects which is a swell idea. Street lamps, house lights go on at night, giving a beautiful effect to your city. You can send Police Cruisers to make sure law and order is preserved. You have new God Like powers, such as manually changng night to day and vice versa, making storms and natural disasters. Beautifully renderd landscapes such as canyons, mountains and water effects add to realism.

System requirments are pretty high. Im playing Sim City 4 on a 1.6 Ghz P4, 356MB ram and a GForce4 64MB. It tends to get a bit slow when scrolling around in dense areas. Besides that, it works perfectly!

Rating:
Summary: Great Game, With Issues.
Review: I got this game for christmas, along with a brand new computer with dual p4 3.0 processors, and 512mb of RAM, and an ATI radeon 9600 pro graphics card w/ Directx 9.0 compatibility. I installed the game, which took a while, and was amazed by the graphics and attention to detail. I was, however, dissapointed whith the landscaping tools. It was very hard to put in fine elements such as coaslines and bays because the effects of tools span across such a wide area.

I worked around this, and was doing wery well with my first city, the controls where easy to use, similar to SC 3000, but the roads that are automatically put in with zones make it hard to put in an effective road system. Without reason, evereything froze up, and the sound turned to annoying prolonged beeps.

I restarted my computer, and the computer acted like I didn't even have a disk drive, meaning that whenever I tried to open or access the drive, it would say "drive D: cannot be found" so, I uninstalled, reinstalled, restarted, you name it to fix the problem. I got my drive back but the game still produced it's incessant beeping. Great game, but i think it's coding and compatibility needs to be improved. It could be my computer, but these are my experiences.

Rating:
Summary: terrible
Review: I bought this game for my Power Mac G4. It was terrible -- not user friendly, a screen that jumps all over the place, etc. It is almost as if the developers -- Aspyr -- put a crappy game out there on purpose.

For instance, the tutorial asks the user to "right click," but MAC mouses only have one button!

I spent $40 on this game and it is unusable. It is the last one I buy with the Aspyr name on it.

Rating:
Summary: same game, better graphics
Review: Pros:
- the original game concept still works
- cool and very detailed graphics
- improved micromanagement (challenging!)
- cool new terrain-tools (really amazing graphics and effects)
- new region play allows metropolitan areas
- nice user-interface
- roads are placed automatically

Cons:
- despite graphics, nothing has changed much
- much smaller city-maps
- region play doesn't work properly (it is not like having one huge city)
- I cannot choose architectural styles or landscapes (Palm trees in NYC???)
- building highways is still a PITB.
- houses and roads still stick to the square/block-system
- Incredible hardware requirements
- game crashes often
- no scenarios!!!
- roads are placed automatically (good thing, bad thing)

Summary: a good game based on old qualities that impresses through its gorgeous graphics at first. However, it also leaves a somewhat bitter after-taste. Even though it is worth its bucks, more could/should have been possible...I don't think EA is good for Maxis.

Rating:
Summary: SIMULATOR=EXCELLENT
Review: I've had most of the previous simcity versions.

Simcity4 is much more of a 'simulator' and less of a 'game' than the previous versions.

It will tax your ability to get a city going profitably. It requires fine tuned management of resources and attention to detail, and will take time.

The graphics are beautiful and engaging. It runs smoothly on my pentium4 system with a ge4 4200 graphics card.

The interface is logically laid out and provides all (if not more) of the information you need to manage the city.

I like the "regional" concept. You can start more than one city on the map, interconnect them, and switch back and forth to work on them. You have full capability to build your own regions and can modify the terrain in endless ways.

Maxis seems to have pitched this as a simulator, in that the amount of start up dollars is fixed, there is no 'difficulty' option, and if you overbuild your infrastructure of power, water, transportation, safety etc too early you will certainly run out of money. The tax base builds slowly and the overhead costs will far exceed that if you're not a prudent manager!

This game is built for those with an obsessive streak, but for those it is fantastic. It has a consistent and rigorous set of rules that make sense during play. For those with a predominant 'gaming' view, on the other hand, it may well be slow and boring.

This is a well designed, graphically beautiful game that can keep you "busy" for hours slaving away to build a viable city. It's focus is simulation, not amusement.

Rating:
Summary: Best Sim City Yet!
Review: Maxis has taken the best from Sim City 2000 and Sim City 3000 and put it into this sequel. The player has lots of control over many aspects of the city, but not control over the sims. You have to be smart and plan well in order for your city to grow the way you want it to. I especially like the long-term aspect of the game. If you let a city age, it will become better (as the population becomes smart--if you have adequate schools). With the expansion set, the game is even better!