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Nice Addition but Simcity Societies is still frustrating and in need of some more fixes

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: July 14, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Very interesting what EA has done. For the first time that I recall, a expansion pack is not offered on its own and in a separate box. EA would never do this with The SIMS2. In this case, EA either lets you digitally download Simcity Socieities: Destinations or you can buy it in the new Simcity Box. Now granted you would think that The Simcity Box would include all the Simcity games from the original to the present one; Simcity Socieites (along with the expansion). This is not the case. Those people who already own Simcity Societies will have to either digitally download Destinations or buy Th Simcity Box. For those people who don't own Simcity 4000 and its expansion, Rush Hour, this is a great deal. You got to wonder what EA was thinking.

In the Simcity Box you get Simcity Societies, its expansion Destinations, Simcity 4 and its expansion Rush Hour, SimCarnival: SnapCity, and the trial version of Spore creator creator. All for $39.99. As I said before, if you don't own Simcity 4 and Simcity Socieites, this is a great deal. If you do, then it's best that you get the digital download version of Simcity Societies: Destinations on EA's website. Strangely it's $29.99 which is a pretty hefty price for a expansion ($10 less than the Simcity Box). Those who don't trust the digital download will buy this. So people will just pay the extra $10 and buy the Simcity Box. Still, not a lot of choices given by EA.

In the Simcity Box, the highlight is Simcity Socieities: Destinations which is the first expansion for the new series; Simcity Socieites. Remember that Tilted Mill had thrown out everything that was built from Simcity (the original) to Simcity 4 and its expansion Rush Hour. Very bold move. Unfortunately, Simcity Societies angered a lot of people and Simcity diehards were very ticked off. Casual gamers liked it as well as others. In Destinations, it includes all of the updates (total of 5) that tried to increase the playability and fix the bugs. The overall meaning of Destinations was to create a vacation destinatation. This I thought was very intriguing. It was unique and would certainly help Simcity Societies to try to win back the Simcity Franchise diehards and try something new. Tilted Mill certainly tried something new at the beginning.

In Destinations more scenarios were added (although not many) ranging in difficulty. You were charged to create either a small vacation destination to a huge Las Vegas type of vacation megaplex. If you choose not to play a scenario you can either play in a sandbox mode where you are free to create and have everything unlocked, to a strategy mode where you have to be mindful of your building costs, maintenance, and unhappy sims which can create havoc on both your city and funds. The strategy mode was an update after Simcity Socieites shipped, so if you gave up on Simcity Socieities you missed the update. However it is included on Destinations. As I stated before, all the updates are included within the expansion Destinations. If you don't want to play in strategic mode, you can choose the difficulty, what type of land you want and how it might look (look at the preview screen). Do you want a desert, tropical, tropical coast land area? You also can pick up to three special landmarks that can have an effect on your tourism which also would effect your city coffers. Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Your main task in Destinations is to create a destination worthy that will attract SimVacationers. Will you build a beach resort? Las Vegas type of vacation spot? Will it have casinos? Minigolf? Motels? Shops? Tents for camping grounds? If you have accomodations for your tourists, you must have venues which are split up into adventure, dining, entertainment, gaming, leisure, and worship. Which kind of tourist do you want to attract? Can you satisfy all of them?The expansion adds taxistops, bustops, subways, airports, and seaports. Remember, how are your tourists going to get to your vacation spot? This is an exciting new perspective within Simcity Societies and brings in some much needed new content. Now for the bad:

Frustrating! Unfortunately, none of the bugs were fixed. The different socitiet values can be too much and it's very vague concerning their importance or why there are here in the first place. I've mixed a few including, spiritual, authortarian, and productivity; nothing happened either in a bad or good way. In other words, what's the point? The graphics of the buildings were nice. Yes, they produce that, or help this, but so what. Again what's the point. If I placed a few buildings that put me in the red, then I just added buildings that add value until I was in the green. In City Life, some of the social values couldn't live near each other. The game gets very slow when you build up your city. The graphics are very nice however, when the sims cross the street, they turn into invisible lines and reappear when they reach the other side....very wierd! The manual included within the Simcity Box on Destinations is not good in explaining all the new ideas and added goodies within it. The frustration factor is still present even when you want to create a vacation destination. A tutorial would of been nice for Destinations. There is none. The only tutorial that is present is the one for Simcity Socieites and even that one is very incomplete, vague, and not as helpful as Simcity 4 and Simcty 4: Rush Hour was. I wish that there was a type of helper that can guide you to help you move along and give you pointers. **WHEN YOU START A NEW CITY, IT'S LIKE YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN AND GOOD LUCK, which I think a lot of people will feel when playing this game. In Simcity4 you had the advisors. While they weren't a great help, they had decent advice. It would be nice to create parking lots, parking structures, malls, shopping centers, putting in parking meters (for revenue and the addition of a new character in your city- the always warmly greeted ticket agent---cough cough :-) It would be nice to walk or drive around your city either as a civilian, a police officer, a fireman, a mailman, or a tourist. If you walk around as the mayor, will you be greeted with handshakes or tomatoes? One thing I really miss is what I enjoyed in Simcity 4: Rush Hour concerning building up your transportation network. I would of loved to be able to have an effect on traffic control either directing traffic if there was an accident, power outage, or construction, and/or creating traffic flow using the traffic signals. The one thing I hated in Simcity 4: Rush Hour was how bland the traffic signals were and at times it looked like cars were stopping at a red light while others didn't. Controlling traffic would be an awesome feature. It would be nice to be able to place stop signs, street signs, signs in general, traffic lights (single or multiple), and turn signals. I also miss one-way streets as well as avenues. It would be refreshing to see your police keeping the peace and pulling over cars that are not following the traffic and parking rules. I would be nice to see cars parking, and entering and exiting driveways and parking lots and/or parking on the street. How about the possibility of you being voted out as mayor? Will the city council loose faith in you? Does Parliament give you the boot? Are you being investigated for taking bribes and/or kickbacks? Will the people keep you in office? If you are booted, you can become the new mayor but you have to change your policies and try a different root. If you get booted again, game over! How about a weather and natural disaster engine that is random. Earthquakes, severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, and tornadoes that can hurt and destroy; forcing you to send out the police to keep the peace, fire engines to stop the fires, rescue vehicles to tend to the injured or killed, and then set out to rebuild. I would of loved to have more city policies (Simcity 4 had more).

There were some good things within the new expansion but the game still is frustrating and still needs quite a bit more content and bug fixes. Then, just maybe all will be forgiven. I still haven't given up hope. Sadly, when I play Destinations, I'm not on it that long because it's just too frustrating and not as fun as Simcity 4. I get all happy thinking what kind of destination am I going to create, then it fades.

SnapCity is bad although it might be appealing for kids. Anyone who doesn't have Simcity 4 and Simcity Societies should get this, it's a good value. Simcity Socieites has improved but there is still more room for improvement. If it blended City Life, Simcity 4, and Simcity Societies together, then it could of gotten the seal of approval of most Simcity diehards. I've been playing Simcity since the original, and I still have hope that Tilted Mill will improve it. For now, Simcity Societies is still a letdown. While not as bad when it first was released in November, it still needs some work. Maybe this is practice for Tilted Mill. I would love to see this game go DirectX10 (or the new DX11). I would also love to see a city management game that would blow even the Sims and Civilization franchises away.

BUYER BEWARE - FALSE ADVERTISING

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 17
Date: July 17, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Contrary to Amazon's text for this item, it does NOT include the Spore Creature Creator. Instead, it includes only the trial version, which you could download for free anyway. The supposed inclusion of the $10 creature creator was a major factor in my purchase decision!

For Casual Gamers

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 12
Date: July 21, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I read the reviews here, and must accept the label of being a casual gamer. For no other reason than I have liked playing this game, and want to be labelled correctly.

Great rumination question: if you're NOT a casual gamer, then what are you?

A permanent gamer?
A working gamer?
A serious gamer?
A formal gamer?
A regular gamer?

I thought, unless you're doing it for money, all gamers were casual by definition.

Well, it does not matter. I liked this game. I liked it because it was fun to play and I liked the way the characters talked and expressed themselves in writing. I liked the graphics. I liked the music.

I especially liked all the BP branding and product placements in the game. It made me feel much better about what BP is charging me for gasoline now; I'm glad some of my money went to Tilted Mill Entertainment this way.

Now THAT's serious gaming.

A great game collection!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The SimCity Box features:

SimCity 4: The best game in the collection, SimCity 4 is the 4th in a line of city-building simulations (and a TRIAL of Spore Creature Creator) which has amused fans for about a decade (I think). You simply zone resedential, commercial, and industrial zones, Then connect them to bring power, e.t.c. but you also need to balance your budget, gain happiness, and improve your mayor rating!

SimCity 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack: An expansion pack that adds new roads, highways, ferries, and such. It also adds U-Drive-It, where you can drive, fly, and boat across town! Not much else to say.

SimCity Societies: A different game than SC4, it isn't made by Maxis, but instead Tilted Mills ( The In-game description of the windmill is "Some say this mill is tilted.") Instead of all the stuff in SC4, in it you place buildings individually, don't worry about power lines, or water pipes. As a side effect of the missing features it can become bland and repetitive. It does however add Social Values, which buildings consume or produce.

SimCity Societies Destinations: The (as I write this) newest SimCity game. It allows you to attract tourists to visit your city, introduces new buildings and landmarks, and a couple of other things.

Spore Creature Creator Trial Edition: It is not SimCity but it is also very good. You can add Mouths, Sensory Organs, Limbs, Graspers, Feet, Weapons, and Details. You can then size an morph parts for (almost) Endless possibilities.
THIS IS A TRIAL! It only contains SOME pieces! The Spore Creature Creator is available for U.S. $10.00.

Snap City: I haven't actually downloaded this do to poor reviews, but I hear it is part of The Sims franchise (also by Maxis) that spoofs SimCity and it is also similiar to tetris. By, Beth Smiths Grandson CJ.

Disappointed in EA with this

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 31, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I was eagerly awaiting the Destinations expansion and this is how they do it!? I have Societies already, I have SimCity 4 and all expansions, no interest at all in SnapCity and WE got the Spore trial for free online. So I'm supposed to pay practically what it cost to buy the base game just to get an expansion!? My only other option is to digitally download the expansion from EA's store. Nope sorry, I'm not paying money to not have a disk of the game. This is very disappointing!

Could not even install...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 31, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The installation went through after 30 mins or so but it failed to start the game. After installing the patch provided by EA (patch ver 5), the situation was even worse and I was asked me to un-install and re-install the whole game. My PC has met the hardware requirement and I still don't know the cause of the problem. After googling it I found many people have encountered the similar issue.

Major Technical Problems - official help can't be reached, due to more tech problems

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: July 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I got this disc from another retailer.

The first two discs say, "Includes SimCity 4 and SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack", but only the first one ever downloads. I even searched all the files on the disk with "My Computer" on Vista, and the words "rush hour" are not to be found.

Also, the snapcity was having problems loading at all, but it's loading now.

Getting help from the official website if hard, too. There is a forum for "technical questions", but, after I spent quite a while navigating - I got stuck on a page for free cheat codes for any of the games, but you need an access code which can not be found in the box edition of any of these games. Also, the same page for cheat codes came up automatically when I just installed snapcity, and it input the registration code I put in when I installed it, which worked, and it says "The specified registration/access code is not for the specified game."

Finally, when I closed down the cheat code page and returned to the forum, I found that it had accepted my registration, but the forum was only in "read only" mode, and the profiles for the administrator, or anybody else, does not have a private message function.

It's kind of fun, for a while. But, I would not recommend it to anyone who gets even slightly frustrated by not getting what you thought you paid for.

SimCity Box

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Not too many surprises with the gameplay. If you have ever played it before it is very similar - just expanded.

The Best Sim City Package Yet!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I have enjoyed this package from day one and can barely stop playing it! It has so many different things to do, it's a load of fun. Especially if you can get everyone in the family hooked on playing it as well! I am very pleased with my products from Amazon.com. Thanks!

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