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A snap reaction

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Well I just got the game the other day. I was a casual fan of sim city and sim city 2000, and own sim city 3000 unlimited. I was really excited about this game when I read about it. Perhaps that is why I feel a little disapointed in my purchase.

Take into account I havent spent a hell of a lot of time with the game yet, but I will rewrite this review once I have a better and more exact apraisal of it's merits and faults. This is a first reaction.

For starters, the game feels slow. I have a brand new 2.4 Ghz machine with 512MB of Ram and a Geforce 4. So it's not my machine... for real. Not that the game grinds to a hault, it just FEELS sluggish in response time. Anytime you move around your city it doesnt feel 100% fluid. This is a minor to moderate complaint, but I'd really like to see the game have a much smoother engine.

This time around the interface is brand new. They tried to work in the interface from The Sims. Well... I hate to say this, but I hate it. Atleast at the moment. It is more confusing to me than the one used in previous versions, and too flashy. I much prefered the interface of sim city 3k. Also there are only a small handfull of disasters which really disapointed me. The ones that are there are moderately well done, and now you can direct them (which is cool). Although it's fun to steer a meteor into a loathed neighborhood of your city, I wish there was a wider scope here. A larger variety of disasters would be much apreciated. I'd like to see varying intensity disasters too, so the difference between an F1 and an F5 tornado could be illustrated in the game... but no.

The paradigm of the game is also changed a lot... for the better AND for the worse. Many aspects have improved, but many have changed in ways that will leave traditional fans frustrated, disapointed, or confused. You can now create a whoole region of cities all interlinked, which is a greta improvement, but I dont see scenarios present. I also hate the startup screen. No menu really... just right to a region... it's a bit perplexing. And perhaps the BIGGEST COMPLAINT I have is that I dont beleve you start in 1900 anymore! As far as I can tell you ALWAYS start your cities in the present day! What a huge loss! I alsways loved starting a city in the beginning of the century to watch it progress over the years as new technologies change the world, and to watch the events occur in the game. Im not 100% sure about this, but if I knew for a fact it was true I would definately be upset!

On the up side there are a lot more buldings and seems like a lot more depth in the game as far as complexity. There are now local budgets for schools and more emphasis on the people of your city. You can even throw your own sims into the city and they'll report back to you. The day/night cycle, is a nice touch, but can be distracting. The graphics are a BIG imporvoement, yet at times fall short of what would be expected. Sound is generally very good, though at points it's obvious they used and built on existing sim city sound effects. Economics in the game is much more detailsed, but the graph features are a little less helpful than we have come to expect in the series up till now.

All in all.... I must admit a heavy sense of disapointment. I very well may come to love the game in some ways, but for now I am still stuck with the feeling of disapointment with the shortomings and unwelcome changes. Don't get me wrong it's still a good game, you'll just have to try it out for yourself and decide whether or not you like the changes and can live with it's few hiccups.

Extremely frustrating. For die-hard strategists only.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: July 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is definitely one of the most frustrating games currently out for the PC. First of all, you need a very, very powerful computer to even be able to play it. (I have a Pentium 4 computer with 1,024 RAM and a very nice graphic card and I still got a lot of slowdown)
This game is definetely for either, A. die-hard strategists who love complicated games that involve you knowing how to attract people to your city, keeping the taxes low, keeping the people happy, having enough jobs etc., all at the same time. Very difficult to do when you have your advisors screaming repetitive information back at you.
The music is something in it's own. It has a wonderful feature that you can access. That feature is the ability to turn the music off. The music has been repeated through every Sim City and will most likely be in the next one as well. At least they were smart enough to include the ability to shut off the sound.
One last closing note,....You know those wonderful pictures of that city with huge skyscrapers on the back of the box and the front as well? Well, good luck getting your city to look like that without cheats.

Same OLD SimCity

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: January 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I got this game the day it came out and I am allready bored of it. It was fun in the beginning, but the longer you play this game the more repititious it gets. The graphics are great but the toolbars are sometimes confusing because there are no words, just picture menus which can be annoying. Once you have built one successful city you will most likely never play this game again. I also think that the whole region/neighbor set up needs to be tweaked a little which might add more hours of gameplay. That seems to be the only major difference between this simcity game and simcity 3000. I would not spend 50 bucks on this game because after a few days of gameplay you will most likely put this game away for good.

ALMOST TOO REALISTIC

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 15
Date: January 27, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Well, it has finally arrived, and judging by the other reviews it seems that many people are not satisfied with Sim City 4. I, on the other hand, find it to be a great city simulator with high educational value, especially in the areas of mathematics, geography, sociology, engineering, etc.

You play as mayor, and you start a new city by building roads and establishing zones (residential, commercial and industrial). As time progresses, the land begins to develop, according to land value and access to resources. As your city's population increases, you add hospitals, schools, fire/police stations, courthouses, rail lines, seaports, airports, parks, and much more. Small fires occasionally break out, riots flare up; the city becomes alive. The toughest part of the game, in my opinion, is staying out of the red. City services cost money, and people do not like to be taxed. It's a complicated balancing act that gets harder as your city's population reaches one million inhabitants, and this problem is compounded by factors like crime and blight. If things get really bad you can resort to asking for loans and making business deals with other cities on the map.

This is a very difficult game, but I am sure that being the mayor of a large metropolis in reality is no walk in the park. Simcity 4 is a program that requires a high-end computer to run adequately, so keep that in mind before purchasing this product

So horrible the company stopped publishing it !

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: June 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

True. Within months it was clear that even very basics within SimCity4 were horribly done. The only hope was for those already owning this version, to PURCHASE an expansion or "Deluxe" that actually end up destroying those few enjoyable elements from the original and never fixing the MAJOR problems the game has. Avoid this game. Even if you can get it for free, it is not worth computer crashes it commonly causes. Awful.

Released before its time!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: January 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If it weren't for the serious bugs, this might be a fun game. As released, it crashes and burns to the point of frustration.

It's a resource hog. I have a 1.5 GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and a GForce 4 video card. SC4 still runs slow, and crashes fairly often. Upon exiting SC4, one has to reboot to clear the debris left behind. It's sad that this stuff gets released long before it's ready.

I also "tested" SC4 on a 700 MHz P3 with 256 meg of RAM. It was unplayable. Taking the RAM up to 512 meg helped. 1 gig of RAM seems to be the point at which the game actually starts working decently.

So, how long do we have to wait on the patch?

Famous Programmer,

Ted Dead

Wait for it to be in the bargin bin.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: February 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I anticipated this game to be totally amazing. The screenshots and description of the new features screamed "this game will be totally awesome, buy it"! Well the game is nice, but the dynamics added to the game are beyond difficult to use and make the game become tedious and rather unappealing quickly. I seriously enjoyed Sim City 3000 much better. If they could have simply made the graphics and features better, but used the simcity 3 game engine I think everything would have ended up much better.

Beyond it losing its appeal rather quickly, the game is VERY demanding on hardware, which is something I actually applaud. It's about time software catches up with hardware and uses it to the max and gives companies a reason to increase system performance, but the recommended requirements they put out are what bothers me. Simply triple what they recommend, and you may get decent game play. Though, this game seems to not have been tweaked for performance at all, there are people with top of the line Athlon XP 2800 or Pentium 3GHz systems with fast hard drives and graphics hardware, and they too have issues running this game w/o lag. That to me is poor game tuning and performance, and the recent patch doesn't address this issue at all, rather it adds SOME of the things they said were going to be in the game and forgot.

... This game needs serious core improvements, something a patch won't address. Some people say "an add-on pack may address these issues like when the sims performance increased after patching to sims livin' large,etc" ...

Big dissapointment.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: March 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The graphics aren't the problem in this game. It's the actual gameplay. Gone is the EXTREMELY detailed level editor of SimCity 3000. All you can do now is affect large areas with one setting. Aside from not being able to make cool mountains around your city anymore, there's the region thing. You have a large map with tiny to large areas to play. The idea is to link them all together. Cool idea but doesn't work too well with business deals. The main problem though, is...ROADS! In this new version, the game thinks it knows what it's doing, and makes roads for you when you zone land. HORRIBLE idea. Whenever enlarging an area the roads become a tangled mess. Even worse, if you try to copy how the game makes roads to do it manually, somehow the layout doesn't work and it still makes more roads. Of course the Sims of your city hate this and let you know with constant complaining. Menus are another atrocity. The menu works but just doesn't fit the game well. It's to "Simized." Meaning it's the exact same menu The Sims uses. The whole game has actually been "Simized". The robot maid is one of the disastors...

Looks, sounds, and plays great - on the right computer

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 22
Date: March 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Being a politician has never been easier than with SimCity 4, the John F. Kennedy, Jr. of simulations. This scion of the first and greatest simulation of all time is the latest, and most elegant of all the members of the SimCity dynasty.

Blessed with stunningly realistic graphics and a hip nouveau-easy listening (I believe the word is "ambient") soundtrack, this game kicks the wow-factors like David Copperfield in Vegas. However, the game requires serious performance from your PC, so don't expect it to play in high-detail mode if your computer isn't pretty souped up; even if you do have some newer hardware on your PC and an abundance of memory, your larger cities might slow down significantly or even cause your computer to freeze or crash.

Modeled after it predecessors, SC4 works much like its earlier incarnations. You start as the Mayor of a bare piece of land, add residential, commercial, and industrial zones, establish roads, power and water sources, and those little community necessities such as schools, police and fire stations, waste disposal and parks. You can't specifically choose what will be developed in each zone, but you can exert influence with your Mayoral choices. No school around? Watch the low-income tract houses with dirt patios spring up. Got a hospital and a library nearby? Tract houses are torn down as mansions and cottages quickly replace them. As your city grows, traffic, pollution, fires, and shrinking open space become concerns the Mayor has to address.

But what's a game sequel without never-before-seen features? Before you start your political career, SC4 has an amazing God Mode that allows you to click topography into being and then erode it all away, sweep trees across the land and populate it with wild animals, and unleash disasters onto your unsuspecting landscape. You can also view your city in the day or night, or allow it to cycle through the entire day. (This is fun to watch the first few times, but it's hard to manage your city when it gets dark outside).

In addition, SC4 gives you a region containing many cities that serve as your saved game slots (much like the neighborhoods in The Sims), and your cities can share resources such as water, railroads, or power. Be aware that your odd topography will have to be "reconciled" to the edges of neighboring cities in order for the cities to interact.

In order to give SC4 crossover appeal with lovers of The Sims, SC4 is equipped with a Sims mode where you can move your favorite sim into a home within your city limits. (The game provides a docket of prefab sims, but you can also import them from your own Sims or Sims Unleashed games.) Once moved in, however, your sim interacts with the city without your intervention (unless you decide to strike Deuce Flyer's house with lightning, that is). The interface is another detail that is more reminiscent of The Sims than of previous SimCity games, and this is definitely a plus, as it is fairly intuitive and makes city management painless.

Once you are done terraforming, you're ready to embark on a city-building mission. You start with $100,000, which is enough to build a fairly impressive city, however, the money quickly runs out if you don't budget well (city management is the name of the game). The game has city advisors who are each in charge of a particular facet of the city, and who give advice with their own agendas in mind. The only way to make your city prosper is to figure out the right balance of restraint and commerce. Even seasoned SimCity freaks will spend hours of game play strategizing before they hit upon the ideal city-building and management process.

Once your city starts growing, Mayoral bonuses are unlocked, based on the specific achievements of your city or region; have a lot of agricultural areas, and you might just get that Farmer's Market. If you get in trouble financially, your money advisor might arrange for other less-savory special offers that can generate additional income, such as a missile test range. For a price, landmark buildings such as the Empire State Building or the Great Pyramid are also available for installation in your city. This is fun, but the landmarks don't actually do anything except make your skyline pretty.

Bottom line: breathtaking graphics, cool music, and long hours of game play make this a great game, but make sure your computer meets the minimum technical requirements for installation. Don't expect much personal interaction, a la The Sims, but do expect to become an addict to yet another absorbing simulation game.

4 = great

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: December 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

this game is fun, if you have alot of time on your hands. Its a pretty difficult game, and i wouldn't recommend it for little kids; mainly because of the difficulty. If the kids want to destroy citys then i guess that would be fun for them. I got this game after owning the previous versions, and i didn't know how to play it. I now know that the only way to make your city big is to creat alot of residential, and a little business, then bunch of factorys around your pwer plant. Its also a very good idea to keep your polution creating things near the edge of the screen since pollution doesn't transfer over to the other citys. I have yet to creat a thriving metropolas but i'm getting there, and i don't really have patience so that is also a problem. I'm really learning alot about citys, and stuff its pretty cool

I highly recommend the strategy guide that goes with this, strategy guide should have been the manual in my oppinion.

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