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It's cool.... it [smells]... it's OK, I guess...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: March 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When I first started this game (on an adequate computer), I was blown away! Sound and graphics are great, but they require a very powerful machine. I got a P4, 3GHz, 1GB ram, Radeon 9700 graphics card, and the performance is just OK. I installed it on an older rig (year and a half old), and it was not playable at all.

If you have good hardware however, this game is beautiful. The city is full of life, and there are a great number of different things happening. Many different buildings and styles. Awesome!

Once you get past that, you are in for a few frustrating hours. I do not care what other people say. This game is very hard! Mainly because of the lack of instructions. The tutorial is very short, and the manual is very thin. I have the strategy guide, but it doesn't explain many of the basic mechanisms. Well, it shouldn't. That's what the manual should be for. But unfortunately, there are many unanswered questions at first. For instance, there are no instructions on how to set up the water supply. Should I use water towers, or a pipe system instead? How many water pumps do I need? And where does the water come from in the first place? You can figure this out on your own, but since the economic model is very tight, you can not afford to build more than you need, or you'll fail terribly.

After a whole lot of trial and error however, things get clearer, and then the game isn't all that hard after all. This makes the lack of a good manual even worse!

I like that Sim City 4 introduces regions. This way, you can create a large metropolis, which is a combination of a number of interacting cities. Unfortunately, the implementation of this idea is sub-optimal as well. The problem is that each city still exists in it's own universe. When you switch from one city to the next, all but the active one just go to sleep. This means that no matter what you do in the other cities, nothing happens in the others. Example: Build a power plant and a power line to another city. Then, sell all the power to the other city. This will make you a lot of money. Then, just before you switch to the other city, turn off the selling operation. This means that although you collected money from that other city (and the money showed up in your account), the other city didn't actually have to pay at all, since nothing changed since you left and by the time you go back you turned off the power transfer. This means that the overall game doesn't have a consistant economy model, which is very disappointing especially in this game.

Oh, and talking about powerlines that are built across cities. Whenever you build something in one city that influences another, that other city will update its terrain the next time you go there. This makes sense to me, but should a simple powerline change the landscape of the other city and therefore wipe out buildings? Seems to me that only one building should be moved out of the way to make room for the power line...

There is one issue that truely [stinks]: Save games. You can not specify the name of a save game. Sim City will figure that out for you. Unfortunately, this means that there is only one save game per city. No going back to previous ones! So be very careful with those saves (and of course, you can not switch to another city in the region without saving or losing your information).

Another point of criticism is the lack of scenarios or even a campaign. There are several different areas you can play, and that's about it. No goals. Just kinda playing away. While this is a cool mode to have, it is also boring and I really crave some more defined goals. How about solving the traffic problem in L.A.? How about getting Salt Lake City ready for the Olympics? How about keeping New York operational after global warming melts away ice caps on the poles, and half the city is about to sink into the Atlantic? How about turning around the economy of Silicon Valley?

The could go as realistic or crazy as they wanted, but just give me some kind of goal!

And: You always start from scratch. It will take you a very long time to build a city with anything beyond a 4 or 5 story building, let alone sky scrapers, towers, and stadiums. I find that very frustrating.

Beyond that, it is a pretty cool game. Not the great game we were all expecting, but pretty good.

Constant Lockups and Crashes

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: January 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I would wait for a newer version or a patch. I am so disgusted with myself for buying this and wish I could take it back. The game would be wonderful and there are some great graphics in it but it locks up constantly. I have a brand new computer that I had built especially for "gamers" with high end everything on it. But I start to build a city and get excited about it and it either crashes or locks up. I've started saving every single time I do anything anymore and that makes the game not very fun to play. If you haven't already bought this game, don't waste your money. I will only be happy after the first patch or two comes out. Until then, I will be playing something else.

I'm Rummaging Through Garbage to Find SimCity3000

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: June 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Please listen to me and realize that this was a very dissapointing game. What went wrong I don't know. EA "Challenged" their reputation making this game, cause it freaking sucks.

Pros:

- Graphics (Everything is more lifelike and seems almost that you can zoom in further than the other SimCity/s)

- Terrain Builder (You can build mountains, hills, or make valleys and lakes)

- Airport (This airport actually brings in people to your city and is no longer a zone. It is pre-made)

Cons:

- Difficulty (Certainly not for the younger crowd)

- Budget (I'm having a lot of trouble keeping money... no matter what- I have like three toxic waste dumps and a naval base missile tester and still my monthly income is negative. I've raised my taxes and lowered matinence and buses and everything- nothing works. MAJOR FLAW!)

- Zoning (The zoning puts in streets that don't line up with other streets and if you delete you wast money because it's part of the zone.)

- Overrated (look at the front of this game. Never will you see buildings like that- trust me. I never see blimps or helicopters.)

Overall- 2/10 (I like the terrain builder a lot... but that's the only thing better than SimCity3000).

Final Word- I was terribly dissapointed with this game. SimCity3000 is just so much better. Get it, and save some $.

Have Fun w/ SimCity300, cause you WILL not have much fun with this.

This game is why there's no clock near my PC

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 15
Date: January 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The improvements are apparent from the moment you start up. As a graduate of SimCity, 2000 and 3000 Unlimited, I was expecting a similar jump in gameplay and graphics for this one. SimCity 4 is a quantum leap ahead, however.

The graphics are photo-realisically awesome. So much so, that they will tax anything less than a 2 year-old or older PC. The game can be played on a 800-900MHz/ 128K machine, but it will be slow at times...be warned.

The scenery and buildings are very realistic. No more 20-story apartment buildings in cities of only 1500 inhabitants, either. Plus, once something's built, it tends to last for a long time, making the bulldozer tool a necessity for growth.

This game is much more difficult. It's taken me several tries to get a city of 10,000 with a balanced budget, without going broke. Watch your expenses carefully and don't build schools or police until you absolutely have to. Keep your budget constantly in mind. Accounting happens monthly, so deficit spending wipes you out fast.

A few quips -- the roads are less real-looking here. You almost have to establish a grid, where they seemed more natural in SC3000. Now, though, they can traverse the topography much easier. It's a trade-off.

There seems to be little benefit to linking to the region unless you've developed other areas. This means you're on an island and development even to a small town of 5,000 to 7,000 can take hours and lots of money. This may not be a bad thing.

Also, editing the terrain is tricky business. On the regional level, it seems almost impossible. Could we please have a God mode for the region view, instead of only at the city level?

Be patient and this one will ruin your career, mariage, etc. Awesome.

Impossibly hard, but slightly rewarding

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First off, this was a ... mleh game. This is a extremely complex game. The farthest i've gone without cheats is about 5 min. The traffic is absurd, subways are beyond expensive, trains and buses placed in the most congested areas only recieve 10% usage at most. The buildings look great and all the graphics are amazing, but the difficulty is beyond anything. SC3000 was a simpler and more addicting.SC4 is still addicting, but the frustration you will recieve trying to balance the budget is too much. BUT, if you pass all that, (i have managed that once), the difficulty gets even harder, powerplants either take up too much space or are too expensive, the budget gets extremly fragile, schools and hospitals overflow once built. But the rewards to see the cities bloom are great. My record pop. is 128,923. Is low for what i see, skyscrapes offices are not enough to get a mil. But still try the game you might get lucky.

good, not exceptional

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game in a special offer with two other games that I did want, I had never heard of this game before so had no idea what it would be like. I was very pleasently surprised.

First I will start with the positive points:
- The graphic believability is very good, that includes the landscaping tools and the buildings.
- The regions are interactive to a degree, it is just a pity you have to start again for a bordering town instead of carrying on with the same one when the map is full.

Now the negative points:
- Once you get freely use to the feel of the game and can navigate easily around the controls, you get tired of seeing the same buildings over again, it is all very well having five police stations in a large city but it would be better if there was more variety of buildings
- When the cities are large, you have to be very careful with things like taxes and expenditures, taxes are basically the only way to make decent money, and you have to figure how to spend the moeny to utilities with making the city go bankrupt.

I also found that after a while the game gets boring and maybe even frustrating, it is extrmely difficult to rear up a city that looks like the one on the cover

This game should appeal to creative minds that don't mind just working on things without too much of a point to the game.

Amazing leap forward but marred by serious problems

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

SimCity IV

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I loved Simcity 2000 which is the best of the series. Simcity 4 is not as good or easy as 2k but much better than 3k. In Sc4 you play the mayor and design the city. At first you built a power plant, a water pump and put some low industrial, low commercial and low residential zones. People will start comming to your city. You have to remember things like, People do not like to live near a factory, They like to live near parks. Put more parks and you get more people. Make sure that people are happy and paying their taxes. There are a very few changes. The best thing is that now you choose a city from a large country map and you can be the mayor for neighbour cities too. Another good thing is now you can charge different taxes for people living in high, medium or low zones. I have Win98SE, P4 2.4Ghz, 512mb Ram and a GeforceFx. I did not face any problems and runs great. Sc4 has beautifull graphics and excellent music. The disaster graphics are the best. Lightning, Volcano, Tornado and meteor are beautifully done. If you loved Sc2k or Sc3k and have a good system get Simcity 4 you will love it.

Best Review Ever!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: May 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I played Sim City 3000 in school. Me and my classmates loved the game! We all have contests to see who could get the biggest town, with the most people. When I asked my mom for it, she suprised me with Sim City 4. I was so happy! But when I began playing, I noticed that it was not a very good game. It was very hard to get a population of 1000, even when going in super speed, When zoning, the streets were made for you, landmarks start at about $30,000, raising taxs is confusing, and "Budget Grim" is always going off, even when taking a loan of $100,000. So I suggest you buy Sim City 3. No ofence to the makers of Sims' stuff, but I think they made a mistake with Sim City 4.

Unacceptable..

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 17
Date: January 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Simcity 4, in it's current state, is a disaster. My specs: P4 2 Ghz,Radeon 9700,512 MB,Soundblaster Audigy 2. The game churns. I'm sure most of the reviews seen here are either from Maxis trying to save their dwindling game, or people who have played it for five minutes. With my machine, a city with a population of 25k on the largest map will barely run. Days take 5-6 seconds to advance even on the fastest setting, and it is impossible to scroll around and place buildings because of the slow down. This programming is horrid. No current machine can run a large city without terrible lag. Simcity 4 is unstable, and with ANY ATI card, buildings are turned off when you scroll, yet I was able to fix this by changing a few lines of code.

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