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Simcity 4

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

the Simcity series has always been fun and challenging.
SimCity 4 is the best yet.
the graphics are awesome and the new ways to interact with your city and it's inhabitants are SOooo totaly cool!
the maps you create Can be used with "The Sims 2 (PC)" as new nieghborhoods.

The best SimCity ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 6
Date: February 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

SC4 is the best in the series. A few caveats, if you have a system that is more than a year or two old and wasn't at the higher end even back then, your game play experience will be significantly affected. Don't pay attention to Maxis' minimum requirements; instead look at their recommended requirements. I have a 1.7GHz Dell w/ 64Mb Nvidia video card and even then it seems like the game runs slower than it should. The graphics are spectacular, as is the amount of detail rendered. But the game is also different in many subtle and important ways that make it more satisfying to play.

SC4 is the hardest game in the series. In SC2K and SC3K you could plop down a couple parks, a good mix of zoning and have a beautiful, successful city. Not so here. For a while I was actually very frustrated with SC4, even though I fancied myself something of a SimCity expert. My cities were spread out and not tall; they did not seem to grow past a certain point; I seemed to be losing money left and right. I highly recommend visiting fansites for help (my favorite: simtropolis.com) or getting the Prima guide. After I did that I got a better understanding of how the internal dynamics of the game worked and how to begin thinking about planning a region rather than simply planning a city. (SC4 cities are interconnected with other cities you build around them in a large region.) I currently have one central city with most of the wealthy commerce, citizens, high tech industry and a large university. To make it successful, I needed two other cities: an industrial city to the south and a bedroom community to the west. I recently started a new bedroom community to the southwest that I hope to transform into a wealthier suburb.

Within cities themselves much has changed. Educational, health, and safety buildings have a specific effect on the neighborhoods around them (think big halo around each of the buildings) and you can adjust their level of funding accordingly. Also, rich apartment buildings coexist next to low income tenements. Traffic takes on a more important meaning. The initially-buggy "My Sim" feature which allows you to move in your sims from The Sims or use SC4-supplied sims into your city is also a huge plus and adds an element of human drama into the game play. If your sim lives in a poor area, but one with good services, you could see him move from a job flipping burgers to becoming a school administrator to becoming CEO of a downtown financial services company. If bad traffic prevents a sim from getting to work, he tells you. This helps you think about how it is that people live in your cities and what kind of services and support they need from you as Mayor to live the good life.

Sims aren't real, of course. But as many SimCity Mayors have discovered for themselves, playing SimCity gives you an appreciation of the demands placed on local governments as they try to meet the needs of the people in their areas and the balancing they have to do to meet those needs. SC4 takes this all to a whole new level and initially does not make it easy--but after you get one city going it's amazing how much fun it can be to develop it and the region around it.

Beautiful scene!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 8
Date: January 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is currently out in some countries(not US yet).
This game has a lot of things to "watch" such as volcano,
how fireman extinguish the fire on the building. etc.

especially when i made a mountain highway, it really looked like real.

the only problem of this game is, this is somewhat.. harder then simcity 3000 and u need fast computer and graphic card.

Better Interface

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 7
Date: January 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

It is complicated in understanding the reasons for growth. I have the manual for it and that has helped to understand the mechanics of building a city. The graphics are much improved. Seeing homes build on the sides of hills is delightful. Always a waste of space in past versions. The agriculture is handled much better now, where before you had to spend too much time trying keep it from converting over to industry. I like the way the staff members interface. The challenge is to keep the income above the expenses.

High Requirements!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 7
Date: February 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The game is absolutely fantastic! The graphic design, the transportation simulation and the animations all add up to a very nice city constructing game. The experience from the previous games had a good effect.
Unfortunately, the game is hungry for memory. I bought a new PC some weeks ago. A 2.4GHz CPU with a GeForce4 4400 128MB grafic card and 512MB of DDR (333MHz) RAM and guess what!? I get an annoying slowmotion-show as soon as the city is big enough (approx. 100000 people). It looks to me as the RAM memory is too small! I hear and see that the HD is constantly being used, so it smells like swapping in and out the content of these rather big maps. So I guess I will buy another chunk of 512MB DDR RAM to try to finally play fluently Sim City 4 with a total 1GB of RAM!!!

SimCity 4

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 10
Date: January 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I like this cool game the best number one simcity 4 then a simcity 3000.

best sim city title yet and more to come

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 4
Date: July 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

it was one of my first CD roms because i always download demos and games of the intenet.i got it because it was my sisters birthday my dad went to buy gifts and didnt want me to feel left out so got me Simcity i love it . Yet its a tiny bit hard to keep your money up.

Its a hard game! Especially with the money...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 4
Date: January 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a game where you need a lot of time and thinking to suceed in. I have tried evrything to get money nohting works. I cheated constantly to build up my city till I could get enough out of my citizens taxes, had casinos, toxic waste sites ect. even only had 1 school and hospital for the entire city and made tons of deals with my neighbours. BUT STILL im losing money!!! I dont get it! But a good way of making money is doing different things on different neighbourhoods. Like a residetial 1 connected to a commerial 1 and thats connected to an industial 1. Swap deals get money, the folks jobs arent far away and everyone's happy. Sort of. The residential lot is the hardest obviously. You need hospitals, schools, libarys, police and firestations, parks and so on.. The easiest 1 I think is commercial. Get a couple of landmarks make sure you have lots of big roads connecting to the residential and industrial lots and hey presto a massive commercial buissnes boom with tons of money. Its a good game but if it was that little bit easier in the budgets especially it would be worth playing that little bit longer.
I wiped it off my system cause it took alot of memory of my computer. Now its being lent to my cuzin, and im playing the sims 2 which has a bit of simcity in it which is quite cool. If you had Simcity 4 and The Sims 2 both installed on your pc you can make your own neighbourhood in the sims 2 but both installed at the same time would just be toooo much for my old computer!

Great graphics but at a cost

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: January 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Really looked forward to this version based on a number of previews; graphics and city details definitely improved over SC3K.....but there's a cost to pay. Even with a computer running at 1.1GB w/128MB RAM, NVidia GEForce2 32 MB video card and most of the neat graphics features turned down/off, the gameplay becomes slow and erratic as your city develops. Just read a review where the same problem appears in a 2.2 GB system w/ 512MB RAM. If you're thinking of buying, wait and see what EA can do to fix this problem.

The good and the bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I agree with other reviewers here who have actually played the game. I have for 24 hours and am slightly disappointed. I find the animations great, but the overall quality of buildings is not as good in SC 3. They are very soft like a water color painting rather than sharp and vivid as in SC3. I have been playing SC since version 1, right through SC3 Unlimited and then this latest one. It is NOT a quantum leap as reviewers would have us believe. On a Dell XP 8200, it installs and works just fine with xtasy everything 64 mg video card. Cities are very difficult to get going since money runs out quickly and citizens seem never to be satisfied. The landscape visuals are much better, but buildings are worse. For those who have played SC 3, it is easy to learn the basics, but then there is so much more to learn and do. As other reviewers have stated, it appears to be unfinished and I suspect later versions will be 4 or 5 stars. Also it is expensive. ... I cannot rate it more than 3 stars. It is also a huge program nearly 900 mg, requiring 2 CDs to install. Just wait until we have computers running at 5 gig with 2 gig of memory and we will have a fantastic 3-D program in version 5 or 6.

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