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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.

Sim City 4 Review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: November 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I recently bought Sim City 4. I had desperately wanted the game. It does not take a while to get used to , as I play it virtually every time I sit on the computer!

I found that it was exciting to watch your city develop, but when the population reaches approximately 10,000, you run out of money and your Sims start flocking out of your city. Also, when I build a city, there is a 'No Road Connection' sign appear on vacant blocks of land, although I have already made a Road Connection to the vacant blocks of land. Also, when I run out of money, the Advisors keep annoyingly whingeing and complaining about Taxes and my Expenditure.

The Terraforming tools are fabulous, as you can make Cliffs, Mesas, Mountains, Seed Forests, and Gouge Valleys.

I only occasionaly place Sims in my city, as they often Whinge about things like lack of Power Plants, but really, there are the more efficient, cleaner and safer Wind Farms. Sometimes my advisor pops up saying there is a Core Meltdown at the Power Plant when I don't even have a Nuclear Power Plant in my City. Another problem is, you cannot manage your Finance and Budget properly. The Advisors seem to take more control of your City than you do. I even take out $2,000,000 loans if I have to. Also, the annoying 'No Job' sign on Residential Units are very annoying, as I already have Commercial and Industrial areas. Also, I have to place Five Elementary Schools in the one City, that is why some things are a waste of time or money.

A lot of people who I have heard of, seem to complain that the game runs extremely slow, even on State-of-the-Art Computers, and the system requirements. That is probably because their computer is jam-packed with Programs and Software. I was hanging out to purchase this, and I sure done myself good. I also have The Sims, not as good as Sim City though!

Sim City 4 is awsome!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It took me a long time to figure out how to make a city but after about a month I was making cities with hundreds of thousands of people. Its fun watching your city develope!

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.

build and watch - that's it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: June 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

There is no strategy to SimCity 4 - I thought that SimCity 3000 had been a botched attempt by the designers, but in truth it appears the direction that they are heading with the SimCity series is simply the "Build and Watch" approach. The graphics are pretty good, although it seems to me that if they are really going to stick with this "build and watch" approach to gaming that they should expand the number of buildings - even a tiny city can easily have ten of the same "Bob's Grease Pit" ... I mean come on fellas... choose your weapon, but do it well!

I was eagerly awaiting the widely touted 'multi-region' capability (wherein multiple cities could be connected and interdependant) but this too was a fairly large dissapointment. The cities are utterly independent of each other, and the ability to create deals between two cities that you have created does not add notably to the gaming experience.

Also worth mentioning, the city map sizes are considerably smaller. Although there are some neat new highway building features, it just doesn't ever feel like there is enough space to warrant a highway in these maps. I suppose they were betting on the interdependency of the regions to give the feeling of a larger world to settle, but as I mentioned this is non-existant. Perhaps if they had given the capability for your city to actually overflow onto the next region (as opposed to starting a new city, with a new bank roll, on the neighboring region) the small map size would have been acceptable.

The Rush Hour expansion pack is supposed to let you walk individual sims from one house to the next, etc, etc... I have not even toyed with this option because I don't feel that SimCity is the right venue for this sort of activity. When playing SimCity I honestly have no interest in manipulating individual Sims, but rather would prefer to manage the "city". So for me, this feature (to which indeed an entire expansion pack was devoted) added nothing to the game.

All in all SimCity 4 plays like a loose collection of ideas. The gaming aspects are nearly completely eroded. It feels like there were 13 different developers who each had their own idea about how the game should play. The result is that it barely retains the status of being a game. The small map sizes and micro-management of sims kept yielding me to the thought "Why didn't they call this one SimTown and make a REAL SimCity sequel instead?!?". Do not expect more than 4 hours of enjoyable game time from this one. Somewhere along the way EA lost site of what constitutes a game. Although I was eagerly awaiting this sequel, I give it two thumbs down.

Best Game Ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: April 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is so fun! Here are the best features in the game... The way you can play as a god. Scupling mountains, planting forests, and animals. I always thought simcities were just plain boring, then I got mine, and WOW! This thing got me hooked, I was hook on "S". I thought to myself I need to quit this is worse than drugs. But I didn't this is just the beginning...

Can't stop playing it!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: March 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I absolutely love this game, and sure the main idea is set on a specific principle, regarding that this is a computer game, yet you don't kill anyone here and you don't go to different levels, and I love my crazy games, yet this one gives ms me the satisfaction of making something while I play rather than destroying it.

Right of the bat, I must say I love the music, at times I leave the city running and growing on the slow speed, just so that I can listen to the jazzy cool tunes. I have been a fan of anything that has to do with the Sims since I was in 7th grade when I discovered Sim City 2000 on a computer in my computer class, yes in 7th grade. I'm almost 25 now and I am still crazy about the Maxis ideology behind the city games, as this grew and evolved into a marvelous game. I seriously don't know how they can improve this, because the graphics are phenomenal, you get to sculpt your land, and you can seriously choose from a whole globe of land to play on. You can plant your trees and wild animals, and then the zones, buildings, the natural disasters, the people who need you, your taxes, community programs, ordinances, and really fun decisions on where to plop your park, and this time you can choose from a huge variety of building and entertainment centers for your Sims.

I this game takes a bit to get used to and figure out how to play wile actually making money instead of spending them, and they sure give you enough at the beginning, and while you can Google for cheat codes, it's really fun to roll up my sleeves and really get my brain pumping while I manage my city. I love how many things I can be in charge of, the style of the buildings, where I want a farm with fruitful trees and orchards, what neighborhood I want the bus to stop in, what schools and museums I want resting in the shade provided by so many kinds of tress I can choose from, and so on.
I love this as it's a game you can play forever, I wonder how old I can grow my city to be and how I can sculpt it to perfection. Really fun game with gorgeous graphics, and the zoom button is amazing, you can get down to the street levels you build yourself and observe, just like watching ants on the ant hill, but 10000 times more fun!

Keycode

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 13
Date: December 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Mine did not even come with a keycode!!!! If anyone could please post theirs i Would greatly apreciate it. thenk you!

Just not fun...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: August 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing SimCity since the original Nintendo release. I awaited the release of SimCity 4 with great anticipation, but I have to say, I was very dissapointed.

The graphics are good and all the features described were delivered, but... the game just isn't fun. I sat watching my cities develop (which takes forever) and realized I was having about as much fun as doing laundry.

I also found the game very easy. If you have played previous versions getting a big city takes little thought, just a LOT of time. I found I was constantly just watching the screen as I waited for stuff to happen.

I hope they make a new version that is FUN again, but I can't recommend this one.

A true disaster in game design.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 22
Date: June 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

After playing and studying SimCity4, one is left to wonder just who is this game for. Children may enjoy watching cars drive around a city (with no logical direction). They may enjoy other similar "eye candy" within in the game as well. However, SC4 is very complex as the player must manage nearly every aspect of their city. From city layout to taxes, micromanagement is what the player will be doing much more than just allowing a city to evolve. The game also can't be for more observant and aware gamers either because basic elements are "broken" within. From pollution that doesn't travel beyond the single section of city it is created in, to residents who can't seem to find a way to their workplace, SC4 is a mess. One's citizens travel in all sorts of directions rarely (if ever) taking the best and fastest route to where they are traveling. Good luck getting your residents to actually use expensive highways you carefully build. This lack of 'AI' may be amusing at first, but ends up destroying the game. When the player realizes the whole activity and management of the city revolves around this "sims" ability to think about everything around them in the entire region, SimCity becomes unplayable - congested traffic will be the LEAST of one's worries. Many strange flaws in the game leave one to wonder who didn't see them when the game was being made. Just one of many flaws is; when building a single road and connecting it to a neighboring part of the region, two entire lengths of the other "city's" border may be completely DESTROYED (equal to about 1/8th of the entire city)! Major problems like regions being deleted when "saved" are very common within SC4 as well. Even minor bugs like city services auto-changing funding (without the players knowlege) constantly blight the game.
It is both odd and sad that SC4 "fan" sites end up spending most time trying to find workarounds to the game's many flaws, or even struggle to make additional 'patches' that the game's maker Maxis didn't care enough to do.
Extra Warning! - This CD is the original version of SimCity 4 that the company stopped publishing within months because it was so bad. Buying this, they then tell you the newer updates (patches) are only for those who buy an ADDITIONAL expansion pack or the newer SC4 - 'Deluxe' that is nearly just as horrid!
Word has it that the next version of SimCity will be less "detailed in design". The makers of SimCity4 must now know the horrible mistakes they made in its creation.

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