March 02, 2010
Sim City 4 Deluxe
Posted by: kk : Category: Software
- Create, build and run the most realistic city you can imagine
- Deploy police cruisers and fire trucks to the scene
- Sculpt mountains, gouge valleys, and seed forests
- Connect your metropolis with other cities you’ve created to form a massive region of SimCities
- System Requirements – Operating System – Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later; CPU Processor – PowerPC G4 or later; CPU Speed – 700 MHz or faster; Memory – 256 MB recommended; Hard Disk Space – 2.0 GB free disk space; Video Card (ATI) – ATI Radeon 7500 or better; Video Card (NVidia) – GeForce2 MX or better; Video Memory (VRam) – 32 MB or higher; Media Required – DVD Drive required to install and play
Product Description
Create the most massive region of cities ever, with a farming town, bedroom community, high-tech commercial center, and industrial backbone. Take complete control of your city’s transportation system and solve U-Drive-It missions from fighting crime to tackling disasters. Watch your population skyrocket as you get your Sims on the go. Create the ultimate living, breathing megalopolis — the most expansive compilation ever.
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March 2nd, 2010 at 3:03 am
When so many games these days focus on death and destruction, it’s nice to have a constructive alternative that is still truly addictive. Filling that niche, as ever, is the prominent Maxis series SimCity.
The latest offering, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, contains all the robust play offered by a completely new version of the city-building legend as well as a plethora of additional content, tools, and mini-games previously sold separately in the Rush Hour add-on pack.
Like it’s predecessors, SimCity 4 is a deep and visually rich simulation. As Mayor the player gets to turn blank plots of land into complex thriving communities with the added challenge of linking them together to form a productive inter-dependent region. With that much realestate to manage, it should hold the interest of creative problem-solvers.
It’s a complicated game, but not overly so, and the hierarchic interface is intuitive, which helps a lot since it takes a few hours to get a good grip on the basics of making a successful city (I highly recommend completing all the tutorials before striking out on your own). Once you can figure out how to grow while keeping a positive cash flow, the game becomes immensely rewarding.
Aside from obviously improved graphics resolution and building variety, the biggest change is that every change in the city is calculated around individual sim-citizens rather than grand formulas. Your job, more than anything else, is to keep your sims happy. If you can do that – provide them with jobs, shorten their commutes, educate them, care for their health, and keep them safe – you have what it takes to be a Mayoral Mogul!
That new perspective also means you can get much more involved with the denizens of your metropolis. You can get down to the street-level and ask them what’s on their mind or even give them a hand through mini-games.
Driving many vehicles (fire trucks, speed boats, and crop-dusters to name a few) you can navigate the city you’ve made. While the simplistic pilotage can be clunky, change of perspective is both fun and helpful. It also splashes a little variety on a game that can get slow once in a while. Besides, what soldier can resist taking a joy ride in a tank or skimming the rooftops in an attack helicopter?
What really keeps you playing this game though is layer upon layer of replay possibilities. Since there are no criteria for winning you can set your own goals and measures of success and you can use any number of approaches pursue your ambitions.
You can play one city aiming for a large population and another for the greatest income possible. You can play the good guy or the ruthless dictator and create everything from slum-ridden industrial towns to tiny farming communities to towering pinnacles of civilization!
And of course you can blow it all up and start over…
There’s no multiplayer in SimCity, but an active online user-base provides both a community aspect to the game and a wealth of new land marks, buildings, and utilities you can download to keep your virtual communities fresh.
If you own The Sims the people you’ve created can even interact with your SimCities. What’s more, there’s a little Mac-only integration in the game. Unlike Windows, you can override the default soundtrack with any playlist in your iTunes library.
While that’s a nice touch, the manual refers to Windows keyboards and there are known graphical problems (especially when “drawing” roads or zones) that are unlikely to be addressed (turning on the Z buffer in the options helps). They aren’t fatal, but I found my building techniques developed around minimizing the effects those glitches rather than productive gameplay.
Even with drawbacks like performance and price (when compared to the Windows version), it’s a quality title and a handy long-term time-waster for creative, micro-managing, or ambitious future base commanders!
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is a great gift and worth owning if you remember SimCity 2000 on the Mac or are looking for a constructive game that exercises your creativity. Of course the inclusion of military facilities like Army and Air Force bases and ICBM silos earns it some kudos too!
Rating: 3 / 5
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:10 am
This is my first Sim game, and I love it. There are three modes to play in: in God Mode, you terraform the region, adding cliffs or valleys, flattening shores, planting forests, etc; in Mayor mode, you will zone areas, add utilities and services, and receive input from dozens of informative graphs, data and advisors; in MySim mode you can create individuals and then name them, give them a place to live and a car to drive, etc.
You can run your simulation in three speeds, and there are hundreds of items and options for you to use — bridges, stadia, landmarks, parks, schools, monorails, industry, agriculture, museums and many more.
There are also several tutorials that show you how to get started, make money, develop a big city, or use the included Rush Hour expansion pack, which lets you get in the driver’s seat of buses, garbage trucks, traffic helicopters, ferry boats, –any vehicle that is operating in your city! Just be careful — it is EASY to spend hours and hours building your city with as much complexity as you care for. Excellent game, implemented very well.
I have had no problems at all with installation or performance running the game on an iMac G4.
Rating: 5 / 5
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:34 am
UPDATE (2/26/09): ASPYR HAS STILL NOT RELEASED AN UPDATE FOR THIS GAME. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF YOU ARE RUNNING 10.4 OR 10.5. THE GAME IS SLOW AND/OR CRASHES CONSTANTLY. ASPYR, FIX THIS GAME!
This is an awesome game, but it STILL does not work on the newest operating system (OSX 10.5); it is slow and it crashes. IF you have an older mac system, this game is great. If you have a newer system, do not waste your money until they release an update for Leopard.
Rating: 1 / 5
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:23 am
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!
Rating: 5 / 5
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:29 am
I loved this game; completely engrossing… That is until my Tiger system was updated to 10.4. It hasn’t worked since. It is now so slow as to be unplayable. It takes ages for even a small stretch of a 2 lane road to render. I’ve written both Apple and Aspyr about the problem but it was never resolved. Aspyr said something to the effect that “Oh well, this has been a problem with OS10.4s.” I hold on to it in hopes that someday someone will fix the bug. If your OS is 10.4 or above, don’t buy it!
Rating: 1 / 5