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With SIMCITY 4 DELUXE EDITION, which conveniently contains both the regular SIMCITY 4 plus the RUSH HOUR EXPANSION PACK, EA Games is really beginning to live up to their tagline “Challenge Everything.” Apparently, the game designers decided to challenge everything that seemed to be holding the game back in the past, and have taken a brave step forward in designing this new edition with those of us in mind who want to be able to create a SimWorld. In other words, you now have an entire continent on which to build cities; instead of having fake adjacent cities that you’re forced to do business with, you now can make your own adjacent cities yourself! You can choose from any of a hundred or so “squares” on which you can build one city after another and have them all trade with each other and everything! You can connect them with superhighways, rail, roads, power, water; it’s great!

Another major improvement is in the increased flexibility in building up each of your cities. Remember how, in previous SimCity versions, it’s such a pain to figure out where to place your streets within your zones? Not anymore; each time you lay out a zone, whether it be Residential, Commercial or Industrial, the game will automatically lay down a grid of streets for you! That saves A LOT of time right there. Also, remember how you had to blow up your streets in order to replace them with bigger streets? Now, it’s a lot easier, because first of all, the road system is much better organized. For example, when you start building a town, you start by using the simple, narrow streets (which are now specifically labeled as being “streets”). However, as people move in and your streets begin to get crowded with traffic, you can then upgrade to wider roads. Eventually, as traffic begins to overwhelm your roads, you may upgrade to wide avenues. All you need to do to “upgrade” is to simply drag a road along a street, or an avenue along a road and—boom!—it automatically changes to a road or avenue. No more having to demolish anything in the process!

The Rush Hour Expansion Pack just adds a new dimension to the game: now you can go out on selected “missions” by car, boat—even helicopter—and earn new buildings, more money, etc. for your city. Admittedly, I’m still trying to get the hang of these missions, as they aren’t too easy, but it’s still a cool feature for the game. Also, the buildings and airports are in much better detail now, and there is far greater variety of them. There are also many new landmarks to choose from; they are in much greater detail and there is no longer any limit how many you may place. (However, you now have to pay to place them.) There are many new rewards for being a good Mayor, too!

My hope is that with SIMCITY 5, they will make everything more 3-D and will finally provide us with the ability for a ground-level Pedestrian View; imagine being able to walk the streets and boulevards of your own cities, drive around, even take your own trains! I think the possibilities are endless. Till then, this will have to do. But, for what it’s worth, it’s still a pretty darn good game!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR SIM FANS
Rating: 5 / 5

Well, being a fan of Simcity for a long time I decided to purchase this game, *after* I finally got a computer capable of running it – the system requirements are very large, so it’s not going to work well on a computer more than three or four years old.

I found out fairly soon that there were some problems with the game like spontaneous crashes and stuff, which need to be fixed by downloading a patch from the official website. And it still has occasional problems with crashing or parts of cities disappearing when I save. There could be significant improvements in stability here, and it doesn’t appear that EA is going to release any more patches for the game.

The graphics are a definite improvement over the previous SimCity games, there’s a lot more detail to everything, and there is a larger variety of buildings, although you still start to see the same building over and over pretty fast.

The game differs from previous versions right away – the map is a large region of squares to build interconnected cities on. Unfortunately, there is no large-scale terrain editor here, nor is there a terrain generator as in Simcity 3000. Instead, you have to go into each little square and edit from there with the terrain tools, which are better than the previous versions, but aren’t very useful in the sense that you will have to go back and forth between squares, reconciling the edges to make a realistic region. It is possible to import grayscale images into a whole region, but it requires being a total geek and a lot of time and patience, something that a lot of people won’t have time to do.

Once you do have a suitable area to start the game is pretty fun, if a bit challenging. If you’ve never played the previous versions of this game before you’ll definitely need to play the tutorials, and if you have played before, you are going to need to unlearn a lot of stuff. It can be a bit difficult at first to get things going and the money coming in, but after a little while you’ll start to fill up the square on the map, and that’s where things get start to get interesting. People can and will commute between two connected squares, and the two “cities” can trade utilies much like the neighbor deals in Simcity 3000. And from this point, at least in theory, you can build a much larger city.

That’s the idea, anyway. In reality as my megacities expanded I’ve just noticed more and more problems that make the game become very frustrating. There are a number of problems I’ve hit at this stage of the game:

1. The large squares become basically unusable as they fill up. The transportation system becomes so complex that the simulation more or less gives up on finding paths for commuting, which in turn halts new development. I’ve had to stop using these altogether because of the choke they can put on the region. And then there’s an issue where things like trees and other of the so-called “props” (basically a lot of small detail that goes along with buildings) may just disappear from large sections of these maps while saving the game.

2. The transportation system eventually stops working logically. People will start commuting just to the closest edge of the map connected to another “city”, which leads to going in circles, extremely high traffic counts on side streets when there’s an empty freeway nearby, and eventually brings the game to the point where I’m trying all sorts of strange tricks to force people into driving in a direction that makes some sort of sense.

3. There’s also this issue with micro-management that becomes very annoying later in the game. Each school and hospital needs to have funding set for them just right – if it’s too low the workers go on strike for apparently eternity, if it’s too high it’s easy to lose a lot money fast. And then there’s the fact that buildings (especially factories) catch on fire an awful lot, and apparently the fire department can’t dispatch to these fires on their own.

4. It’s difficult to build any sort of realism in these cities, partially because of the issues with the scale of things, for example you will likely need dozens of power plants scattered all over the place, and the same thing goes for sanitary landfills, and while it’s theoretically possible to have some central location for these kind of things, in reality the cost is prohibitive. In addition people will not commute more than about 1 1/2 miles from their homes, which takes them like TWO HOURS in good traffic.

In addition, perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t see a whole lot of fun in the so-called “U-Drive-It” part of this game. I find it boring for the most part and difficult to use. I think this feature is way overrated and overhyped.

My advice is if you are already a fan of Simcity go ahead and buy this game (if your computer can handle it), but don’t pay full price for it. If you haven’t played a Simcity game before this one will likely be somewhat overwhelming and confusing and I would recommend buying and playing an older version, such as Simcity 3000.
Rating: 2 / 5