Emerging from Weeks of Sim City 4 (Sim City 4 (PC))

Member Name: delawney

Product:	Sim City 4 (PC)
Date:	09/03/03 (3552 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Playability

Disadvantages: Addictive

*** THE SHORT VERSION (FOR THOSE IN A HURRY - AND BECAUSE I APPEAR TO HAVE WITTERED ON SOMEWHAT!) ***

The latest in a succession of successful "God" games based on creating and running your own city, Sim City 4 is definitely a cut above it's previous incarnations. It maintains the same addictive qualities, but has managed to eradicate some of the slightly more irritating aspects of the game.

It is beautiful to look at, fairly easy to pick up and highly playable. The features and levels of the games have expanded, enabling you to appreciate the game on both a large (regional) and a small (individual person) level.

It will take up masses of space and drain your memory, and small elements of the game can still become irritating, but on the whole it is fantastic fun and will keep you amused for ages. Comes with the delawney seal of approval!


*** THE FULL OPINION ***

So, you may have been wondering where I've been for the last couple of months. Actually you probably weren't, as I'm sure you all have something vaguely resembling a life. Truth is, I've been sucked into that neverending chasm that is my job at the moment, but in those rare moments when I've actually had something that could be called "free time" I've been suffering from a terrible affliction. Yep, my name is delawney and I am a Sim City addict.

It all started back with Sim City 2 sometime in the dim and distant past. I remember many a night thinking "I'll go to bed in a minute" and then eventually craling under the covers past three in the morning with work the next day. But although highly addictive (it must be a power thing) the novelty slowly wore off as the little annoyances of the game - like forever having to repair roads - eventually got the better of me.

Then some time ago mr delawney came home with Sim City 3000 World Edition and I was hooked once more. Hours we
re whiled away when I was supposedly "studying" creating ever expanding metropolises and enjoying the worship of my contented citizens. Still, all good things come to an end eventually, and when I'd played the game through several times to the point of getting the space port, it finally dawned on me that I seemed to have done pretty much everything the game allowed you to do, and once more Sim City found its way onto the shelf.

Anyway, mr delawney being the sweetir he is came home from town one Saturday at the end of January with the latest in the Sim City family - Sim City 4, and I've been addicted ever since.


* So, What Is Sim City Then? *

As with all the best games, the basic principle of Sim City 4 is simple. You are a "mayor", in charge of building your own city. You are not "all powerful" - the number of people or "Sims" that choose to come and live and work in your city all depends on how well you play the game. Persuade lots of people that they want to come and live in your town, your city will become proseperous and you will earn "rewards", such as a Mayor's House, a City Hall, a Country Club or a Radio Station.

* How Do You Build A City? *

The game commences in "God Mode", where you really are all powerful. This is where you get to shape the terrain. Sim City 4's terraforming tools are a huge step up from previous editions. You can have the tallest, pointiest mountains, rolling hills or dramatic gorges. Thick forest or spartan plains - the choice is yours. You can even populate your terrain with wild animals, although as far as I can tell these seem to disappear as soon as you start building your city.

Once you are happy with your terrain, you can enter "Mayor Mode", where you start building your city proper. There is a veritable selection of tools to create your city. First off, you will need to inst
all basic utilities such as power and water. Then you can get going with putting in your roads and zoning your residential, commercial and industrial areas. There is a much bigger emphasis on agricultural zones in the latest edition. Back in Sim City 3000, it was a bit of a feat to develop farmland, and if you succeeded it never seemed to last very long. In Sim City 4, there is a dedicated tool for agricultural zoning. Agricultural zones must be powered, but do not require water. (The Sims appear to be dab hands at installing irrigation devices). There are a couple of rewards dedicated to how much agricultural zoning you have - a Farmers' Market and a State Fair.

Don't forget that as well as utilities, zones and roads, your city is going to require basic services such as Fire Stations, Police Stations and Schools. Just like real people, Sims love to play, so make sure you put in some sports facilities. Plenty of parks will also help make you a popular mayor.

Once you've put in the initial bare bones of your city you can watch your Sims start to move in. Hours can pass as you watch them build their cute little houses and offices, and see the little cars driving round and round the city. Believe me I know!

* Managing Your City *

Sim City is not just about building a city, it's about managing it too. You have a budget to balance! Now, theoretically this should be my forte, and I'm pleased to say I don't seem to be doing too badly at it all things considered...

You start with a budget of 100,000 Simoleans. Sounds like a lot, but it seems to vanish really quickly! Everything you build in Sim City has an initial capital cost, and most items have ongoing revenue costs as well. For example, if you build a school, you incur the initial cost to build it, but you also have to pay for the teachers and the maintenance of that school. Roads will cost you money in repairs.

But hey, it
9;s not all spend spend spend. You are Mayor remember. You get to charge taxes! It's up to you the levels you set your taxes for Residential, Commercial and Industrial sectors. In an improvement on earlier versions of the game, you can now set different levels of taxation depending on whether the taxee (is that even a word?) is high wealth, medium wealth or low wealth.

You are also responsible for implementing (or removing) your "City Ordinances". These are things such as legalising gambling, making the city a nuclear free zone, charging for car parking, implementing a tyre recycling programme etc. etc. One or two of these will make you money, but the vast majority of them are going to cost you, so use them with care. In my experience the Sims don't seem to complain too much if you never implement an ordinance, but if you set one in motion and then repeal it that seems to really hack them off. That said, make sure you legalise gamibling at an early stage - that will automatically increase your income by 100 Simoleans a month. And later on, you may just be offered the casino ;)

You can also make (or spend) money by making deals with your neighbouring cities. (First, a neighbouring city has to exist, but more of that in the next section). You can sell them water or power, or offer to dispose of their garbage for them, for which they will pay you a fee. Of course, you can also buy water or power from your neighbours, or dump your garbage on them for a price.

* Now It Really Is Sim Nation *

On earlier versions of Sim City, that's exactly what it was: Sim City. Now you get to create a whole region. You can start with one of the games "prepared regions", based on the terrain of existing cities such as London, or you can start a whole new region entirely from scratch. I recommend practicing on a few of their preloaded regions until you get the hang of it a bit more.

Before you can b
enefit from making deals with neighbouring cities, you have to have created them. As your region and your individual cities grow, you can use smaller cities to provide "overspill" from your major cities - for example cities consisting almost entirely of residential zones so your Sims can commute.

There are various sizes of city available. As most of the rewards are connected to your city's population size, you will find your rewards are limited in the smaller cities, as there is simply only so much you can cram into the space. But in this latest version of Sim City, big is not necessarily best - what matters is that the city functions well for its size.

* It's Big, But It's Small Too *

Unlike previous versions of Sim City, you can really concentrate on gearing services to particular areas. For example, you can adjust the level of funding for individual schools or medical centres to reflect the demand in that area. If your school only has 20 pupils, it doesn't really need 30 teachers, so why pay for them?

Sim City 4 also enables you to get a real insider's view of your city with the "My Sim" mode. Now you can move individual Sims into the city and monitor their progress. The initial social status if your Sim depends on the typr of property you move them into. Move them into a tenement, and they will be low wealth Sims, but move them into a grand mansion and they will automatically be wealthy. Their social status will change as the game moves on - depending on how you are running your city they may become better educated, get better jobs and move into higher wealth accommodation.

You can have up to 5 of your own Sims in each city. They will keep you informed of how the city is running - if they think more schools or medical services are required, they will tell you so. Sometimes this can become annoying - they will bombard you with the same requests over and over again!
>
You can have great fun naming your Sims after people you know, especially if one happens to be the spitting image of one of your mates! Also, if you have previously been playing "The Sims", you can import your own Sims from there.

* Playability *

When I first acquired the game, I was a bit concerned that it might be a bit complicated - there seemed to be so much it could do! I needn't have worried - the game is driven entirely by "menus" (well, graphical representations of with tags) and is really easy to follow. I'm sure this is made easier by having played earlier versions of the game, but I still believe it would be pretty easy to pick up even if you hadn't played the game before.

There are tutorials to help get you going, but I definitely found it beneficial to just mess about on it a bit to get a feel for it before I started playing proper.

* Looks *

One of the things you notice instantly, especially having experienced previous incarnations, is the quality of the graphics. From the really quite blocky, basic representations of Sim City 2, the game has progressed into something really quite beautiful to look at. The layout also seems more realistic - you can really see how the Sims are getting to their houses and their office buildings, whereas before you kind of felt there had to be invisible roads or something for them to actually be able to access some buildings.

* delawney's Top Tips *

Having spent far more time than is healthy immersed in this game over the past few weeks, I feel able to share just a few of the things I've learned whilst playing the game:

* Build your power stations, landfill sites and anything polluting as close to the edge of your city as possible. This will help keep your pollution levels down, and bizzarrely does not affect neighbouring cities.
* Legalise gambling as soon as you enter Mayor Mode - this will a
utomatically give you an extra 100 Simoleans per month income.
* Raise taxes to 9% early on - the Sims don't seem to complain as long as you don't go above this level. (The default tax rate is 7%).
* The Sims seem to love agriculture - stick loads of it in at an early stage in the game. The bonus is it's not too expensive. This will help you get the Farmers' Market and the State Fair as your population increases.
* In the early stages of the game zone low density for residential and commercial. You can always increase the density of a zone later as your city grows.
* Make sure you maintain good fire coverage at all times, else you may well find a big chunk if your city burns down. You can save money by not putting police services in straight away - whilst your city is very small there doesn't seem to be a crime problem. Don't put it off forever, though, else you will get your comeuppance!

* Technical Stuff *

This is a big old game. It's going to take up a whopping 1GB of your hard drive, so be warned! The minimum requirements to run the game are:

* Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
* 128 MB RAM
* 1 GB Hard Drive Space
* 8 Speed DVD/CD
* 16 MB Graphics
* DirectX 7.0 Compatible Sound Card

I do find this game is quite hungry on the RAM, and I do find it beneficial to restart my machine after playing else everything seems to run dreadfully slow.

* Cost *

Sim City 4 currently retails for approximately £34.99 - at least that's what mr delawney paid for it (it seems he didn't think to remove the price!).

* Overall Verdict *

There is so much packed into this game, that to have described it all in great detail I would have had to have written a small novel, so obviously there are some features I have just glossed over, or neglected entirely. Hey, you've got to have some fun discovering them yourself!

This is a fantastic
ally addictive, easily playable game. If you have never played Sim City before (and even if you have) you are likely to find that your first few cities run out of money in no time and you wonder if you will ever make a successful city. In time, though, you do get a feel for the demands of the Sims and how much things cost, and you suddenly you will find your cities thriving. Don't be put off in those early stages!

A lot of the annoyances of earlier versions of the game have disappeared - you don't seem to spend all your time repairing roads, for example. However, as your cities grow, you will find some things a little repetitive and irritating. For example, in a large city, you may have 15 schools, and it can become time consuming to monitor their funding all the time as the population grows, so periodically staff go on strike as the school is underfunded. This is easily resolved (increase the funding!), but when it keeps happening over and over it can become somewhat tiresome. I also get a bit fed up with demolishing decaying buildings, and it seems that no matter how successful your city is and how much they love you as a mayor, there always seems to be one or two spots that for no fathomable reason keep decaying.

Due to these small irritations, I am giving Sim City 4 a total of four stars rather than five, though if dooyoo let me award half stars it would get four and a half!

It should, however, come with a health warning due to its highly addictive qualities!

* Final Thought *

In my usual very philosophical manner, the thought has occurred to me that maybe we are all just a bunch of Sims in one great big scary God game. I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing or not - any thoughts?

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