Sim City 4

[RabidYak]

Just got a copy of Sim City 4 from my local branch of Shaneftp and i'm not impressed at all.

With Maxis being owned by EA thesedays I was expecting some sort of mass-market cash-in to take advantage of the success of that criminally overated boredom simulator that the slobbering hordes have been buying by the shedload, which was exactly what I got. Its got very nice graphics and a couple of the new elements make sense, but it has a horrendusly annoying interface and the game mechanics seems to work totally different to the last 3 games. Now weve got a set of Sims-style happiness bars, restrictions on building based on your public popularity and various other factors, the same crappy impractial way of storing saved games and handeling neibours as Sims and new cash'n'construction dynamics.

My usuall tactic of slashing public funding and building loads of heavy industry to make sure the city breaks-even fairly quickly dosent look like it'll work here since overheads are massive due to almost all non-zone objects you build costing regular matience money (even trees and grass) and the zones seemingly requiring somesort o x-factor to make them fill up. Normally you could build big industrial and residential areas with a medium-sized commercial buffer between them and it would all fill up pretty quickly, i've done exactly the same here and its taking donkeys for the little gits to start moving in even though it all well covered with public services. Plus whenever you try to zone a decent sized area at once the poxy game automatically adds roads to the plan, usually in totally anoying and useless places that cause major obstructions to the design and praticality of your city.

Overall l think i'll stick with it for a bit to see if it improves, but i'll be going back to 2000 or 3000 next time I need a city-building fix. Still, its allot more fun then telling a little simulated man to go for a shit every 2 minuites.

On a totally unrelated note - If anyone hasent checked out Star Trek - Elite Force yet, make sure you dont pay for it when you do. I picked up the budget re-release yesterday and have finished it already, sod knows how much more pissed off I would of been if I had paid full price for it when it came out. I remember when FPS took 2 months to finish, not 2 fucking days.

[were]

ugh..simcity is choppy on the comp (see below on the specs

[ivwshane]

I haven't even played the game yet.

[Silverhaze]

I've always been shit at sim games. Especially sim city. Nobody wants to move in to my shitty city.

The sims is quite easy but you send one to work and dont have time to feed them. The other takes all day just to tidy up from the day before and when the first one comes home from work you barely have time to take a shit, clean and eat before its back to bed.

Sealing them in a room with no doors is quite funny though

[adidas]

On a totally unrelated note - If anyone hasent checked out Star Trek - Elite Force yet, make sure you dont pay for it when you do. I picked up the budget re-release yesterday and have finished it already, sod knows how much more pissed off I would of been if I had paid full price for it when it came out. I remember when FPS took 2 months to finish, not 2 fucking days.

Amen to that. Thank goodness I didn't pay for that piece of crap game.

And as for Simcity 4--It sounds like a bunch of BS. I think I'll stick with 3000.

[Silverhaze]

Will somebody tell me how to play sim city then cos I feel like a crap mayor amoung a group of outstanding pillars of society.

I would draw you a diagram of how I usually (unsuccessfully) set up my city but Damian hasnt got round to changing us to the new board yet and as such we dont have file uploads and I dont have any ftp software at work to upload to my webspace.

[RabidYak]

I can tell you how to play 2000 and 3000, but i'm still trying to work out how you are supposed to build a city in 4 without going broke in a hour and a half.

[Silverhaze]

trainer