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.