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20100718.144024
website is now in archive mode. visit blog.subnova.com for information.
20080730.144615
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20080114.231544
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SimCity 4 (PC)
For those of you that haven't yet encountered the SimCity series, its about building cities. There's no fighting, no adventuring, and definitely no crates. Well, not strictly true. There's an ever ending battle against your budget, every city is an adventure in itself and crates... no, no crates.
So what's the point? Well, if you've ever wanted to be a mayor, this could be the closest you'll get. And the aim is whatever you want it to be. If you want to play it for a long time then you'll need to cut a profit somewhere, but you can choose if you want to do this by making an industry-heavy slum or the next utopia. And in fact, with the new regioning system, you can do both!
So, now that we've got the premise sorted, lets get personal.
Bigger is Better
Unlike the previous 3 SimCity games, SimCity 4 allows you to make massive cities. Well, that's not quite true. The actual size of the largest city is slightly smaller than that of the largest available in SimCity 3000, however SC4 introduces the idea of regions. When you first start the game, you are greeted with an overview of a large map containing about 20 different locations for you to site your first city, all of varying sizes. There are two tutorial cities which I shan't go into too much detail over, but suffice to say they make up for the rather skimpy manual.
The Region view for San Francisco with two cities in progress
[click image for 1:1 scale]
You can load in new regions, including San Francisco, New York, London and of course MaxisLand. Some come with a couple of small cities already started, and the others are totally blank canvases, with just exciting terrain for you to play in. You can even create your own regions, terraforming the whole area at will. SC4 provides a nice "reconcile edges" button, which will make each map fit in to those around it.
Once you've started a city, you can connect up the various utilities and infrastructure to its neighbours, offering your services as a landfill, or providing power for the nation. These deals can be really productive for an ailing economy, and if you start to think big it has some seriously cool consequences.
Things like pollution don't seem to flow over into other cities, but if you have highway (or even just road) and rail connections between cities then residents in one can go to work in the other easily. This means that you can farm out all of your heavy, dirty industrial to a corner of the region, make another city which relies on agriculture and quite poissibly power and water generation, and you've instantly got really attractive neighbours that you can move into and start trying to set up the high quality buisnesses and homes.
When you leave a city and go back to the region view to start a different city, the one you have left is frozen in the state that you left it at. It won't gain or lose any money, and all the employment, power, etc. graphs will remain the same.
Laying Foundations
Obviously the most important part of the game is the interface for creating your city. There is a very simple control panel in the bottom left of the screen which shows a map and some simple controls. There are then three main buttons: God Mode, Mayor Mode and MySim Mode.
The God Mode button is most functional before you've actually set up a city in a location. This is where you can (for free) mould the terrain to your liking, using the buttons which appear in a bar going up the left hand side of the screen. There are loads of options here, including the planting of forests and the releasing of herds of wild animals. You can raise and lower terrain, create mesas and valeys, and even erode the terrain.
The first time you click on the Mayor Mode you are asked what you want to call this city and what your name is. Once you've started the city, the God Mode options are restricted to casting disasters and very expensive terrain modelling tools. In Mayor Mode itself, a toolbar appears up the left hand side of the screen, and a tabbed bar appears along the bottom.
A load of rather pretty industrial buildings
[click image for 1:1 scale]
The toolbar is a multi-level menu system which allows you to select what structures you want to build, what zones you want to place, and what infrastructure elements you want to lay. It all works quickly and cleanly, and most of the most used buttons also have keyboard shortcuts detailed in the manual.
The most used button will certainly be the zoning tool, which designates areas of land to different types of building: residental, commercial or industrial. Each of these three has three levels of density, with the (sort of) exception of industrial, where the lowest density is in fact agricultural land. Contrary to the other SimCities, SC4 will actually lay roads in zones for you, which is an immense relief. No longer do you have to count out squares perfectly to make sure everyone has road access, this is all done for you! The roads which are built are simple service roads, which work fine with zones of a similar type, but if you want your Sims to get to work quicker you need to upgrade some of the service roads to proper roads, which can handle more traffic.
Once you've zoned an area, you also need to plumb it in, which you can do by laying pipes underground and connecting them to a water pump or tower. You no longer have to connect in power over every road: zones and roads all carry power with them wherever they go, although you can stretch power-lines across the landscape to far-off areas if you need to.
Now's when it starts to get complicated, and I shan't go into ny more detail, but you basically have all the utilities and services that you can think of to somehow fit into your city, from fire stations to public libraries. If you build things too quickly, then you'll run out of cash to fund them (oh yes, everything apart from zoned land costs you a monthly fee from) and you'll quickly go broke. On the other hand, if you don't build and maintain these things, all hell is going to break loose in your city and noone is going to want to move in, meaning that you have no money. What a lovely vicious circle.
Suffice to say that a vast amount of your time will be spent looking at the tabbed bar at the bottom of the screen, which contains, on separate tabs, demographic information, data views which can be overlaid on the city, general opinions towards the city, your advisors, and the ever-present budget. You can also click on individual facilities and change their funding according to how well you want them to work: no point in generating 3000 units of power if you're only using 500...
It has to be said though, there is little more satisfying than wondering why an area is not developing as much as its neighbours, and then planting a school nearby and seeing all the low-grade buildings quickly go up-market.
I really should build a landfill, or set up a recycling center...
[click image for 1:1 scale]
Sim's Eye View
The final mode that you can operate in is the MySim mode. In this mode all the building tools disappear, and the bar at the bottom is replaced with a bar that allows you to place Sims (people that live in SimCities) in your city. Choose a mug shot for them, give them a humourous name and a star-sign (for some bizarre reason) and plant them in one of the houses in your city. You can then get detailed information on them, such as where they work, how rich they are, and what they think of various issues like education and health. It sounds a little lame, but you'd be surprised how useful it can be to know what's going on in an area. Even when you're not in the MySim mode, news items will flash by saying things such as "Bob Bobson says that he thinks the health service sucks". I have a feeling that these little tidbits are what really matter in your city, and by paying close attention to them I've got on rather well.
Eye Candy
Visually, SimCity 4 is very impressive. You're given the classic 3/4 isometric view, where you are above the terrain and looking down at an angle. While the game is in fact in proper 3D (all the buildings are actually 3D), you are still limited to viewing it from only 4 angles, which is a bit of a limitation but I imagine it would become very confusing indeed if you could view it at an arbitary angle.
There are an insane number of zoom levels as well. You can zoom all the way out so you can see the whole map, which is pretty pointless for everything but gloating over your empire, or go through about 5 levels of zoom all the way down to street level, where you can see individual people and cars making their way around your city.
At the highest level of zoom, the amount of detail in everything is fantastic. If a new construction site is set up you'll see the scaffolding go up, workmen come in and start hammering bits together, and the building slowly grow. If there's a fire then you'll see the Sims that were in the building running for their lives, until they are at a safe distance, at which point they'll wait for the fire truck to arrive and watch the firemen unload and put out the fire. Gorgeous.
You can also get some useful feedback. More than just being able to see the quality of the buildings (apartment blocks or mansions), you can actually see the state of repair of the buildings too, including garbage collecting outside on the roads and pollution damaging the brickwork.
A bustling fair in the middle of Max Land at night
[click image for 1:1 scale]
Not all Green and Pleasant
Obviously, SimCity 4 is not without faults. The overriding problem is performance. You can see the specs of my machine at the bottom of the page along with the minimum specification claimed by the box. You can see that my machine far outstrips the minimum requirements in most areas, however when I run it at 1280x1024 resolution (the second best available) and with detail turned up, it doesn't run perfectly at all.
The game will run fine for a while, but when I change zoom modes it takes a good few seconds (10 or so at times) to load in all the graphics for that zoom mode and display it, during which time everything freezes. This is particularly annoying when there's an emergency, because the game automatically pops up a dialog and zooms you right in to the emergency. Of course the fire isn't spreading while the game is hung up, but its really distracting. If you have the rather lovely feature that changes the city from day into night over time, this happens while that transition is happening as well, and while the lights are coming on.
In general its really not that bad, but it certainly loses a couple of points. I have to say that I think more RAM would probably fix this problem (I imagine 512Meg would handle it perfectly), but I could be wrong.
The other rather upsetting problem is that I seem to have hit a ceiling of development :) I have a bunch of mediocre buildings and commerce, some decent industrial, but nothing all that special. I really want it to become a bulging metropolis, but I have no idea where to procede from here! I guess that's the hard part of the game, and I have only been playing for 3 days solid so far...
Conclusion
SC4 is a fantastic game. I played SC3000 for about a day and got bored by its slowness and idiocity. SC4 takes all that was good from SimCity 2000, throws in a really impressive graphics engine and some excellent additions (you can now zone all but the steepest hills, they build houses on stilts!) and comes out victorious. I did spend quite some time agonizing over the performance issues but in reality they aren't that bad, and you get used to it and learn to predict when it will happen.
Another thing which I totally forgot to cover is the sound, which is beautiful. There are context sensitive sounds for where you are currently looking, which work in stereo very nicely, and an acceptable background score. I have a feeling that the music could be substituted for your own MP3s, but I haven't tried that yet. The music also helps to fill in those agonising gaps when the game freezes.
| Graphics | 9.0/10 | | Sound | 9.0/10 | | Story | N/A | | Playability | 9.0/10 | | Replay Value | 9.0/10 | | Fun Factor | 10/10 | | Overall | 9.2/10 |
Minimum Requirements: Windows 98 or greater, 500Mhz processor, 128Mb RAM, 1Gb free hard disk, CD-ROM drive, 16Mb graphics card, DirectX 7.0 compatible sound card.
Test System: Windows XP, 1.5Ghz Athlon XP, 256Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 Ti 4200
Please note all images in this article are Copyright © mailto:max@subnova.com|Max_Dyckhoff |
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