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Copyright |
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©2005 Jason Cross
All Rights Reserved
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 Wednesday, January 15, 2003 |
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SimCity 4 was released yesterday. Being a player of SimCity since its original release (ah, all the square parcels of land...) and through the 2000 and 3000 incarnations, I have been awaiting SC4 for some time. Videos and images released last year looked very promising, but no release date beyond simply "2003" was set. Thus my surprise last week when I saw a sign advertising "Coming Tuesday January 14th!"
So after work yesterday I went to Best Buy and spent $50 on the game (who says I don't support worthwhile products?) as well as buying Undercover Brother and Blue Crush on DVD (and I get two free DVDs by mail for purchasing both - what a deal!). I got home, loaded the game on the PC (does EVERY game have to take a Gig of hard drive space these days?!) and went through the tutorials.
The detail in the game is amazing. Day and night cycles. Cars travel in 3D detail. Place a golf course and you see the holes, zoom in far enough and even see the people walking on the course. You can even place Sims in the game (either ones that are pre-made for the game or your own Sims from The Sims) and they'll move in to one of the houses in the residential zone, get a job at one of the locations in town and give you feedback.
What's also nice is the fine-tuning to some of the more annoying parts of the game mechanics of earlier games. Large zoned areas automatically place side streets, so you don't have to compartmentalize so much between streets and zones to make sure a street is close enough. Power and water grids create themselves over an area around their respective utilities so you only need to deal with power lines and water pipes to get from major area to major area. And you can even create multiple cities on a single map, purposing cities towards industrial, residential, etc, allowing for less of a balance to be required to make your particular city function.
So if you're in to Sim games, check it out. It's a great new version of an old classic. |
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