GAME-A-WEEK - SIMCITY 4

In the wake of EA's huge debacle with the newest SimCity game, I thought it'd be a good idea to boot up the last official iteration (we're not counting SimCity Societies), which was 2003's SimCity 4.  For all of the complaints about the new game's always-on DRM, awful server issues, and small build areas, I thought it would be refreshing to go back and see where the series peaked.  In doing so, I learned one very valuable lesson:

I am fucking terrible at these games.  

What were my expectations going in?
Well to be honest, fairly high.  I know that SimCity 4 was considered the series' peak.  Enough that it took them ten years to make another one, that is.  I knew that it was incredibly comprehensive, and that you could at any point drive around your city and see it from ground level.  But I also knew that the game was supposed to be approachable for people of any skill level, from the novice to the hardcore city planner.

The humble beginnings of Cranksburg

So how was it?
It's really, really hard to do a fair, unbiased review of a game that you're absolutely terrible at. 

I'll give the game credit, it gives a fairly good tutorial.  I may have sucked at everything I did, but I knew how to suck at doing it.  The game gives you tutorial cities for everything from the basic planning up to traffic flow patterns and disaster control.   I think my problem is that I'm impatient; I want a giant sprawling city RIGHT NOW DAMMIT.  So I blew through my city's initial cash stores, and made more zones than I could ever possibly hope to accommodate.  And when a zone wouldn't grow as quickly as I hoped?  Well hell, let's zone some more!

There are a surprisingly wide variety of things to build in this game!  Tons of options for schools and utilities like police, fire, and medical, each with their own stats for range vs cost.  When connecting to other towns, do you want to build a monorail? An airport?  A subway?  A train?  What kind of train?  What about highways?   The sheer number of road types threw me for a loop at first.  Streets, roads, and avenues each have their own set place in the game, and you will get barked at if you pick the wrong ones.

Build your very own slums!

The game tries to help.  It will yell at you when you've got problems, with a system of news headlines and advisers.  The only issue I had there was that they would only tell you how to solve one problem, and not the repercussions.  Yes, I'm aware that people are pissed about the high taxes, but if I lower those taxes then I have to cut from their utilities.  What now, hotshot?   I spent the majority of the game combating massive financial hemorrhaging. I'm not gonna say I cheated, but.....yeah I cheated.
 
Thankfully SimCity 4 offers a way to boost your cash flow and/or your mayoral rating, in the form of vehicle missions.  These are a series of randomized missions that let you hop in a vehicle and take to the streets of your city, driving (or flying) from Point A to Point B.  Almost all of these missions have two options: do the honorable thing and boost your mayoral rating, but earn no income, or do the corrupt thing and lose mayoral points in exchange for an often sizable cash windfall. 

WHO LET ME HAVE A TANK!?

Graphically, the game is pretty damn good for being a 2003 game.  I mean, not that 2003 was some desolate wasteland of bad graphics or anything, but still...the game is very crisp, with some beautiful detail on all levels of zoom.  The building designs have an incredible amount of variation by region, income, and chosen motif.  Small details peppered throughout the world, like wild animals in unzoned areas, really give the game a great feel.

If there's one big complaint I have, it is the terrain generator.  It's not that it's necessarily hard to use; in fact, it's surprisingly easy to make things look exactly the way you want them to...in each individual city cell.  There is no way of terraforming the entire region as a whole, and then starting your cities from there.  The game offers a "reconcile" tool, that will make sure that the edges of each city cell match those of its neighbors, but it's just awful.   I tried to make one range of mountains that would sprawl across multiple cells, and instead wound up with this sort of slapdash collection of mountain fragments that looked like the role of God was played by Dr. Nick Riviera (say it with me now, "Hi, everybody!")

I shall scatter animals across the land with a Godly pepper shaker...

The good thing about this game is that, apart from a couple of resolution snafus (this game came out before widescreen monitors were a thing), it pretty much transcends the test of time.  The graphics are perfectly serviceable, the mechanics work as well as they need to, and the sound is...well, background noise.  The game never really feels that dated, so it's not like I'm engaging in any kind of gaming archaeology.  It's a good, solid game that is every bit as fun now as it was in 2003.  I'm just absolutely terrible at it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go continue running the crime-ridden town of Cranksburg (in the state of D'OHio, naturally) into the ground with yet another mayoral scandal that pays off nicely.


Play time:  6 hours
Finished:  N/A
Recommended:  As a superior alternative to the 2013 version of the game
Available For:  PC