Product Details
 | SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition |
| List Price: | $19.99 |
| Price: | $10.49 |
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from and sold by BudgetGames
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Product Description
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition turns you into a citizen, a criminal, an architect, a mayor, even a god -- bringing you deeper into SimLife than ever! As you create railways, ferries, plan out streets, you also get to use that transportation in a series of great new driving missionsProduct Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #917 in Video Games
- Brand: Electronic Arts
- Released on: 2003-09-22
- ESRB Rating: Everyone
- Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.00" h x 10.25" w x 7.75" l, .65 pounds
Features
- Create, build and run the most realistic city you can imagine
- Connect your metropolis with other cities you've created to form a massive region of SimCities
- Sculpt mountains, gouge valleys, and seed forests
- Deploy police cruisers and fire trucks to the scene
- For 1 player
Editorial Reviews
From the Manufacturer
Get
SimCity 4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack in one
convenient package. Create, grow, and breathe life into your ideal urban
environment. Fight disasters both realistic and fantastic. Govern your
own virtual metropolis as you see fit with SimCity 4 Deluxe.
Customer Reviews
An Escape from Reality -- Or is it?
You don't have to be a gamer
to appreciate SimCity 4. If you have the hand-eye coordination to browse
a website, you're covered there. You don't need a great sense of
spatial relations with the various levels of zoom. You don't need to be
able to make split-second decisions with the possible exception of
quickly hitting the pause button. You don't need many of the traditional
computer gamer skills to enjoy SimCity 4.
What you do need is the
ability to make risk-benefit decisions, and a sense of how the real
world works. You need to know, for example, that people with a few bucks
in their pockets don't choose to live next to a factory, and you need
to understand whether it's better to spend money to build a fire station
now, or risk having to rebuild if you wait.
One thing that
SimCity 4 does real well is it's simulation of how a government budget
works. If, for example, you build an infrastructure that appropriately
supports your city, you'll find that funding everything at 100% would
require raising taxes beyond what the residents and business owners will
stand for. Pretty soon you'll see abandoned residential, commercial and
industrial properties. That means your tax base goes down, and you'll
have to raise taxes even further.
If you take the alternative and
cut the funding to your infrastructure so you can lower taxes, you'll be
faced with teachers, fire fighters, police, transit and healthcare
worker strikes, and satisfying them enough to bring them back to work
will cost you more than appropriate funding would have.
Just when
you think you've found that balance between funding your infrastructure
and your tax rate, the power plant and roads you originally built start
reaching the end of their lives, and you need to replace them. (You were
building up a surplus you can tap into, weren't you?)
While your
budgetary problems may consume you, there are other factors to consider.
A big one is transportation. Sims don't like rush hour traffic any more
than you do - and probably less. If you let commutes get too bad, the
Sims will stop going to work. You'll either need bigger roads, more
efficient mass transit, or you'll need to move the factories and
residential areas closer. But wait... Didn't we already establish that
people don't like to live next to factories? Again you have to struggle
to find a balance - and that balance needs to fit within your budgetary
constraints, too!
SimCity 4 Deluxe includes the Rush Hour
Expansion Pack. In addition to more transportation options, Rush Hour
(and thus Deluxe) adds a "you drive it" feature that allows you to
control cars, planes, helicopters, and other transports. If you're
really getting into the planning and strategy of the game, these options
are a distraction. But if you're showing your city to someone less
interested in city planning, a you drive it mission may be a fun way to
tour the city.
Something I would love to see in real life is
instead of having candidates for public office debate each other, set
them down in front of computers, and have them prove their ability to
successfully build a working city in SimCity 4. The only governing skill
SimCity 4 doesn't simulate well is the ability to work with others. I
think we should be very worried about any big city mayor who isn't able
to demonstrate their abilities by being successful in SimCity 4.
4.5 Stars---The Best SimCity Yet!
With SIMCITY 4 DELUXE
EDITION, which conveniently contains both the regular SIMCITY 4 plus the
RUSH HOUR EXPANSION PACK, EA Games is really beginning to live up to
their tagline "Challenge Everything." Apparently, the game designers
decided to challenge everything that seemed to be holding the game back
in the past, and have taken a brave step forward in designing this new
edition with those of us in mind who want to be able to create a
SimWorld. In other words, you now have an entire continent on which to
build cities; instead of having fake adjacent cities that you're forced
to do business with, you now can make your own adjacent cities yourself!
You can choose from any of a hundred or so "squares" on which you can
build one city after another and have them all trade with each other and
everything! You can connect them with superhighways, rail, roads,
power, water; it's great!
Another major improvement is in the
increased flexibility in building up each of your cities. Remember how,
in previous SimCity versions, it's such a pain to figure out where to
place your streets within your zones? Not anymore; each time you lay out
a zone, whether it be Residential, Commercial or Industrial, the game
will automatically lay down a grid of streets for you! That saves A LOT
of time right there. Also, remember how you had to blow up your streets
in order to replace them with bigger streets? Now, it's a lot easier,
because first of all, the road system is much better organized. For
example, when you start building a town, you start by using the simple,
narrow streets (which are now specifically labeled as being "streets").
However, as people move in and your streets begin to get crowded with
traffic, you can then upgrade to wider roads. Eventually, as traffic
begins to overwhelm your roads, you may upgrade to wide avenues. All you
need to do to "upgrade" is to simply drag a road along a street, or an
avenue along a road and---boom!---it automatically changes to a road or
avenue. No more having to demolish anything in the process!
The
Rush Hour Expansion Pack just adds a new dimension to the game: now you
can go out on selected "missions" by car, boat---even helicopter---and
earn new buildings, more money, etc. for your city. Admittedly, I'm
still trying to get the hang of these missions, as they aren't too easy,
but it's still a cool feature for the game. Also, the buildings and
airports are in much better detail now, and there is far greater variety
of them. There are also many new landmarks to choose from; they are in
much greater detail and there is no longer any limit how many you may
place. (However, you now have to pay to place them.) There are many new
rewards for being a good Mayor, too!
My hope is that with SIMCITY
5, they will make everything more 3-D and will finally provide us with
the ability for a ground-level Pedestrian View; imagine being able to
walk the streets and boulevards of your own cities, drive around, even
take your own trains! I think the possibilities are endless. Till then,
this will have to do. But, for what it's worth, it's still a pretty darn
good game!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR SIM FANS
Great game at any time
Simcity 4 could probably be
one of the best of its kind ever. The game is very realistic and
involves most of the daily problems a city mayor has to deal with. It is
even very difficult to keep the budget balanced. But here is a tip for
this: when you start a new city, always create industrial zones and some
commercial that will start to generate new business that would add an
income to the city and they do not need any or but a few public
services. One you have a big budget surplus you start creating
residential zones and leaving space for public buildings. Never create
small hospitals, fire and police stations, because in the long term
you'll need about 3 times de number of big buildings to keep your
citizents happy.
The only bad thing the game has is the fact that it
needs a super pc to run always at a normal speed. I have a Pentium 4
2.80 ghz and 512 RAM with and excellent Video Card and when you use the
zoom in your city it sometimes goes a bit slow. So I would suggest that
if your planning to get this video game you better have a superb pc or
you'll find it frustating to see that the game runs slow.
I don't
know if this game can get any better but I sure hope so. Buy it, you'll
end up playing it for hours.
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