SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition - EA Value (PC CD)

The product was in very good conditions containing everything and it was delivered within a couple of days. The reason why I'm not giving 5 stars is because I believe it could be cheaper.

Works as described

Please note: This is a review of the original game and not this 'classics' version. I do not know if this game works on newer PCs, I have a Vista PC that I still use to play this...SimCity 4 deluxe is the best city game I’ve ever played. I had my copy work on my windows 98 machine and it also installs well on my vista pc. The code problem that people are having hasn’t affected me at all, perhaps as I don’t go online at all with that pc so there is no expiry as far as my pc is concerned. The game comes on two discs but as it’s the deluxe version you will get the original SimCity 4 plus the Rush Hour expansion pack already installed together.The game starts with a tutorial area. You actually don’t need to read any manual if you don’t want to as the tutorials do a good job of explaining the basic concepts to you. Unlike with SimCity 300 which I also own you have a large area of a map. Within this area there are lots of rectangle boxes of various sizes where you can build cities. Whenever you start playing the game will place you in that area first but you can select different maps from the options menu.Once you plan to build a city the first thing you get is the blank plot of green land (or water if you picked to start a city map with water). There are tools to use to transform the terrain in any way that you like. You can add mountains, hills, canyons, rivers, by raising and lowering the terrain using the tools (tip- hold the shift button to expand the cursor or ctrl to shrink it, plus selecting a number from 1-9 will change the size of the cursor). You can then select to erode the terrain or put volcanoes, etc. There’s a lot you can do and you can also set off disasters such as tornadoes and earthquakes during this mode without it affecting your city – it’s also a great chance to see all the disasters and decide which you’d want when you’ve built your city. You can also then add animals. I love this feature as later in the game if you zoom in on an area of unzoned land you can see the horses, llamas, etc walking about. The music in the terrain mode is different too, very primal, and a tip for everyone, pause the game while playing with terrain, otherwise the time just slips away and you’ll start your city way into the future. I just personally don’t like the time slipping away like that.Once you’re happy with your terrain you move to mayor mode. This is where the classic SimCity game comes into effect. You have to build up residential, commercial and industrial zones and keep up with demand while collecting taxes to help fund an ever expanding city. The games advisors are updated. They look like sims 1 sims but moving (at the time this was very impressive as it was pre-sims 2 release!).In previous sims 3000 you had to build all the roads yourself and then zone just green, blue or yellow areas of land, but SimCity 4 you now can drag and place large areas of say residential land and streets will automatically be built. While I like this feature I don’t usually like the bottleneck traffic zones it creates, so although it takes time I tend to build all my roads and then drag a few houses at a time until I’ve build the city plan I like.Just like in the previous sim city the key to this game is to earn enough money and not go bankrupt. The only way to do that I’ve found is to build a big enough city and accept lots of free buildings that earn you money like the prison. However things like the casino, which also earn money, used to only be available if you built a large enough city, but here comes the best part of SimCity 4 deluxe:The Rush Hour Expansion pack! This is included with the game and you can immediately take on ‘u-drive it’ missions. This involves putting down the mouse and using the arrow buttons on the keyboard to control a vehicle in your city. This can be anything from random sim cars, to limos, hearses, ice cream trucks, police cars, to helicopters, planes, trains and even a ufo!I’ve found this part of SimCity 4 the best part, and the reason I keep coming back to this game again and again. Apart from the fun of just driving around your city you also have the fun of earning either simoleons or other things by taking on special missions. You can always drive a vehicle at any time but certain missions can earn you buildings that you couldn’t get without having a set amount of residents or green industry, for example you need a lot of high tech industry before you can get a solar power plant in your city, but if you get a monorail and complete a mission you can get a free one!THE BAD:I’ve said all the good and now here is one very bad thing about this game…It WILL crash! At a certain point on the game it will crash. This seems to be linked with the number of total residents (residential, commercial and industrial combined). I’m not sure of the exact figure but every time I build a very populated city, with lots of dense areas the game will then crash, and once you reach this threshold number that city becomes unplayable forever. It will crash again and again, dumping you back to the desktop as soon as your city grows to that number. This crash of course means that you can never build a city beyond a certain size, so the larger your land the more low residential it has to be. It’s a shame as I really never get to see lots of large high rise buildings as I’m always aware that if I build too many it will crash. This crash however seems to be the only major bug in this game and I haven’t encountered any others.There’s one feature I liked with SimCity 300 that’s lost in this game – random disasters. With 3000 you could play a game where a disaster would just happen and you had to deal with the consequences, like in tropico. But with SimCity 4 you never get this feature. You can place a disaster where you like in the city, anything from the obvious tornadoes to less obvious robot attacks, etc. But for me I just don’t like picking an area, I’m not that type of player who likes destroying all my hard work, I’d have preferred the game to do it for me.SO:So, to conclude: This game is really great, very playable and lots of features I just haven’t gone into. The game is older so there is no typical 3D view as you see today. Instead you can see a top-down diagonal view that you can spin four times to view from north, south, east and west. Just like the classic sis 1 and other games that came out at that time. You can really zoom in close to the streets though and click on individual sims, and see them driving and wondering around. The sound effects and music are great too.I’d recommend this game to anyone of any age. The game is fun, it’s a strategy game but with the rush hour expansion I think it’s the best version of SimCity to try if you’ve never played a SimCity game before. But beware of building cities that are too large.