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| By Brad Cook Ted McGinty thought he was living the high life. Plucked from a ramshackle house he shared with two roommates, he was sent to live in a lovely two-story Victorian with a view of the water. He scored a nice job as a mid-level manager at a local hospital and was on his way to a masters degree at the local college. |
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 Fireworks. Celebrate your city on each anniversary of its founding. |
“What happened to my home?” he cried. “Who did this to me?”
You did. You were bored with that city, and its crushing budget deficit didn’t help matters.
It Came From Outer Space. Unleash an extra-terrestrial robot on your city and your Sims will flee the carnage.
Build It Up, Tear It Down
McGinty’s fate may seem cruel, but don’t worry. In Aspyr Media’s SimCity 4, you can rebuild what you tear down. And McGinty — as well as all your Sims — will be available once again for you to import from Aspyr’s other hit simulator, The Sims. (SimCity 4 comes with several little people if you don’t own The Sims already.)
SimCity 4 is the latest entry in a series that began in 1989 with the publication of Will Wright’s groundbreaking game SimCity. The fourth edition allows you to build multiple cities that you can link with railroads, highways and airports; shape the terrain to your liking before you create your urban art; manage every detail of the city budget, right down to the level of funding that individual schools, fire stations, and so forth receive; and dictate your pace of growth by zoning the residential, commercial and industrial areas for low, medium or high density.
And when you decide to zap a city because it has incurred your wrath, you can call in disasters that range from tornadoes and earthquakes to meteor showers and giant killer robots from space.
Evolution of a Sim
“We’ve always thought of SimCity as an evolving experience,” says producer Sean Decker, of developer Maxis. “The team is constantly generating great ideas for the game.”
Genesis. Zoom out to get a god’s eye view of your growing city.
Decker notes that the foundation of the gameplay “is a combination of what happens in real life and what makes for a fun game. Joseph Knight, one of our designers, has a graduate degree in Urban Planning and represents the ‘real’ side of urban life. Michael McCormick is the designer who represents the fun and wacky side of SimCity 4.”
In the “real” side of the game, you have access to a variety of tools that provide crucial data about your city, such as crime rates by neighborhood or the percentage of residents who have access to adequate health care. A group of advisors lets you know when you’re skimping on a crucial area or when they think you should install certain services or buildings.
The fun and wacky side of the game covers not only disasters pulled from cheesy sci-fi movies but also little details that will make you smile. Click on the mayor’s mansion, for example, and you’ll hear a cork pop out of a champagne bottle as people cheer. A pop-up window shows you how many uninvited guests are currently hanging out.
Between that and the comments your advisors make, it seems that the city residents view you as if you’re the mayor from The Simpsons. It’s up to you to prove them wrong.
Genesis, SimCity Style
SimCity 4 also incorporates world-building tools that allow you to do a bit of terraforming before you establish your cities. You can make mountains rise out of the ground and place valleys between their towering peaks.
If you liked this game, check out:
Black & White The Sims Tropico
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 Sim City 4 Deluxe (Sim City 4 and Rush Hour Expansion Pack) available for online ordering 24 hours a day, every day. |
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Or create plateaus that allow your Sims to live well above sea level. You can even scatter random trees and animals around the map. And look closely at the water, where you’ll see whales and other sea creatures come to life.
Now Departing… Build airports and let your Sims stretch their wings.
“My favorite cities are located on top of a series of mesas with bridges connecting them,” says Decker. “It’s quite the sight.”
He also encourages players to click the zoom button a few times and watch your Sims up close once you finish terraforming and establish your city. “The details the player can now see make the game come alive,” he marvels. “You can see individual Sims going about their daily lives: Sims sitting at a café, Sim children playing at the school playground, Sim parents watching their kids play soccer, and even Sims getting mugged in the seedy parts of town.”
You can check up on the Sims who you import and read comments from them about their lives. They’ll tell you where they’re working, how they feel about the city’s services, and impart other feedback that you should heed. They give a “Sim on the street” perspective that your advisors usually don’t offer.
Specialized Cities
As in most simulations, you don’t win while playing SimCity 4. You simply nurture your cities and watch them grow over time; once you have a solid foundation in place, you can speed up the time and let the years pass quickly as your Sims construct all sorts of buildings. A variety of data tools allow you to chart your city’s progress, and you can take plenty of screenshots that provide a pictorial history of its evolution from sleepy hamlet to major metropolis with highways connecting it to other cities.
Cruisin’. Zoom in and watch the people and cars traverse your city sidewalks and streets.
Of course, the ability to create multiple cities means that you can leave that sleepy hamlet alone and never let it grow. “Sims can now work in one city and live in another,” Decker points out. “This allows players to build specialized cities such as bedroom communities, resort towns, financial centers, and industrial cities.”
So keep that in mind when you import Ted McGinty and put him in one of houses on the nice side of town. Before you conjure up a volcano that will destroy his home with a plume of white-hot lava, move him and his friends to a better city, one where you didn’t screw up the tax rate. They will thank you for it.
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