When it was released on January 14th 2003, SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.
Twenty years later - thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community - SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it's also the best citybuilder.
]]>Earlier this week the social medias went wild over pictures of Justin Bieber's giant plastic mansion-hole. People were saying it looked like the Marvel Avengers HQ. This is the most incorrect thing I have ever heard. It clearly looks like something you'd see made out of empty Müller Corners and Fairy Liquid bottles on three successive episodes of Blue Peter.
Look at it. That's the long lens shot of it everyone is rinsing, in the header there. You can just imagine painting that circular bit on the left in white acrylic paint, and your mum putting it on the shelf with all the spaghetti so it would dry, except you couldn't be that patient so you started painting it silver too soon and that bit ended up being streaky compared to the rest. Anyway, turns out I'm also wrong and that what it actually is, is a base building from a 90s PC game.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
By far the best SimCity has ever been.
]]>You: SimCity... Network... Not this again! What are EA up to n-- Wait. SimCity 4? Network Addon Mod?
Me: The latest SimCity might have been hamstrung by infrastructural problems, but there's no reason your love affair with Maxis' fair city-builder need end there. SimCity 4 has enormous cities. SimCity 4 had no internet requirement. SimCity 4 had... all the same traffic problems as the more recent release. But! It also had a vibrant modding community that's still working on fixing problems and making the game better today. This pre-release (i.e. alpha release) of version 32 of the Network Addon Mod is testament to that. NAM improves the game's pathfinding, fixes bugs in the base game, and adds "a myriad of new transport network items, ranging from ground light rail, to fractional-angle roads, to roundabouts, and much more"
Roundabouts!
]]>EA wants to say "sooorweeeee". For pretending the game had to be online for server computations, and then ignoring us when we pointed out this wasn't the case? No, not because of that! But for launching SimCity in the most extraordinarily inept fashion, with barely functioning servers, massive queues, frequent crashes, and the rest of the mess everyone in the whole world except EA and that one reviews editor predicted would happen. To make this up to everyone who's activated a copy of the game, and rather madly to people who buy one any time up to the 25th March, there is a free game available. And they're proper good ones, too. One of them is a rather fine city building game, called SimCity 4.
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