Product Description

Sim City 4: Deluxe Edition includes the bestselling Sim City 4 and the all-new Sim City 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack. Create the most massive region of cities ever, with a farming town, bedroom community, high-tech commercial center, and industrial backbone. Take complete control of your city's transportation system and solve U-Drive-It missions from fighting crime to tackling disasters.

• Sculpt mountains, gouge valleys, seed forests, and bring forth animals to create a world all your own.
• Summon volcanoes, release tornados, and call down meteors and lightning.
• Build a world class city with stadiums, airports, universities, and real-world landmarks.
• Deploy emergency vehicles and join in the action as they battle blazes, mobs, and more.
• Place your Sims in your city to get the inside scoop on what's going on around town.
• Connect a massive region of SimCities, each sharing and competing for resources.
• Sim City 4: Rush Hour:
• New U-Drive-It Missions:
• Race through canals and waterways
• Conduct your Sims on a railway excursion
• Chase down criminals before they leave town
• Take out undesirable businesses with force
• Wow your Sims with skywriting
• New Transportation options:
• Build elevated rails
• Create a ferry system
• Connect far-reaching areas with a monorail network
• Add wide avenues to your metropolis

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1615 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Aspyr
• Released on: 2005-11-25
• Platform: Mac OS X

Manufacturer's Description
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition includes the bestselling SimCity 4 and the all-new SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack. Create the most massive region of cities ever, with a farming town, bedroom community, high-tech commercial center, and industrial backbone. Take complete control of your city's transportation system and solve U-Drive-It missions from fighting crime to tackling disasters.

Customer Reviews

Play God - what more can you want out of a game
I prefer the strategy-builder games like SimCity and Civilisation, and so I get a lot of fun from this version. You basically get to be God (in fact the mayor) and you start building your ideal community. Naturally it takes a bit of skill to find a viable combination of key elements (e.g. housing, industry and commerce) otherwise your community just goes bankrupt and dies away. I tend to enjoy just playing the early periods, and the next time I just start all over again. I love trying out different approaches to positioning housing and commerce together and putting industry in isolated areas, but I think the key is to optimise planning (and in particular commuting time) for the period in which you find yourself, and not to be afraid to change quite radically your planning as things develop. It is really addictive in the early phase as you see your community start to get going. My impression is that if you get the mix right your community grows naturally and all you need to do is keep taxes in check and deliver on any major demand by the populous. I play it on a G4 with 1GB of RAM and it works perfectly, although it might take a second to write the video when you move around too quickly (I use the highest resolution). So I get just as much fun from this version as I did on my old PC. Lets face it if you don't give 5-stars to SimCity what would you give them too. It's a masterpiece and should be on everyone's computer.

Superb port of the PC classic
There's no point reviewing Sim City 4 Deluxe itself, as that has been plenty covered in the PC version of the review - Aspyr have changed nothing in the gameplay after all. Suffice to say, it's addictive as ever, if a little hard to get to grips with the details.

So the port to Macintosh?
Very ably done by Aspyr, which often comes as a suprise. Normally game performance noticeably degrades from the PC version (see Doom 3) when moving to Macintosh, but Sim City 4 seems to have stood up to the task. It behaves better than my old PC copy, which was plagued with instability issues and frequent performance hangups.

Having played with large cities with populations well over 200,000 and covering the whole region square, no slowdown was apparent on my machine - something a P4 2.5Ghz struggled to handle despite being well over the minimum specifications.

The only slight let down is that on dual displays one of the monitors will go blank - no windowed play as seen in World of Warcraft by Blizzard, which would allow multi-tasking whilst engaging in the game.

All in all, a sterling port. Well worth adding to the collection for sleepless nights of city management.

Tested on PowerMac G5 2.5Ghz dual, 2Gb RAM, Radeon 9800XT 256Mb, 750Gb HDD space, Apple 23" and 20" Cinema Displays. Graphics set to maximum, highest resolution.

It's not about fun, it's an obsession
This game is rewarding to get obsessed by. There's always something to strive for and always some nasty neighbourhood that needs more parks or whatever. It's worth checking the professional reviews and comparing them to those of the more recent SimCity game(s) in case they're more your thing. But for a die-hard meglomaniac, this one is the business.
Pro-tip: check out the traffic usage of your underground metro lines! That's something the original SC4 didn't do, that comes with the Rush Hour extension.