Customer Reviews

Sim City 4 Deluxe (Mac)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

UPDATE (2/26/09): ASPYR HAS STILL NOT RELEASED AN UPDATE FOR THIS GAME. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF YOU ARE RUNNING 10.4 OR 10.5. THE GAME IS SLOW AND/OR CRASHES CONSTANTLY. ASPYR, FIX THIS GAME!

This is an awesome game, but it STILL does not work on the newest operating system (OSX 10.5); it is slow and it crashes. IF you have an older mac system, this game is great. If you have a newer system, do not waste your money until they release an update for Leopard.

When so many games these days focus on death and destruction, it's nice to have a constructive alternative that is still truly addictive. Filling that niche, as ever, is the prominent Maxis series SimCity.

The latest offering, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, contains all the robust play offered by a completely new version of the city-building legend as well as a plethora of additional content, tools, and mini-games previously sold separately in the Rush Hour add-on pack.

Like it's predecessors, SimCity 4 is a deep and visually rich simulation. As Mayor the player gets to turn blank plots of land into complex thriving communities with the added challenge of linking them together to form a productive inter-dependent region. With that much realestate to manage, it should hold the interest of creative problem-solvers.

It's a complicated game, but not overly so, and the hierarchic interface is intuitive, which helps a lot since it takes a few hours to get a good grip on the basics of making a successful city (I highly recommend completing all the tutorials before striking out on your own). Once you can figure out how to grow while keeping a positive cash flow, the game becomes immensely rewarding.

Aside from obviously improved graphics resolution and building variety, the biggest change is that every change in the city is calculated around individual sim-citizens rather than grand formulas. Your job, more than anything else, is to keep your sims happy. If you can do that - provide them with jobs, shorten their commutes, educate them, care for their health, and keep them safe - you have what it takes to be a Mayoral Mogul!

That new perspective also means you can get much more involved with the denizens of your metropolis. You can get down to the street-level and ask them what's on their mind or even give them a hand through mini-games.

Driving many vehicles (fire trucks, speed boats, and crop-dusters to name a few) you can navigate the city you've made. While the simplistic pilotage can be clunky, change of perspective is both fun and helpful. It also splashes a little variety on a game that can get slow once in a while. Besides, what soldier can resist taking a joy ride in a tank or skimming the rooftops in an attack helicopter?

What really keeps you playing this game though is layer upon layer of replay possibilities. Since there are no criteria for winning you can set your own goals and measures of success and you can use any number of approaches pursue your ambitions.

You can play one city aiming for a large population and another for the greatest income possible. You can play the good guy or the ruthless dictator and create everything from slum-ridden industrial towns to tiny farming communities to towering pinnacles of civilization!

And of course you can blow it all up and start over...

There's no multiplayer in SimCity, but an active online user-base provides both a community aspect to the game and a wealth of new land marks, buildings, and utilities you can download to keep your virtual communities fresh.

If you own The Sims the people you've created can even interact with your SimCities. What's more, there's a little Mac-only integration in the game. Unlike Windows, you can override the default soundtrack with any playlist in your iTunes library.

While that's a nice touch, the manual refers to Windows keyboards and there are known graphical problems (especially when "drawing" roads or zones) that are unlikely to be addressed (turning on the Z buffer in the options helps). They aren't fatal, but I found my building techniques developed around minimizing the effects those glitches rather than productive gameplay.

Even with drawbacks like performance and price (when compared to the Windows version), it's a quality title and a handy long-term time-waster for creative, micro-managing, or ambitious future base commanders!

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is a great gift and worth owning if you remember SimCity 2000 on the Mac or are looking for a constructive game that exercises your creativity. Of course the inclusion of military facilities like Army and Air Force bases and ICBM silos earns it some kudos too!

This is my first Sim game, and I love it. There are three modes to play in: in God Mode, you terraform the region, adding cliffs or valleys, flattening shores, planting forests, etc; in Mayor mode, you will zone areas, add utilities and services, and receive input from dozens of informative graphs, data and advisors; in MySim mode you can create individuals and then name them, give them a place to live and a car to drive, etc.

You can run your simulation in three speeds, and there are hundreds of items and options for you to use -- bridges, stadia, landmarks, parks, schools, monorails, industry, agriculture, museums and many more.

There are also several tutorials that show you how to get started, make money, develop a big city, or use the included Rush Hour expansion pack, which lets you get in the driver's seat of buses, garbage trucks, traffic helicopters, ferry boats, --any vehicle that is operating in your city! Just be careful -- it is EASY to spend hours and hours building your city with as much complexity as you care for. Excellent game, implemented very well.

I have had no problems at all with installation or performance running the game on an iMac G4.

I loved this game; completely engrossing... That is until my Tiger system was updated to 10.4. It hasn't worked since. It is now so slow as to be unplayable. It takes ages for even a small stretch of a 2 lane road to render. I've written both Apple and Aspyr about the problem but it was never resolved. Aspyr said something to the effect that "Oh well, this has been a problem with OS10.4s." I hold on to it in hopes that someday someone will fix the bug. If your OS is 10.4 or above, don't buy it!

SimCity has been a staple around the Mac gaming scene for years, but it looks like there is no playable SC for Modern Macs.

This game will not function properly on Intel Macs, its not stable under Leopard/Snow Leopard. The last update to the application was in 2007. So you are not getting anything new.

There are a lot of reviews claiming that this works fine on PowerPC, but Apple has not sold any PPC Macs in four years. PowerPC technology has been phased out by Apple and all legacy software along with it.

It's such a shame that this game has been neglected to this point. Aspyr needs to pull this product from sale, its dishonest to sell a product with zero support.

If you want to play the game and are using any Intel Mac you can always purchase SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition for Windows and run it under Parallels Desktop 5.0 for Mac, VMware Fusion 3, CrossOver Games - Mac, or Boot Camp using your Windows version of choice.

Best of Luck in building your Cities, and I do hope we get a stable, fast native SimCity on the Mac again.

It's too bad this game does not run on an Intel Mac.
I used to enjoy it on my G4 but when I upgraded to a new Mac Pro and installed the game it repeatedly crashed. Support from the company Aspyr says unfortunately it does not run on Intel Mac.

I absolutely love this game, and sure the main idea is set on a specific principle, regarding that this is a computer game, yet you don't kill anyone here and you don't go to different levels, and I love my crazy games, yet this one gives ms me the satisfaction of making something while I play rather than destroying it.

Right of the bat, I must say I love the music, at times I leave the city running and growing on the slow speed, just so that I can listen to the jazzy cool tunes. I have been a fan of anything that has to do with the Sims since I was in 7th grade when I discovered Sim City 2000 on a computer in my computer class, yes in 7th grade. I'm almost 25 now and I am still crazy about the Maxis ideology behind the city games, as this grew and evolved into a marvelous game. I seriously don't know how they can improve this, because the graphics are phenomenal, you get to sculpt your land, and you can seriously choose from a whole globe of land to play on. You can plant your trees and wild animals, and then the zones, buildings, the natural disasters, the people who need you, your taxes, community programs, ordinances, and really fun decisions on where to plop your park, and this time you can choose from a huge variety of building and entertainment centers for your Sims.

I this game takes a bit to get used to and figure out how to play wile actually making money instead of spending them, and they sure give you enough at the beginning, and while you can Google for cheat codes, it's really fun to roll up my sleeves and really get my brain pumping while I manage my city. I love how many things I can be in charge of, the style of the buildings, where I want a farm with fruitful trees and orchards, what neighborhood I want the bus to stop in, what schools and museums I want resting in the shade provided by so many kinds of tress I can choose from, and so on.
I love this as it's a game you can play forever, I wonder how old I can grow my city to be and how I can sculpt it to perfection. Really fun game with gorgeous graphics, and the zoom button is amazing, you can get down to the street levels you build yourself and observe, just like watching ants on the ant hill, but 10000 times more fun!

Computing power makes little difference with this game; performance is poor! Some processes in the game are very slow, such as trying to select subway stations, subway tubes, and water mains. There is also an issue with city boundaries becoming misaligned with neighboring cities, of their own accord, it seems. If you choose to correct this, be prepared to loose any development(s) along those boundaries.

If you choose to accept any of the driving missions or helicopter missions, be prepared to lose mayor approval points because the performance while trying to control either of them is ABYSMAL and Infuriating! The hospital helicopter mission is the only mission I will even bother to try because it requires the least amount of precision. The police copter mission cheated me on 2 of my 3 attempts when the criminal I was supposed to spotlight left the city limits in under 10 seconds after the mission began.

Another issue I encountered involves the planting of trees to try to improve my environmental rating; trees will not necessarily survive between gaming sessions. That is a nice way to waste time and money in the game. Also, some options do not save.

Aspyr does not seem to offer any support or patches. There is no "booklet" with the Mac version. This purchase has left me feeling as if I wasted a lot of hard earned money! If it worked correctly, the game would be fun instead of an exercise in frustration.

I was ripped off when I purchased this game. IT WILL NOT WORK properly on a standard iMac Pro OS X platform. I contacted customer service at Aspyr and they said, "The game was designed for the Power PC processor and doesn't get along with the Intel processor very well. It's an older title. Sorry."

Save your money. Do not buy this game!

This game was a blast at first, and being a big fan of the previous Sim City games I was really impressed with the content. And then my city grew and the game got slower. And slower. By the time I hit 150,000 citizens I had to turn down all of the graphics to the bare minimum just to get the game to do anything. And then I had to turn the sound off because it was irritating to hear the helicopters over the city batting away endlessly (I think it's an unfixed glitch.) And as I neared 200,000 citizens I gave up. The game had bogged down to a freeze-frame that changes every ten seconds. Yay!
Now I'm on a brand new iMac (intel-based) and didn't think it'd have trouble like this, but something must have gone wrong in the crossover from PC to Mac to Intel-Mac, because this game is pretty much worthless to me at this point. And that makes me sad, because it was fun for a few hours. Even after searching and digging for patches (which are not easy to find and the game's website/help is not set up well either) it still stinks.

I'll give it two stars for potential, but if you're on a new iMac don't bother with this one.