SimCity 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack

by Electronic Arts

Product Features

• Expansion to Sims 4 allows god-like control over city infrastructure
• Players take complete individual control of roads, rail, air, waterways, and even vehicles
• Choose from modern European or three historical architectural eras
• Introduce new disasters into your city
• For 1 player

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00009V3NQ
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches ; 8.8 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: September 22, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,836 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Your city is on the move with the new SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack. Get your Sims on the road to happiness by taking control of your city's transportation including roads, rail, air, waterways, and even cars. Take complete charge of vehicles on the streets of your city. Is the fire department stuck in traffic on its way to a four-alarm fire? Take direct control of the "hook and ladder" and pursue the quickest route to the blazing inferno. Solve missions from chasing down bank robbers to catching car-jackers, and earn reward buildings and other vehicles.

As you gain traction by fixing transportation problems and solving missions your mayor approval rating will soar and Sims will flock to your city. Put your Sims on the move in new cars, ferries, and helicopters. Choose from all-new road types including wide avenues, suspension bridges, or one-way streets. Whisk your Sims across the city by developing seamless mass-transit systems that connect to a greater regional travel network. Add popular structures such as historic rail stations or classic Americana road marks. Go global and create a city based on a modern European building set. Make your final mark as mayor and personalize your cities by labeling street names, mountains, neighborhoods, and points of interest.

Key Features Include:

U-Drive It!: Take hands on control over cars, helicopters, planes, and boats to fight crime or respond to disasters. Turn up the siren on the police car and chase down the car-jackers. Or control the helicopter spotlight to track down the bank robbers. As you take charge and solve missions, you'll earn new rewards buildings and vehicles, your approval rating will skyrocket in the polls and your Sim population grow.

Exciting New Transportation Options: Put things in motion by creating the one-way streets of San Francisco, wide avenues of New York, a ferry system of Seattle, the elevated train networks of Chicago, or high speed monorails of Tokyo. Select from a variety of bridge types including the classic suspension bridge.

100+ New Structures: Add dozens of new structures including rail yards, lighthouses, and ferry buildings. Give your Sim citizen top-notch entertainment by adding a space shuttle launch center or TV news station with a helipad for the news copter.

Maps and Tools: Track the pulsing traffic flows throughout the day, plan out efficient routes for Sims to get to work, or map out how your Sims whisk from one city to another as part of regional transportation network.

Make Your Mark: Create signposts in key areas of your city to designate neighborhoods, districts, and points of interest. Place labels on streets, roads, mountains, and bodies of water to personalize your city.

New Building Set Options: Lay out your city based on an all-new Modern European building set, or choose from three other historical architectural eras, including Chicago 1890's, New York 1940's, or Houston 1990's.

New Disasters: Looking for the big disaster? Start the UFO invasion and watch as Sims are abducted, and buildings are destroyed. Attempt to take control of your own UFO and create a little havoc yourself. See massive wrecks at railroad crossings? Sit back and watch chaos rule, or place a wide avenue to avert future disasters.

SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack requires SimCity 4 to play.

Product Description

This software is BRAND NEW. Packaging may differ slightly from the stock photo above. Please click on our logo above to see over 15,000 titles in stock.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful and much needed expansion of Sim City 4, September 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: SimCity 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack (CD-ROM)

I love Rush Hour!

In many ways Sim City gets a whole new feel with Rush Hour. It is not only the much talked about U-drive-it feature, a new building set, or a few more transportation options - quite a lot of smaller changes were made that tremendously add to the gameplay!

First of all, the game runs a lot faster now on my computer(Yipee!).

Then I especially like the changes to the traffic simulation engine. Now you can see how and from where sims get to a building. Not only gives this more transparency to what is actually going on, it also gives the player a lot of feedback. Plus: the traffic simulation makes more sense now (sims now use the fastest instead of the shortest route - so your highways are no longer unused if the onramp is a few blocks away). So cool: now you see trucks clog the roads in industrial areas whereas residential suburban roads are packed with vans and SUVs.

Maxis also added different difficulty levels as well as new tutorials. If you play on easy you no longer need to spend 90% of your time on super-micromanagement tasks like adjusting the number of teachers in every school.

Many people think the U-drive-it feature is purely hype. Well, it is not THAT special. However, after an a while of laying out zones and roads it is always fun to just click on a mission and drive around the city in a police car with sirens on, pushing other cars off the road.

I heard somebody say he feels that Rush Hour breathes a lot more life into his city. And I totally agree. Now you see car accidents on big crossings, you do see trains (or the fancy monorail) bring in commuters from the suburbs in morning and evening hours. In many ways the city just feels more real and alive now.

Sim City with Rush Hour must be the most complex game ever - the sheer detail of what is simulated is breathtaking. And it is also a lot of fun. Intelligent and entertaining! Let's be honest: many things like avenues should have been included in the original game already. Now, with RH, Maxis adds so much to the game that it is hard to complain. I hope we'll see many more expansions like RH.

P.S.: no, i am not paid by Maxis, I am just a happy fan ;)

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gouging or not, this expansion is packed, September 22, 2003

By 

Paul Cerra - See all my reviews

This review is from: SimCity 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack (CD-ROM)

We've all heard the talk that Maxis is gouging customers by deliberately leaving out features from Sim City 4 to put into an expansion pack. The real question is this: is the expansion pack worth the money? After just one day of looking at Rush Hour, I believe this is one of the best expansion packs I've ever seen. Unlike expansions for many games which just give you a few new buildings and often represent nothing more than bug fixes with bonus scenarios, Rush Hour is a BIG step forward for Sim City 4.

The new transportation options alone are worth the price of admission. Maxis has added double-wide avenues, which were desperately needed to handle traffic. A new ferry terminal building allows access by water, even on a regional level. Elevated rails (think Chicago) have been added, and rails can now connect to subways. Ground-level freeways and T-interchanges are also new. Speaking of interchanges, they are now MUCH easier to position than ever before. And there don't have to be any more "highways to nowhere": highways can now transition to avenues which in turn can transition to regular streets. But perhaps most important of all is a route query tool that lets you see how your sims get to and from work. With this overlay, you can *finally* create a mass transit system that works!

Still not convinced? One big new feature is the addition of road names and signs for use throughout the city. For those who found the original game too difficult, difficulty levels have been implemented and added. For those of us -- and there are many -- who wanted a return of the "make historic" option from earlier versions of Sim City, Maxis has obliged us. There are even new tilesets to make your new cities look different from the old ones. But you now also have the option to limit yourself to one single tileset, too.

The final feature that everyone is talking about is "U-drive." Players can now take control of vehicles and drive them around the city. And not just cars -- you can drive a tank, a jet, a train, even a boat! Maxis has added missions -- supposedly more than 75 of them -- to make this feature worthwhile. Complete missions to get new rewards. Early buzz on this feature is that it is surprisingly fun, although I admit that I haven't even tried it out yet myself.

I haven't listed all the new features -- there are still more. But this expansion pack has brought major improvements to Sim City 4. Sure, it would be nice if Maxis had been able to include all this stuff with the original game, but then the game would not have been released until September 2003. Maxis didn't invent the expansion pack; this phenomenon has been going on for many years now. I think Maxis is charging a fair price for a LOT of new gameplay fun... and remember, if you bought Sim City 4 and saved your receipt, you can get a $10 rebate. For that price, this expansion is almost a steal. Almost.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Well-Priced Expansion with Excellent Features!, September 24, 2003

By 

Sam (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: SimCity 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack (CD-ROM)

Rush Hour is a valuable and desperately needed addition to SimCity 4. Admittedly, many of the additional transportation features should have been included in the original SimCity 4, but despite this fact the new additions are still very welcome. The new ability to jump into certain vehicles and take control is a fun distraction, as well as a great way to make some spare money, though with certain aircraft it's very difficult to judge your height above buildings, particularly when in helicopters.

The best new feature, however, is the ability to see EXACTLY where your Sims are going, where they're leaving from, and the routes they take. This makes it infinitely easier to construct your mass-transit facilities and open up congested areas on your transport network. The new options for roads, elevated trains, and even monorails are also superb. One note, however, is that is is rather difficult to lay down elevated track that curves; you need to be sure to hold down the shift key when laying track in order to make a curve, or else you will be forever frustrated.

Finally, the incredibly low cost of this add-on alone makes it worthwhile, even though it is, at it's core, just adding functionality that should've come with SimCity 4 out of the box.