SimCity - Limited Edition

by Electronic Arts

• Constructible Worlds - Creative and customizable world that offers unique gameplay benefits, all with a fun tactile interface.
• Sims Matter - The Sims in your city speak to you directly and it's up to you to respond to their needs. Will you listen and be the toast of the town? Or abuse your power for fame and fortune?
• Specialize in What You Love - Mold your city as a casino resort, manufacturing hub, educational enclave, and more, and then watch as a unique look and feel spread throughout your city.
• Multiplayer - Build a region with friends for the first time! Collaborate or compete in regional and global challenges and make decisions that impact the greater SimCity World.
• GlassBox Engine - SimCity introduces GlassBox, the revolutionary simulation technology that gives you the power to impact individual Sims lives, manage city level simulation, and balance multiple city simulations at once

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B007FTE2VW
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 4.6 inches ; 14.1 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: March 5, 2013
• Average Customer Review: 1.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3,790 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #365 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #2 in Video Games > PC Games > Games > Simulation > Life

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com

SimCity is a city-building and management simulation game for the PC gaming platform that serves as a 2013 reboot of the iconic video game series. As with all games in the franchise, SimCity provides total control of how cities develop, but also adds new features such as: crisp 3D graphics, direct contact with citizens, dynamic real-time in-game units that replace animations representing player actions and levels of citizen happiness, franchise first multiplayer support, and in-game weather and pollution representation.

This special limited edition release of SimCity contains exclusive bonus content. See the complete list of bonus items included below.

SimCity returns, with relevant city planning choices such as whether to go green.
View larger

Or to invest in heavy industry and deal with the environmental costs.
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Power to Change a World Together

The defining city simulation is back. Create the city you desire and make the choices that shape your city and power the citizens within it. Every decision, big or small, has real consequences. Invest in heavy industry and your economy will soar - but at the expense of your Sims' health as pollution spreads. Implement green technology and improve your Sims' lives while risking higher taxes and unemployment. Team up with your friends to solve global challenges: launch a space shuttle, reduce carbon emissions, or build magnificent wonders. Compete on global and regional leaderboards to be the richest, the dirtiest, the happiest or the best place to visit.

Key Game Features

• Constructible Worlds - Creative and customizable world that offers unique gameplay benefits, all with a fun tactile interface.
• Sims Matter - The Sims in your city speak to you directly and it's up to you to respond to their needs. Will you listen and be the toast of the town? Or abuse your power for fame and fortune?
• Specialize in What You Love - Mold your city as a casino resort, manufacturing hub, educational enclave, and more, and then watch as a unique look and feel spread throughout your city.
• Multiplayer - Build a region with friends for the first time. Collaborate or compete in regional and global challenges and make decisions that impact the greater SimCity World. 2-16 player support online.
• GlassBox Engine - SimCity introduces GlassBox, the revolutionary simulation technology that gives you the power to impact individual Sims lives, manage city level simulation, and balance multiple city simulations at once.

System Requirements

• OS - Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7
• Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4000+ or better / Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0 GHz or better
• RAM - 1.5 GB (XP) / 2 GB (Vista / Windows 7) / 2 GB (built-in graphical chipset)
• Graphics Card - ATI X1800 or better, nVidia 7800 or better, Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better (*minimum of 256 MB of onboard RAM and shader 3.0 or better support)
• DVD-ROM - 8x or better
• Internet connection

Limited Edition Bonus Content

• New Characters - Protector of SimCity MaxisMan vs. The Evil Dr. Vu and his henchman.
• Crime Waves - The Evil Dr. Vu is loose and will create havoc in your city. Normal police have their hands full against this Super Villain. The Evil Dr. Vu will solicit Sims to become his henchmen and carry out his dastardly deeds.
• Super Hero HQ - Place MaxisMan's headquarters in your city to combat crime and keep your Sims safe. Upgrade with the Turbo Machine garage and the Reticulator landing pad.
• Evil Villain Lair - Place Dr. Vu's Lair in your city to unleash a crime wave. As The Evil Dr. Vu commits more crimes, upgrade his lair with a special laboratory and a garage for the Evil VuMobile.

Additional Screenshots

Franchise first multiplayer. View larger

Impact individual Sims lives. View larger

Create specialized cities. View larger

New hero & villain characters. View larger

Product Description

The defining city simulation is back! Create the city you desire and make the choices that shape your city and power the Sims within it. Every decision, big or small, has real consequences. Invest in heavy industry and your economy will soar - but at the expense of your Sims' health as pollution spreads. Implement green technology and improve your Sims’ lives while risking higher taxes and unemployment. Team up with your friends to solve global challenges: launch a space shuttle, reduce carbon emissions, or build magnificent wonders. Compete on global and regional leaderboards to be the richest, the dirtiest, the happiest or the best place to visit!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9,676 of 9,880 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars What a lousy toy March 6, 2013

By Malor

Platform for Display:PC

Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

Fundamentally, SimCity has always been a 'software toy'. That means that there's no real end state, no way to win. It's just a thing that you play and experiment with. You build, and tinker, and mess around. It's a toy, not a game; it's a sandbox, not baseball.

So, in this iteration of the game, you don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers. So you have to have a live Internet connection at all times, and their servers have to be up, and have to have space for you. And the rules for play are draconian. If you want to, say, build a city, save it, blow it up with something terrible, and then restore from save, you can't do that anymore. That's an unauthorized usage of their toy. And if you figure out ways of using their toy that they don't like, they'll ban you forever.

All third-party modding is shut out. One of the best parts of SimCity 4 and The Sims is that users can create and share content among themselves for free. You will no longer be able to do this. You will be required to run only Official Authorized Content.

Further, you're not getting the whole game for your $60 or $80, depending on what version you're buying. EA's plan is to sell you Simcity 5 over and over and over. They've directly admitted that they already have it running with larger cities, but they're not releasing that now. They claim it's because it "won't run on Dad's PC", but the real reason is so they can sell it to you again later. Want subways? That's gonna be $20. Want railroads? Another $20. Bigger cities? Oh, that's in the $30 expansion.

Right now, if you look at The Sims 3, the game costs $30.... But if also you buy all the DLC for it, it's *four hundred and seventy dollars*. This is what they are doing with SimCity 5; locking you into their server infrastructure, and then exploiting the heck out of your wallet.

This is a lousy deal, and you would be stupid to take it. Always-on DRM, and a deliberately crippled game, so that they can slowly uncripple it, charging you for every restored feature from prior versions.

Simcity 4 still works pretty well. It's not quite as nice as most current games, and can require you to 'pin' the process to just one processor on a multi-core system (ie, most current machines), but if you want a city builder where you won't have to pay extra to breathe both in AND out, that would be a better option.

But buying this game? In my opinion, you would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire. Read more ›

1,816 of 1,878 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars This game should be called SimTowns........ March 6, 2013

By Matrix

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

So I took the bait. Even after all the research I did on other Simcity forums from those who played beta I bought the game.
Spent about 4 hours with it yesterday and I am quite disappointed in it.

Let's get out the Pro's:

Graphics - Yes it looks very pretty. Even though I was shocked to see the "sims" looking like lego characters, overall the buildings and houses etc are very pretty.

Modular upgrades - Excellent idea, and works very well. I never did like the idea behind "I need more firetrucks? build 5 more fire stations". Now I can add onto the Firehouse and expand it's coverage that way. Works very well for Police, Fire, Schools, etc.

Curved Roads - I can actually build a realistic looking town. The curved roads are great. However they leave issues with putting down homes and buildings on them at times.

Now for all the Cons:

Online DRM - I know everyone complains about this. I was willing to deal with it. Then the servers went down and I couldn't play. Is it first day issues? I'm not sure but it was almost ironic when the servers went down.

City Size - Of course a huge complaint, other reviews mention this. Filled up my entire town in a little over an hour.

Diversity of buildings - Where are all the buildings I want to build? I'm talking places like Museums, Churches, Zoo's, Post Offices, etc. etc. I can think of tons of missing content. Were these left out so EA can sell us buildings for $1 each later down the road?

Transportation - So far it seems all you get are buses. No subways, raised trams, etc. From other reviewers I have been told you can build a local airport and eventually an international one as a "great work"....

The whole "Upgrade town hall to unlock stuff" - Seems silly and unnecessary. I can't build a hospital because I already used my TownHall upgrade for something unrelated so I have to wait.

It's hard to really say all the issues with the game in just bullet points. One of the biggest issues I have is simply with the density of zones. Let me paint a picture for you. You have a nice suburban part of your town, where say you want your middle to upper class to live. They would live on nice single lane roads with maybe some cul da sacs shooting off that road etc. You can build the road system, and then zone it for residential. That's it.... So what happens? You get mobile homes all over, and the only way to get the houses to "upgrade" to nicer establishment is to put parks/recreation all over nearby (and their effect is small size wise). Or you have to upgrade the road. Now who lives on a 4 lane road in a mansion? Not many people I can think of. It's absolutely idiotic. And what tends to happen when you do expand the road? You then get apartment buildings in the middle of where you wanted small suburb.

The game is definitely driven to have you share resources with neighboring regions. If you try to do it all in your one small city, you're in for a mess. So you have to essentially pause your game, and go to another city and start fresh there. Whether in the other city it's creating better jobs, or focusing on utilities to provide to your other city, etc.

Overall, I am extremely disappointed in this game. A lot of the issues CAN be patched, fixed, upgraded with a lot of work from Maxis. But in the state the game is now, it should never have been released. This will probably be a game I shelve for a bit, and hope that in a few months it becomes playable. As it sits now, I paid for a beta copy. If I could return this to EA I would. Read more ›

1,754 of 1,867 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars I purchased a game correct? March 5, 2013

By Neumac1

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

No problems installing the game, trying to play the game though???? When I go to create a city it keeps giving me errors it can't at this time try again. Now it's stuck sending me into some tutorial but after the tutorial loads nothing works. Click on Help and they have a notice that the servers are overloaded to try back later! You designed the game to use the internet servers and they can't handle it, so I can't play a game I paid money for....really!

1,502 of 1,603 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars I should have known better.. March 5, 2013

By KiloEchoNovember

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

Well folks I hate to say it, but I HATE this game and what EA has done to it.

First off, I love Simcity. I played the original when it was new, 2000, 3000 and Simcity 4. So count me as a well-informed fan of the series.

EA has RUINED it with the persistent DRM that prevents you from saving your game to your computer. That's right, if you get disconnected from their buggy server and are in the middle of a game.. you'll lose whatever progress you've made. Assuming you can log in..

Second, the spaces allocated for 'cities' are pathetic. No space to actually produce a tax base that would justify or pay for these grandiose projects and buildings..

There are more problems with it but the other reviews are spot on about those.

Save your money. Don't buy this, I've already sent mine back out of frustration and disappointment.

561 of 595 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Fun for a few hours, if you could play it (Updated) March 6, 2013

By Travis D

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fun: 3.0 out of 5 stars   

Very rarely do I give 1 star reviews, but if I spend $60 on a game, I expect to be able to play it. I ended up getting 5 hours into a city (after waiting 20 minutes in a queue to play a game), only to get issues with my city "not processing properly". I was forced to do a roll back, and lost 2 hours of work. I spent another few hours getting it back to the way I had it before my save started having problems, and went to sleep. Now, today when I try to load my game, I get the following error: "Unable to load city at this time. Please Try Again Later". I have no idea if my save is gone for good, or if it's a temporary problem. The server status is green and is supposedly working, but I can't load my city.

If I could play the game perfectly without any problems, I'd give it a 2/5 at best, because I literally filled the entire map up in less than 5 hours of gameplay. The excuse EA gave in making small maps is mediocre at best, and it shows how wrong they are in the early reviews. They say they want to give us maps that size because it might lag people with slow computers, but what about the people with good computers who want to have a map they can build in for longer than 5 hours without filling it up completely? Apparently in their eyes, multiplayer gameplay can only be as large as the weakest link.

Besides the obvious drawbacks in the map size, the entire game seems to be 'dumbed down' from Simcity 4. No subways, no water pipes, it's almost as if the game was made for Facebook. There are major graphical issues as well, and tile problems. For example, I had a bridge across a river, and I accidently made it a suspension bridge (Which looked horrible, because there was only a single "tower" on the bridge), so I removed the road completely.... However, when I tried to make another bridge in the exact same place, it said it was too steep. Since there is no way to go back to a previous save besides having your save glitch and being forced to do it, I had to end up bulldozing 5 skyscrapers just to fit a bridge in.

All in all, it's been a disappointment so far. I can't play my save at all, even though the server seems to be working, and the map can get filled up in a few hours of gameplay. Oh, I also remember playing for about an hour while I had lost connection to the SimCity servers, which wasn't because I was offline, it was because of some server problems with SimCity. Nothing I did saved, I ended up having to start over again.

Update: It's now been almost 36 hours since I was last able to play my save, SimCity support won't tell me if it's a server problem or if it's gone for good, so I'm going to create a new save on another server. Very disappointing. Read more ›