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SimCity - Standard Edition [Download]
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Product information
| ASIN | B007VTVRFA |
|---|---|
| Release date | March 4, 2013 |
| Customer Reviews |
4.2 out of 5 stars |
| Pricing | The strikethrough price is the List Price. Savings represents a discount off the List Price. |
| Countries | |
| Return Policy | This product is non-returnable and non-refundable. |
| Terms of Use | By placing your order, you agree to our Games and Software Terms of Use. |
| Type of item | Software Download |
| Rated | Rating Pending |
| Item model number | 71481 |
| Manufacturer | Electronic Arts |
| Date First Available | November 7, 2012 |
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Product Description
From the Manufacturer
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.
- 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
Requires Origin Client to activate.
System Requirements
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better or Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or betterOperating System: Windows XP/Vista/7
RAM: 2GB RAM
Hard Drive: 10GB HD Space
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 2x00 or better*, nVidia 7800 or better*, Intel Series 4 integrated graphics or better*
Broadband Internet: Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload
*Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better support.
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SimCity - E3 2012 Trailer
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SimCity - Disaster
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Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on March 12, 2013
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Cons
1) City Size. While I understand why they did this, it's still frustrating on many levels. The major frustration comes from if you don't realize the true limitations you try to do everything in one city and end up fighting traffic, budget deficit issues, and the never ending demand of RCI. Instead, the concept of this game is to not have a single giant city but instead to have several smaller specialized ones. When you realize this and you plan accordingly, your regions really prosper.
2) City Safety. No matter how many buildings you have and even if you max them out, there's never enough to go around or you're stymied by traffic. In one of my cities, I have over 60 police cars, 4 detective vans, and 4 crime prevention vans and yet there's still too much crime. It wasn't until I looked closer at the entrance to the city that I realized the issue was:
3) Traffic. I've watched videos, read write-ups, and tried out many different road lay outs but I still can't get around the massive rush hour traffic that just about shuts all my cities down. In my tourism city I have 2 train stations, a port with a cruise line, over 25 street cars and over 30 buses and I can't keep up with the traffic. I try to route traffic specifically by park & go's and bus stops, I try and route local sims to business instead of into major throughways, and I try to keep the traffic from the trains and port routing to the tourism sites but none of it helps. Don't even get me started on by oil/ore/coal cities.
4) AI. Now, I'm sure they'll fix this eventually, and a lot of different reviews (amateur and professional alike) have hit on this already, but the AI is stupid in this game. Pathing, city service deployment, transportation, you name it. You have 3 T-intersections in an area completely clogged up but 2 blocks up and over there's 3 cars total passing through the entire road line. Why wouldn't they reroute the traffic jam to utilize the open roads? 3 cop cars, 2 fire trucks and 2 ambulances coming up behind you, don't pull over to the side and let them by or anything, just flip 'em off and continue waiting in the gridlock. I mean really, why would you not program certain vehicles to have a higher priority on the roads or to have the other cars move to the side for emergency vehicles. Half my city is burning because a) my fire trucks decided to go through downtown at rush hour instead of taking the alternate path and b) they're stuck in rush hour because no one lets them by.
Pros
1) Addicting. This type of game is how I wish all games were. It's addicting enough to keep you involved for hours upon hours while playing and you can work on city upgrade plans in the back of your mind while not playing. But the level of addiction isn't so bad as it's all you want to do. I can easily drop 2-3 hours in an evening and it flies by, but once I walk away I don't have any overwhelming urge to run back to it. Mind you this is a personal Pro because user experiences will vary, but for me it's what makes it an ideal game.
2) Graphics. While it's a simple city-planning style game, I really love the flow and look of the graphics. Realistic enough to leave an awe inspiring feelings of accomplishment as your city grows into a sprawling metropolis but not so much that you take the game overly serious. It's beautiful and the depth of overall visuals are extremely pleasing. Everything from the plans flying overhead (even if you don't have airports yet in your region), to the random boats passing by through your water ways, to the changing time of day (even if it sometimes is to dark at night) is just satisfying. It's nice to play a game that's still a game and not focusing on hyper-realism (graphics wise).
3) Regions. While I initially disliked the city sizes, once I realized the possibilities of creating a fully functioning region I actually started getting pretty excited about the possibilities. It takes some getting used to, planning out the individual cities to work in tandem with each other is really a fun and new take on for Sim City. Before you had a large area (probably the same size as a region) to build a multi-purpose city that involved everything, here you have smaller cities that add up to make the whole region. Similar to how you have a county with smaller city/towns that make it up and each city/town adds different things to the overall county. I'd really like to see at some point in the games future where they actually interconnect Regions with planes/boats/trains and truly turn the game from a single city/region responsibility to a true world environment.
4) Overall game play. I cannot knock on how they've managed to pull everything together on this game. Given, the last SimCity I played actively was 3000 so I'm not sure of how 4 played, but I really love the smooth game play implementation of this iteration. Takes a few failed cities/regions to realize the major changes, but once you do it really is a good game and helps add to and build up the SimCity legacy. The menus are extremely easy to navigate and find. The advisors give pretty decent advice even if they are redundant or obvious.
5) Music! I'm a music nut, in my opinion music is the true window into the soul. The sound track (when it works) is really amazing and even listening to it for over 4 hours still sounds fresh. I also like how it changes depending on your zoom level. Just overall amazing. As for the "when it works" comment, I've found that once the city hits a certain size or there's just so much going on in the city the sound will die out or glitch on a specific sound. Like if you clicked on your Police Dept while sirens were going off in the background and traffic noise was being introduced ontop of whatever the engine handling all of that gets over loaded and just loops those noises over and over again until you exit out and reload. Rather annoying.
In summary, despite the epic launch day issues (even though I didn't experience them), the DRM/Always on requirement, and the occasional sound glitch, the game is still fun and enjoyable. While I'm not playing it, the issues are present and frustrating and enough to not have me rushing back to it, but when I do get into it, it's more than enough to keep me in it for hours on end.
5/5 for enjoyment
5/5 for music
5/5 for graphics
4/5 for game play
3/5 for AI
1. Purchased the game on Amazon
2. Followed the detailed instructions on how to install/setup origin
3. I am unable to get beyond Step #10 - which is to "View in Library" within Origin.
Essentially I provided my game key to Origin, where they acknowledge and accepted my key, but the game fails to show up in my game library. Consequently I can't get to the game to download it - let alone play it. It's apparently a known issue to them. I their Help screens I found the following statement:
"We're aware that for some users SimCity is not showing up in their My Games Library, Origin is working on the issue. In some cases refreshing Origin resolves the issue."
So I noticed that Origin has a Live Chat feature to get assistance. I click the link and find there is a 35-40 minute wait time to chat with the next available Advisor. After waiting for a good 15 minutes I decided I'd try to Refresh the games library which led me to restart Origin - which failed to let me log out. Not only did it fail to work, but it killed my Chat window where I had been waiting patiently. I then rebooted Origin, clicked on "Live Chat" again and now the wait was now 45-50 minutes. Ughh!!!!
At this point I'm sitting with 25-30 minutes of wait time. Assuming they resolve my issue, I'll still have to download the actual game itself before I can play it. So far my experience with Origin has been irritating to say the least. This experience is making me appreciate Steam (which says a lot).
This whole experience makes me wonder if they rushed too quickly to market. Clearly this is a serious distribution problem - Origin issues and it sounds like others are struggling with servers in-game.
I'll revise my rating once I get to play the game - whenever that might be. If Origin is interested in doing the right thing they should grant the deluxe edition for free to people who have to sit through this nonsense. For crying out loud - it's a $60 game, right???
**UPDATE: It's now 3 hours later. When I was down to 5-10 minutes of wait time, the game finally appeared on its own in the My Games Library. I then quickly downloaded the game, launched and it then spent quite some time patching itself. When that finally completed, I launched the game again (per instruction) and got an error message, "Our service is currently down. We are fixing the problem. Please check back soon." I would echo what other reviewers have said - this wouldn't be an issue if you could play the game offline. Not a deal-breaker for me, but obviously they're having Day-1 release problems. I'd certainly call this a major failure on their part since they have known just how much buzz there is around this release. Yikes, EA...
**UPDATE: After roughly 6 hours of waiting, I finally managed to get into the game. However, I have reason to believe most of the cause was related to the Origin setup. After many attempts, I did some searching around Origin and found out that I should have received a confirmation email from Origin to "activate" my account. I never got an email from them, so I triggered the email from their site. This allowed me to activate the account. That still didn't do the trick, however, until I completely logged out of Origin and then logged back in. At that point I was prompted to create a screen name and a password recovery question. Viola! This finally seemed to do the trick as I was finally able to play the game. So my advice to those using origin for the first time is to make sure you're getting an email to activate your account. If not, that will keep you from playing. Second, be sure you've been prompted to create a screen name in Origin. If those two things happen my hope is you'll get into the game as I did. Unfortunately I stumbled upon the resolution myself as the previous error message led me to believe the servers were the cause (and they may have been also - not sure).
That said, I got to play the game for a good 3 hours or so. I really enjoy the game play thus far and I disagree with those who believe the cities are way too small. As it stands there are 8 or so selectable regions and each region has a certain number of city plots. If I recall, the regions have anywhere from 3 city plots up to 16 - depends on how large an area you want to deal with. Now you can't fill an entire region with "all city" as you could in Sim City 4, but I was never able (or committed enough) to fill an entire region in SC4 anyway. It also doesn't look like you can create your own regions, but I'm also ok with this as I never used the feature in previous iterations of the game.
What I enjoy most is that you don't have to micro-manage nearly as much of the game as you did in SC4. For instance, I never cared for managing a network of pipes or running power lines all over the map. In real life it's safe to say that pipes and power tend to align with road networks - and they were able to simplify things by aligning those networks to roads automatically. I like the flexibility to create roads and route them however you'd like - including circular roads, curves, rectangular, etc. I especially like the graphs/overlays in this version. You have great indicators at your disposal and I have found the menus to be very intuitive.
I am changing my rating to 4 stars. I give 5 stars to the game itself - the other star is taken off due to the install headaches.
![SimCity Complete Edition - Origin PC [Online Game Code]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81HleiOZ2KL._AC_UL140_SR140,140_.jpg)








