Interests & Hobbies

SimCity 4

"Welcome to a world you create - SimCity™ 4! Whether you are an experienced Mayor, or are just entering the world of city planning and politics, SimCity™ 4 offers unparalleled opportunities to create the metropolis of your dreams. Or, if you prefer, you can destroy that visionary city with a fiery meteor shower. The possibilities are endless." - so begins the 40 page user guide to this, the 4th incarnation of Simcity. For once, everything that was promised has been, in my opinion, delivered. Bigger scale, better graphics, more options, better playability, less stability (oops, they didn't promise that, did they, but SC4 crashes more often for me than the previous games ever did).

The point of the game is to build, maintain, expand, and improve cities of your own creation, with a little help from the computer controlled developers. After all, YOU don't build the majority of the buildings, you just create development zones and the developers, if they like them enough, will come in and fill em with bricks and mortar (or glass and steel a little later on).

As seems to be the norm now with maxis' series of sim games, SC4 has spawned countless fan built sites where you can get hints, tips and strategy advice, alongside downloads and much more. As these people seem to have more time than I do to do this, I'm not going to try to compete... I'm also not going to put up an exhaustive list of links to these sites, as EA/Maxis have done this too...

Simply pop over to the official website @ www.simcity.com (ok, there is no site there, but it'll redirect you to a sub-site of ea.com) and click on the link to fan sites... Plenty there toi get you started anyway.

Two little warnings though... Before you go and buy this game, make sure you aren't short on hard disk space... the initial install will take up a good gig, and you can double that pretty quickly once you get into saving games - the other warning... take a week off work... It's one of those games where you sit down at lunchtime, blink, and it's dark outside... Hours can and will fly by...

Note: A little mexican wave to the folks at EA, owner of Maxis for producing a fansite package.. A nice collection of graphics and logos for fans of the game to use to produce sites of thier own. About time these big companies realised that fans are going to make sites about games they love, and to help them out with these starter kits...