SimCity 4 Deluxe | 
 enlarge | From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £4.95
You Save: £15.04 (75%)
New (16) Used (6) from £4.94
Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 619
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Xp, Windows Me, Windows Nt
Genre: world-builder-strategy-games
Rating: Universal, suitable for all
Media: Video Game
Number Of Items: 1
Age: 3 - 18 years
Operating System: Windows Me
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5030930036386
ASIN: B000160ZTO
Release Date: January 30, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Buy this!!!! September 22, 2008
Ms. A. Busby (Bradford, UK)
I bought this game some time ago and I'm far from tired of it so it's been well worth the money.
You can sculpt your own region with mountains, lakes, rivers and rolling hills. Large bodies of water attract whales which was a wonderful surprise!
Onto this you can scatter forests and herds of animals.
Make a mountain lake and scatter trees and wild animals around. Now zoom in and you see eagles flying over the lake - it's truly stunning!
Making a complex region can take time and it can be frustrating but take time to look at the Maxis site and check out some of the recommended fan sites. There are user made tools which make region management very much easier. Many users have created regions based upon real life locations around the world and you can download and import these. You can have several regions at once so if you get bored of trying to build up Manhattan to the sky you can retreat to rural France and build a few new farms. Also from the Maxis site you can download user items - as a fan of the Sims I couldn't imagine sticking with the supplied range of buildings and utilities when I can download well made alternatives.
The manual hints at the best way to get started with developing cities. A tutorial region is supplied with the game which walks you through creating the different zones and managing problem cities. It didn't take long to learn how to build up from a small community to a large and bustling city though. You have various advisors who keep you informed if the crime rate is getting too high or your water system has become polluted. Your financial advisor looks at you despairingly over her glasses if you spend too much too quick but it's fairly easy to start bringing the simolleans in - especially once you have a few cities in your region all trading with one another.
Detailed data is only a click away and you can soon see what needs to be done to sort out the traffic jams or improve education levels.
The U drive it feature of the deluxe version brings in extra revenue but even without the rewards are good fun. Speeding through your city scattering terrified pedestrians, totalling busses and dodging trains is tremendous fun. They allow you to really see your city at pavement level as you drive past your citizens going about their daily business. Drive the mayor's limo throwing money from the back, take passengers on a whale watching tour or become a hero by air-lifting sick children to hospital - There are dozens of different missions and lots to be won from each one.
People who have problems with the game freezing up should look at the display options in the game setup. I had some issues but they went away when I switched from hardware to software rendering which allowed the game to run at top detail level with my cheap graphics card.
As with all games of this type you get out what you put in. You can have a lot of fun planning a big city, laying down subways and monorails and planning where your population centres should be but there's plenty of fun to be got from creating clogged up slums and watching the police helicopter chase villains around the abandoned houses! If you feel it's time to clear away the urban decay and start again you can choose one of a number of natural and un-natural disasters to bring upon your poor helpless citizens. Once the meteor shower, killer robots and, tornadoes and volcanoes have cleared up you can start all over again from scratch - with the added advantage of all those pretty new valleys where your business district used to be!
Be warned though. You will find you spend a LOT of time playing this game!!
 Great game (if it wouldn't fall over at random intervals) April 16, 2007
Mike Smith (England)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
A note of caution - this is a great game, but I've had problems with it falling over at random intervals. This wouldn't ordinarily be a huge problem, but there's no autosave function and with a game this engaging it's difficult to remember to save your city at regular intervals - A few times I've lost 2+ hours of progress with a crash.
My copy is fully patched, and when the game crashes it returns you to the desktop - no message, no warning, just lots of frustration.
AMAZING!! April 14, 2007
Fritzler/// 36 (South-West, England, UK)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I played 'Sim City 4' first and I thought that was good (until I lost it!). This is triple the fun... you can win stuff by doing fun missions, put LOADS of different roads (and other transport-type-routes) and bridges. Different buildings make it better as well as being able to do many more things with your 'MY sims'!
DEFINETLY 5/5 for EVERYTHING!!
Great graphics and VERY fun-NOTHING better!
A very big (i.e. needs a lot of memory, big processor etc.) game though so I would advise thoroughly checking you have the requirements and specifications first. Even a tiny scratch will RUIN your game so take EXTRA care and ea are quite helpful (4/5) if you are stuck with anything.
WELL WORTH THE MONEY-IF it works/ installs/ plays etc.!
REMEMBER TO CHECK THE REQUIREMENTS... FIRST>>> MUST CHECK!
The best sim city game by far April 11, 2007
R. Lowe (Berkshire, UK)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This game is defiantly the best in this long series. It has many great features like improved graphics, and a large amount of new stuff you can build. The add on pack also adds a different spin on the game, with the ability of being able to control planes and cars, and being awarded for completing tasks; such as flying through checkpoints. God mode is also a nice touch, with the ability to destroy parts of your city you may want to regenerate (or just destroy).
I, like many others, found the installation problem, but if you copy the first disc to your hard drive in a temporary folder and double click the autorun.exe it solves the problem (make sure you have the second disc in your drive though).
Overall this is a good game with many good features, and a lot of gameplay. But like most ea games, it is basically the same game play like its previous version but with better graphics (hence not the 5 starts). However, if you are a tycoon fan, and/or loved the original sim city games you won't be disappointed buying this game.
Installation Problems? February 19, 2007
H. Ismail (Bradford, England)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
Initially I had installation problems with the sim city 4 deluxe edition (the first disk would install to 49% and ask for the second disk, after insertion of disk 2 the installation would remain stuck) but after trying a modified version of the suggestions on the EA games website for another simcity I managed to do it. This problem occurred on a desktop pc and two other laptops that I have, so it is not just a fault with my computer.
Basically I copied disk 1 onto a folder in my hard drive and removed disk 1 and replaced it with disk 2. (so all the disk 1 info is on my hard drive and disk 2 is in the CD drive)
I would run setup.exe from the folder with the info (copied from disk 1) and the installation would occur. At the 49% completion mark, where you are supposed to switch disks, the installation automatically continues (no switch disk box appears), switching from reading disk 1 info from your hard drive, to reading the disk 2 info in your CD/DVD drive.
Installation was faster and it worked.
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