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Macguide Issue 12  Okay, I know how to treat a population right. After all, I edit New Zealand's most popular by far Mac magazine. (Okay, so I edit New Zealand's only Mac magazine.)
The first thing you get to do in Sim City 4 is terraform the landscape in your zone of choice - make peaks, hills, plateaus, plains, canyons, whatever, then pepper the place with trees and set the antelopes (or whatever) free to roam. It's fun. Eventually, with cities, towns etc in different zones, you can connect them up with railways, freeways, airports and power lines and get them selling essential services to each other, so plan ahead - the scale can become both maddeningly intricate and massive. You could make a town based around a huge power generating industry, for example, build dorms for the workers and a park and commercial area, then flog power to the other cities for income, or a town specialising in processing waste (mine was called Parliament). Anyway, onto the crucial part. I took a modest name, as is my nature - Mayor Pel». Town planning is essential. First put the services in, and radiate everything out from that. The most essential service goes first, right? Sound logic. So I began with the jewel in the crown, the centrepiece city, the place everybody would aspire to in my Sim World, my Los Angeles, my Amsterdam, my Thames - and I gave it a homely name that would resonate in the hearts of my sims: FA City. I built the soccer field first, of course - as you do (Rugby World Cup, what?) - and I made sure it would function right. There was some nice land around it for when I could finance the grandstands, a huge police station for keeping the fans under control, a big hospital for player physiotherapy and those little mishaps, and then I surrounded it with roads to some shops and lots of houses for the football hooligans - I mean workers. With a 100,000 simoleon budget, you can create different building zones and types, service, transport networks and all sorts of other stuff. As you prosper you can even add real landmarks like famous museums, the Sphinx etc. I ran out of budget pretty fast, but what the hell - the match was about to start.  | The Football Kingz are about to take the field against the Aussies - some advisor is bleating about budget out of control and fires breaking out. I'm the mayor so I don't listen÷ | I stopped bothering with the rest to watch the game - I'll have to get that mayoral box built - and a fire broke out somewhere. I don't know where, I was watching the game, and I couldn't really direct the fire fighters to put it out, anyhow, as I'd forgotten to make them. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of my first city - when the game was interrupted by the raging inferno, I demolished the city with a meteor - another new feature - and started again. New Town
Okay, so I couldn't afford to be quite so one-eyed. I can learn. I would build a whole new city, a new beginning for my Sims. And it would be called Fifa City. So I built the soccer field, put some houses around it so the fans could walk to the games, built some nice parks around it too, a power station, festooned the place with power lines, water pipes, access roads, built two fire stations - see, I am a caring guy. Um, and then the football game started÷ It's really fascinating - you can create Sims and follow them around as they go about their daily business. You can do the same with Sim characters you import from other Sims' games. When you zoom in the animation is shockingly good. You get day and night, and all the lights go on, or let them carry out their business in perpetual daylight. It's all thoroughly absorbing and will keep you going for weeks. Get information on specific features to see if the crime rate is killing your shopping district, or the roads are sufficient for your industries - the devil is lurking in every detail. Tips - Plan ahead with your landscape - you should terraform every zone and not just the first one you're going to build a city on, so you can make sure they can be connected.
- Start modest and leave plenty in your budget for unforeseen eventualities. With services, shopping zones and leisure areas already there, Sims will appear and move in, houses will spring up, and cars will start driving the roads, but they're unpredictable like real people.
- If everything turns to custard, go out in style: SC4 gives you active volcanoes, meteors, tornados, lightning, and even a giant killer robot with which to terminate your failures.
Pros Absorbing
Rich graphics
Unpredictability adds hours of twists |  | Cons I don't think Sims like soccer
Suits players experienced in the Sim schtick | © Parkside Media 2003
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