For those of you who didn't know, I got a Gamecube, and a memory card. I also own Super Smash Bros. Melee, which was a game I hated until I owned it. Now I like it. I also borrowed SSX Tricky from Token and have been playing that a lot. I figured that I could really play my Gamecube now that I got my memory card back. I played it a bit on Nick's memory card, but I didn't want to bother with copying data back and forth so I didn't play that much.
I also got Simcity 4, and it is pretty cool. They managed to make the game a lot more like The Sims and less like the traditional Simcity games, but it's still a fun game to play. There is more micromanagement than ever before. Instead of just having roads, now there are streets and roads, with streets being primarily for light traffic and roads for heavy traffic. When placing schools, you actually have to choose between elementary schools and high schools. There are also small versions of fire departments and police departments, designed to cover a smaller area for small starting towns. The graphics are still primarily sprite-based, but the cars and stuff are all 3D rendered. I'm pretty sure you can import your sims from The Sims and put them in a house in your city... I haven't tried it yet though, I don't have The Sims installed on my comp.
Anyway, the landscapes are awesome, and are much more versatile than the other Simcity games... you can now build zones on hilly terrain, and it will still grow. There's a lot more terraforming options than before, one of them being that you can build mesas, with a mesa creating tool. You could build things that were similar to mesas in older simcity games, but they actually look like mesas in SC4.
Well, I don't really know much about the game past that point. It really eats computers, but I still turn it up to 1280x1024 resolution and 32 bit color, because the game really is beautiful on high resolutions.
Posted by at January 12, 2003 04:42 AM