SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition with Rush Hour Expansion Pack Review

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SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition with Rush Hour Expansion Pack ReviewYou don't have to be a gamer to appreciate SimCity 4. If you have the hand-eye coordination to browse a website, you're covered there. You don't need a great sense of spatial relations with the various levels of zoom. You don't need to be able to make split-second decisions with the possible exception of quickly hitting the pause button. You don't need many of the traditional computer gamer skills to enjoy SimCity 4.
What you do need is the ability to make risk-benefit decisions, and a sense of how the real world works. You need to know, for example, that people with a few bucks in their pockets don't choose to live next to a factory, and you need to understand whether it's better to spend money to build a fire station now, or risk having to rebuild if you wait.
One thing that SimCity 4 does real well is it's simulation of how a government budget works. If, for example, you build an infrastructure that appropriately supports your city, you'll find that funding everything at 100% would require raising taxes beyond what the residents and business owners will stand for. Pretty soon you'll see abandoned residential, commercial and industrial properties. That means your tax base goes down, and you'll have to raise taxes even further.
If you take the alternative and cut the funding to your infrastructure so you can lower taxes, you'll be faced with teachers, fire fighters, police, transit and healthcare worker strikes, and satisfying them enough to bring them back to work will cost you more than appropriate funding would have.
Just when you think you've found that balance between funding your infrastructure and your tax rate, the power plant and roads you originally built start reaching the end of their lives, and you need to replace them. (You were building up a surplus you can tap into, weren't you?)
While your budgetary problems may consume you, there are other factors to consider. A big one is transportation. Sims don't like rush hour traffic any more than you do - and probably less. If you let commutes get too bad, the Sims will stop going to work. You'll either need bigger roads, more efficient mass transit, or you'll need to move the factories and residential areas closer. But wait... Didn't we already establish that people don't like to live next to factories? Again you have to struggle to find a balance - and that balance needs to fit within your budgetary constraints, too!
SimCity 4 Deluxe includes the Rush Hour Expansion Pack. In addition to more transportation options, Rush Hour (and thus Deluxe) adds a "you drive it" feature that allows you to control cars, planes, helicopters, and other transports. If you're really getting into the planning and strategy of the game, these options are a distraction. But if you're showing your city to someone less interested in city planning, a you drive it mission may be a fun way to tour the city.
Something I would love to see in real life is instead of having candidates for public office debate each other, set them down in front of computers, and have them prove their ability to successfully build a working city in SimCity 4. The only governing skill SimCity 4 doesn't simulate well is the ability to work with others. I think we should be very worried about any big city mayor who isn't able to demonstrate their abilities by being successful in SimCity 4.SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition with Rush Hour Expansion Pack OverviewSimCity 4 Deluxe Edition turns you into a citizen, a criminal, an architect, a mayor, even a god -- bringing you deeper into SimLife than ever!As you create railways, ferries, plan out streets, you also get to use that transportation in a series of great new driving missions

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Sid Meier's Railroads Review

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Sid Meier's Railroads ReviewI've spent some good time with the game now and, despite the fact that I'm about as big a fan of Sid Meier's work as you're likely to find, have to admit disappointment with this game. When it comes right down to it, the game seems more like Sid's golf game than the original RRT. It's shallow, fast and just not nearly as fun as you'd hope.
Of course it's not all bad. The graphics are beautiful, the music is great and you actually get a real manual. The game looks nice and plays nice, even on a system which is not a true gaming rig. The animations are great as well and I love how each of the train cars at a depot have to be filled individually with coal or grain or whatever the case may be. The patent auctions are well done as well.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the game:
First, the game moves too quickly. For example, if you play the Eastern USA scenario, you may start in Baltimore. You can immediately join with Washington, plunk a depot in Washington, and get a little Grasshopper to run a single mail car and a single passenger car back and forth. By the time the train has made its first run from Baltimore to Washington, you'll have enough money to connect to your second city (Baltimore to Frederick). So you do that, and get your second train. Give it four or five minutes and you'll be able to either double the line between BAL and WAS or create a third line to a nearby resource. Within fifteen minutes you will have connected to every city and needed resource in the vicinity. By then your opponents (assuming you are playing against two) will have pretty well done the same so that every good-sized town has at least one connection. The opponent railroads are a complete mess, with weird overpasses and tunnels all over the place. Much like the previous iterations of RRT, the AI seems to deal with brute force rather than sophistication.
Second, the maps are too small. RRT and RRT2 had a real epic feel. RRT2 was especially good with this, allowing you to make huge railroads stretching across an entire continent. The maps in SMR are tiny in comparison and few in number. This could be my single biggest point of disappointment. It contributes, of course, to the first problem, since you now have three railroads stuck in just a small corner of a country.
Third, the financial game is shallow compared to previous RRTs. The same is true of the economies. There doesn't seem to be much sophistication in this. Also, it is very easy to make great deals of money and, because the game moves so quickly, if you take a few minutes to look around the map, you'll probably find that suddenly you've got a couple million dollars in your account. This may be less the case in the more difficult European scenarios, but certainly I haven't had any trouble making money in the US of A. The stock market offers buy and selling. There is no splitting, no short selling or anything else. There are ten shares per company and that's it. I may just be missing something, but it also seems difficult to know how much different resources are worth, which ones are the most valuable, and so on.
Fourth, there seem to be some problems with routing. It's not unusual to see trains getting all plugged up near stations, even stations with three tracks running through them. The crossovers kind of work, but not as well as you might hope. When a station gets enough traffic running through it (and that may be only 5 or 6 trains) it can really begin to bog down so trains sit endlessly without being able to unload. There have also been times when the little "end of line" roadblocks have refused to go away, even in the middle of a station. That means no trains can run past the roadblock out the other side of the station. To this point I haven't found an easy way of resolving this. I think it will prove difficult to have stations with a large number of trains accessing them.
Fifth, laying track is so automatic it's almost disappointing. Unlike previous games, there do not seem to be a lot of premiums in placing bridges or tunnels. A track running from Phoenix to Flagstaff, which requires at least one major bridge and a couple of long tunnel sections, will only set you back about $500,000. That wouldn't get you very far in previous RRT games, and I think it's better that way. It used to be more important to find just the right route (anyone else remember running trains through the mountains to California in RRT2?), but now it hardly matters anymore. Terrain gets smoothed, tunnels get dug and bridges get built just like that. You can just smack a track wherever you want one and the game takes care of the rest.
Sixth, there is no campaign. This is hugely disappointing as the campaign in RRT2 was one of the best parts of the game (with the exception of those stupid puzzle ones where all you had to do is route trains). The individual scenarios have a list of objectives, but if you are not looking for them, you won't find them and won't heed them. I don't think you ever get reminded of the objectives and they don't seem to have any real bearing on the game. They are just there. Once you finish a scenario there is no connection to the next one--you just start over. All-in-all, this is pretty disappointing.
So overall, I think it has the makings of a great game...they just didn't finish it. The game itself is so good in the way it looks and the way it plays. It pains me that they kept it so shallow.
PS - One more thing. I forgot to mention the strange fact that the economies are not modified depending on the era. So be prepared to funnel steel to an automobile manufacturer in 1830...and one that is based in a city filled with 20th century skyscrapers.Sid Meier's Railroads Overview

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