

But before you begin, you may wish to take the step-by-step tutorials of the game's mayor mode-the heart of SimCity 4-and the god mode, where you can terraform the land to your heart's content, making the terrain as flat, as hilly, as undulating, or as improbably strange as you like. At any rate, getting started is as easy as clicking on any SimNation square, naming your city, and appointing yourself as mayor, and you're off. These cities can even interact to some extent, exchanging surplus energy, water, and such for cash. SimNation is divided up into numerous smaller square segments, yet each of these in fact can hold an entire city of your making. Immediately as you begin the game, you're presented with a view of SimNation, though it's not much of a nation at first. One of the biggest changes to the gameplay of SimCity 4 is evident from the start. SimCity 4 is similar to its predecessors, but it offers a number of interesting new features. On the other hand, it's still a complex and detailed strategy game that can entertain you for hours on end and even teach you a thing or two. However, due to the presence of some stability and performance issues, as well as a few noticeably lacking features, SimCity 4 doesn't seem as polished as it could have been. The game does have a number of new features and a few additional layers of depth on top of the preceding SimCity 3000, and its visuals have been impressively overhauled. And SimCity 4 for the most part isn't a huge departure from its predecessors, either, not that it really needs to be. About 15 years have passed since the original SimCity was first released, and while the classic SimCity series is still well known among PC gamers, it has only reached its fourth full installment.

SimCity was challenging and plausibly realistic and even had a surprising amount of humor, especially for a game with a seemingly mundane subject. Long before game designer Will Wright created the best-selling computer game of all time, The Sims, he created SimCity, an innovative game with a clear, compelling premise: You're the mayor, and your goal is to plan a city from the ground up (and from a godlike vantage point) and then nurture it, eventually turning what starts as a sleepy little town into a bustling metropolis.
