The Canadian Middle Finger... in your city!
SimCity 4 is a city building simulator. As the mayor of a plot of land of various sizes, the goal is to build something that you want. There are no goals in this game – so you can build a city that rivals New York City with a massive subway system, massive elevated highways and high density buildings. At the same time, you can build smaller towns that rely mainly on farming, with undivided streets and wind turbines powering everything. The sandbox style of SimCity allows you to build whatever your imagination allows, although there are some pressures such as managing finances and also six gauges under the City Opinion Polls that will judge your management of the city.
At the same time, there is a God Mode tool where you will be allowed to terraform the plot of land you chose such that it has valleys, plateaus, mountains and other geographical features. If you prefer a flat piece of land, which makes building a city much simpler, you can level the land.
SimCity 4 is extremely addictive because of the ability for you to see your city grow. You start with an empty plot of land, and from there, you will make decisions that affect your city. If you managed it well, you will see your city grow taller and mightier. Your advisors will heap praise on you if you do it well. Conversely, if you mess up, you will see your city, finances and rating go down in smoke. The latter situation is not that big of a problem because you can level your city off and start afresh. Or you can create disasters such as earthquakes and take revenge on your people.
The game plays very well on a standard netbook. Integrated graphics can pump out at least 20fps under the default graphics settings, although it might be subject to slowdowns when you zoom in and out. One problem is that the game does not have native support for widescreen resolutions, so you can either play the game with a shrunk 1024×768 resolution, or play it with a 800×600 resolution without stretch using this hack. One problem is that this game does crash to desktop quite a bit, so it would be prudent for you to try to fix it using the methods outlined in the SimCity 4 Wiki, or have an external autosaving tool.
SimCity 4 is something that is still loved by many people, and is kept alive by the large modding community. This is a full fledged game that plays great on your netbook, and so if you like this genre of games, you should check it out.
Like
Runs great on a netbook
Fantastic game despite age
Lots of mods to satisfy your every craving.
Dislike
Crashes to desktop sometimes
Verdict
If you like city building simulations and sandbox games, this is one of the most interesting ones to try.
Gameplay: Excellent
Graphics: Good (20+ fps with slowdowns at times)
Work needed to get game to play: Moderate (fixing crashes; resolution issues)
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I love this game!!! There’s an easy way to play in native resolution without squashing or black boxes. Just change your SC4 shortcut to something like this:
“C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe” -CustomResolution:enabled -r1024x600x32
On my Gateway LT4004u netbook, with an Atom N2600 CPU and GMA 3600 GPU (and 2 GB of RAM), I’m forced to play using software rendering, because the graphics drivers are just awful. The bottom half of the screen is completely unusable in hardware mode.
By the way, do you use hardware or software rendering by default?
20fps sounds horrid even for a strategy game.
makes me miss themepark… still can’t figure how to make it work on dosbox though. i followed all the recommended settings for themepark and all.
If you have a 1024×728 res monitor its runs great!