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System Requirements

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 16
Date: November 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The system requirements for this Mac game are available at:
[...]

System Requirements:

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later
CPU Processor: PowerPC G4 or later
CPU Speed: 700 MHz or faster
Memory: 256 MB or higher
Hard Disk Space: 2.0 GB free disk space
Video Card (ATI): Radeon 7500 or better
Video Card (NVidia): GeForce2 MX or better
Video Memory (VRam): 32 MB or higher
Media Required: DVD Drive

Not worth it!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ok so i was a fan of Sim City 2000 which I found a demo of on a CD I didnt know i had. So I put it in and played Sim City 2000...and played and played and so on so I soon got the full thing. I became addicted to it. When Sim City 4 came out, i wanted it so much but I only had a mac. When it came out I bought like the first day! When I played I was sooooo dissapointed. nothing seemed to work right, the airplanes shadows became square and the streams on the airplanes was stretched all the way across, it kept crashing, and the industrial zone turned white, edge scrolling messed up sooooo slooooow. When I played it on a PC at my friends house, it was beutiful! Not a single bug! I ditched the game and played 2000 again finding it much better. Now I only play for like 10 minutes before getting bored. Seiously on this, NOT worth spending $40-$50 on this pathetic game. Maxis should be ashamed of themselves to take so much care in the PC games then throw it on a mac bugs and all. NOT worth it! Keep your money while you can! In other words, it doesn't take good graphics to make a good game. So get with it Maxis!!

Neat game, but slow...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: February 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

On a PowerBook G4 667MHz, it works *pretty* well to start with... But as the size of the city grows, it gets slower and slower until it's a bit annoying to use. However, the graphics are great, and they've added a lot of interesting tidbits to it.

If you're a Sim City fan and enjoyed the previous three versions, then you'll like this one.. However, don't bother buying it if you don't have a modern enough graphics card/computer.

Good game but minus some performace problems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: January 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I had the most advanced Apple, that is until the new aluminum ones came out, and I have had trouble with performance. My computer is full of memory and has the best graphics card apple offers. When my city was still small I would have problems when I scroll with the map becoming segmented. That is to say that as I scroll portions of the map would show up in their own "window" of sorts completely out of place. This detracted seriously from the playability of the game. If not for that the game would be more enjoyable.

Don't hesitate to buy SimCity 4. It's worth it!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: February 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

[Edit]Two things you need to know about Sim City 4:

1) update it from files easily found on the Internet.
2) Get the Sim City "Rush Hour" expansion pack. Don't even consider not getting the expansion pack. It completes the game, and makes it all worthwhile.

This is an incredibly good game, and it runs incredibly well on a modest Mac. The horror stories come from those who did not update it or buy Rush Hour. Mine never quits or crashes. Sim City 3 still has a certain charm, but this is a far better game. There are commands you can learn from the keyboard that enable things you can't do with the mouse. The manuals (when you combine them both) give you all you need to know.

and now, for my original review below: [/edit]

SimCity 4 has already kept me entertained for a month! I've pulled 36 hour and 48 hour days just to play this game! It's that engrossing. This is, in my opinion, the best version yet, and I've spent more time than I care to admit on all of them. I still have favorite cities saved from every version of Sim City, though I don't enjoy the early one as much anymore. This new version finally gets most things right. Now the correlations between budgets, taxes, zoning, population, land value, and so forth all seem to make much more sense than in previous versions, as if someone finally got serious and decided just how much things REALLY should cost, and how much a school or park really should affect the desirability of a plot of land. You no longer need dozens of water pumps or half-a-dozen power plants to keep things going, and roads are much easier to place; unlevel terrain is more of a problem for water pipes, though. It was harder at first to get a city off the ground, but now that I've learned the tricks, I can have a thriving city in an hour or two. Still, I'll be up all night trying to develop each new city. There is always something to do, something you wish you'd done earlier, and you never get the time to just explore the city as you may wish, for there is always an emergency to tend to. Sometimes I just ignore all that and enjoy my city.

People complain about the lack of support for BAT files for Macintosh, but if you go to the user forums, you can find ways to make them work--maybe not perfectly, but mostly. Sure, we don't get to build our own, but at least we get to see what others have built. I'm more interested in the city itself.

Region play has made SC4 more interesting by an order of magnitude. Now those neighbor deals are part of the strategy, and you're controlling both ends of the deal! You can build bustling regions this way. There are cheats built into the game, and you can easily locate them online, but honestly you do not need them to stay afloat. I used them for the first few cities as I learned the ropes; now I don't need them at all. In fact, it's more fun without them. Don't worry about the horror stories or the disappointments. Aspyr did a grand job of porting this to the Mac. Long time Mac users know that we're not ever going to see all the games and features that PC users get. It's just the economics of scale. I'm thrilled with the fact that I get to play this on my Mac at all, and I don't have to go beg time from my son to use his PC. After all, SC4 keeps me so busy that he'd never get his PC back! Rather than looking at the lack of the building/architecture tools as a deficit, look at SC4 as a bonus. It really is a bonus on a Mac, and we really do get to use almost everything the PC users get. Yeah, it's the old "glass half full" or "glass half-empty" thing, but I promise you this glass is plenty full, and you'll have a hard time drinking it all in.

No question; this is the best version yet, and it's worth every penny for both SC4 and Rush Hour expansion pack. Support development for the Mac! Sim City is one of our old classics, and SC4 upholds the tradition of raising the bar and keeping it fun.

Shooshie

Never buy anything from Aspyr!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: June 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you ever get this game running, you will see the numerous bugs (like the glowing buildings), the horrible speed on machines that well exceed the "system requirements", and countless options taken out from the PC version. The biggest bug though is that it will crash on many machines. Aspyr has a patch to download on their website for this, but it requires the serial number from the CD case, which is a problem because they shipped thousands of copies with invalid serial numbers. They have no tech support to speak of, which is fitting I guess for their horrible products.

In short, Aspyr is a crooked organization that may be in line for some class action lawsuits, and I wouldn't have paid one cent for their typically worthless mac port of Simcity 4 if I had known anything about Aspyr beforehand.

Sim City 4 - Best sim so far.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 18
Date: June 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Probably the best designed Sim City game yet. Extremely enjoyable and easy to learn. Make sure you have a fast computer though!

Much Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: September 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

It runs a but slow on my Dual G4 800 with 1.2 GB ram and 64 MG GeForce2 video card. Aside from speed issues, the game is great with excellent graphics and gameplay. I recommend. SC3 sucked, and I nevered played it. However, I have been playing SC4 quite a bit.

SimCity 4 - the best SimCity game ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: June 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I own this game since from August 2004 and when I played it, I totally loved it. I mean, this game has much more opportunities and control for me to take the power with, comparing with the SimCity 2000. In SimCity 2000, you can only manage the region-wide controls as the fire department, police stations, and hospital's budgets and so on. Also, you get few rewards in that game. But now, it's SimCity 4, you get the ability to control more than ONE cities, and you can finally make neighboring cities to exhange some deals and so on. You can even design your own map of the cities, like the quote from SimCity 4's game trailer, "Build the city of your dreams." This is the best game and if you're looking for the total power and control of the cities and building them from your own mind, SimCity 4 is the best game to own!

One Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is simply a must have. Yes, at times it does have a slow gameplay, but, for the most part is is smooth running. When you do have bigger cities, in order to keep it running smoothly, you must lower some graphic quality, ex. not have high building variety, low amount of cars, etc. I've played SC4 on my friends' PCs, and yes, it can run slowly too. If you want a fast running Sim City, you are just going to have to live with out the high intensity graphics.

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