I like Sim City 4 Deluxe. It’s the kind of thing you either like or you don’t. If planning and developing a city doesn’t sound like fun to you, skip it.
But if it sounds cool, you gotta give it a try!
There’s the tedium of laying down the infrastructure and giving the citizens the things they need to grow and become better educated. You grow your city and get your baseball stadiums, federal prisons, universities etc.
What really gets me off is building the mass transit systems for when my city becomes densely populated. I like laying out the subways and busstops and trying to get the Sims to use them. There’s a ‘route query’ tool that lets you click on a building (say a big residential building) and it tells you how many Sims are going to work by car, bus, train etc. And it shows you where they’re going, so you can try to figure out where to place your mass transit stops. Once you get your subway and train stations cooking, you can build an above ground monorail.
Then you can just sit back and check it out, watch it run really smooth. Like I said, that really gets me off for some reason.
You can build up the neighboring regions so that some regions are only agricultural or industrial and so the sims in your major city have some place to go and work and the economies get interconnected.
I think it’s really cool and you can literally lose yourself for hours at a time in this game. If you’re in a bad mood you can drop the budget for sanitation and police down to nothing and watch crime take over your city and trash pile up in the streets... Or create your own little police state with a high population of police officers.
That sounds like a game for me.
When I was playing GTA-SA I wanted to build my own city. LOL.. It would be cool if you could build a large 3-d city and walk or drive through it.
I guess we have to wait a decade for computers to catch up with a dreamer