Sim City 4: Electric Avenue

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 22, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 18 comments

I’m playing Sim City 4, working on a small town and trying to create a close aproximation of the type of area where I live: A modest town with rural areas and some smallish farms about. Here is the main part of town:


Click for a view of the whole city, including the power supply.

All of that, plus a housing plan, plus a few farms and an industrial sector, are all supported by two wind turbines. Yeah right. This is a town of almost a thousand people, and still they are only using about 50% of the total output of these turbines.

Sim City 4 is billed as a “simulation” game, but clearly it has more in common with Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft. You know: fantasy games.

 


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18 thoughts on “Sim City 4: Electric Avenue

  1. It’s the world as it ought to be, you know. A world where wind power is actually practical as a primary source of energy (because as we all know, the wind blows 24 hours a day, 365 days per year) and a world in which Godzilla can show up to tromp all over your town!

    That’s the world I want to live in! (Especially the Godzilla part. Can we send Godzilla to Berkeley for a visit?)

  2. Evil Otto says:

    “Can we send Godzilla to Berkeley for a visit?”

    That’s all we need… Godzilla stoned out of his mind after eating all those hippies.

  3. foobario says:

    It says something about the saturation of this whole Web 2.0 thing that when I looked at the picture of your town I tried to drag it over so I could see what was beyond the edges… don’t they have simGoogleMaps yet?

  4. Hey, in the “disasters” list, does Sim City 4 allow you to trigger global warming? Raise the sea level by 20 meters? That’d be really cool.

    …or warm, as the case may be.

  5. Shamus says:

    Let’s see….

    UFO, Giant Robots, Volcano, Meteor, Lightening, Earthquake, Robosaurus Rex, Fire….

    Nope. No global warming.

    On the upside: Meteor and Lightening are REALLY fun to use. >:)

  6. Dan says:

    Dude,
    Your little dice roller told me I had rolled a natural twenty but the die was clearly marked as a 19.
    You had better get your act straight and start running this site like a proffesional Dude. Don’t make me bust balls.

  7. I think Simcity 3000 had flooding and global warming scenarios.

    I don’t know if they had Ray Nagin, though.

  8. J Greely says:

    My favorite un-sim-ly moment in a “simulation” game was the Civ 3 game where I set off 270 nukes in one turn, bombing every other civilization back to the stone age. This nuclear winter triggered massive global warming that took fifteen minutes to resolve, every turn for the rest of the game. My troops, however, could freely move through the wastelands and take over the surviving villages.

    -j

  9. 10Kan says:

    I remember when a friend of mine in college got Sim City 4. One day, he was showing me how he could call the giant robot disaster and then control its movement. Upon seeing this, a possibility immediately occurred to me;

    “Can you use the robot to attack rioters?”

    Alas, the answer was no. SimDystopia does not yet exist.

  10. guy says:

    simcity 2000 was the one that allowed local flooding or widespread due to hurricane flooding

  11. marat says:

    why are you limeted to how many hoes and cinstrucksion in SIM CITY 4?

  12. brookswift says:

    two wind turbines is perfectly reasonable… if you assume average windspeed of 150mph.

  13. cloud9 says:

    Not sure if this is still active – or if anyone else besides me will ever look at this again. But one more thing to add – In sc4 the the capacity of houses is much larger than it would be in real life – if you open up one of those §§§ houses, you’ll see that it can support 14 or 15 residents. The §§ houses support around 10 – 14 people. So if that town were real, it would only contain about 500 people at the most.

    Also if build up one of those tiles, it’s possible to create a city with twice the population density of Tokyo, the most densely populated place in the world.

  14. Steve says:

    Meteors sound fun…A world in which alternative energy sources are effective. Sounds like that fantasy world where Godzilla rampages destroys those cities.

  15. Chris says:

    Very nice, but I was just wondering.. it seems like your expenses are higher than your income?

  16. Andrew says:

    Which then raises the question: would you take economically feasible wind turbines, if there was a raging godzilla attached to the deal?

  17. AndyL says:

    Actually … that doesn’t look that unreasonable.

    Assuming you’ve got good steady wind, It’s not ridiculous for a turbine to put out five million KWh annually.

    That should be roughly a thousand customers worth. It really doesn’t look like you’ve got a thousand families and businesses in that picture.

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