After 'Rollercoaster Tycoon 2' previously, this is likely my second-most played game ever. In total I made multiple regions with dozens of cities each, one bigger than the next. Like 'Rollercoaster', I have been playing 'SimCity 4' with it's add-on for as long as the game is out and pretty much non-stop. Still, I only recently broke my record for biggest city I ever made, maxing out at about 420,000 inhabitants, the record for my biggest region remains at about 1.5 million so far though.
The most literal translation of the city-building genre, it's predecessors even defined it, the objective is simply to make a big city. Infrastructure, zoning, utilities and recreation are all on the plate of the player, along with tax and budget management. The word 'ploppable' originates from this series. The game also gives the player the opportunity to create their own landscapes so their vision can be realized as realistically as possible.
After all these years, there still hasn't been a game in it's genre that bested SimCity 4 and I have given up hope that there will ever be one. The game has already been on many of my computers, and it seems like I will have to take the discs with me and install them on every new computer I'll have indefinitely. Not really a problem though.
