On the GDC 2012 EA and Maxis have shown a new version of SimCity. Simcity 4
is the newest version of the game since 2004, offering a sort-of-isometric view
and real 3D objects ingame. The game depth was really high but not higher than
in Simcity 3000 (published in 1998). I’m a big fan, who has played the original.

The original game was released in 1989, the very first Simcity for PC, and playable on a 286 at 8MHz on a monochrome Hercules monitor. The game fits on a floppy disk with 720KB. The Simcity 4 Deluxe edition (released 2003) comes on a DVD and using 8.2GB HDD space and needs a dualcore CPU at 2.6GHz. The graphics card should be at least meet the level of a 8800GT to run smooth!

The other versions in between (Societies and SimCity Creator for consoles) don’t count as such as their game depth is stripped down vastly compared to the original SimCity…

I developed a taste for the game and played it for hours on different platforms and in almost all flavors. Maxis, the origin of all Sim-Games with Will Wright as the father of SimCity have created a game that’s always behaving different each game session you play. That’s real cool and promises hors and hours of game time!

This is one of the best news from EA since long time and I am greatly looking forward to this game. It’s been 9 years since an overhaul has been announced and in 2013, when the game is expected to release, I’ll be one of the Sim-ianers to play the game and again spend hours in concepting the City of my dreams… with the new 3D look and the modern hardware, the in-game experience may become even stronger.

There are not much games I am looking forward to see… but this one is definitely worthwile waiting for.

To sweeten the waiting time, I’ve added some more pics for you:

Of course these are only concept art pictures but hey… if the game looks similar to this then it’s gonna rock as hell!

There isn’t much known of the gameplay yet but the trailer looks promising: