I like to just watch my city work, sometimes - an experience helped by being able to drop in named Sims, either created specifically or imported from The Sims, and watch as they go about their daily lives in great detail. SimCity 4 is also the series' best ant farm, the sprite-based graphics causing the game to run slowly at the time but now making it crisp, beautiful and able to flood the screen with sims. Soon you'll have a sprawling metropolis - and there's space to let it sprawl - which is bustling with life.

Zone some residential, but now your residents need jobs zone some industrial for them to work in, but now there's crime and pollution and fire place down police stations and fire stations and parks but it's never quite perfect, and they need shops to shop in, and- Let's start a new neighbourhood over there, on that hill. Polished over the previous three games, SimCity 4 offers the perfect example of the series' system of competing needs. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.

Sim city 4