For those of you new to the series, SimCity allows players to build and run a city from the ground up. The game has no logical ending but rather the challenge lies in balancing the needs of the City's citizens, commercial interests, industry and city finances so your city grows and expands.

'Look guys, see how they have now given us a huge regional map to play on. Now we can play multiple cities. Heres a nice spot for the city of Gameplanet right next to the coast. Wow, the 3D environment has even got clouds and waves on the beach and hey look at all the wild animals. No Gunner watch out with that earth mover! Don't you guys have any appreciation of nature?'

You start the game by chosing either to play one of the tutorial areas or any of the other areas in the large regional map. You can elect to play the map as is, or in God mode where you can terraform the land to your chosing. The tools themselves vary from raising and lowering the terrain to creating deep rift valleys and asteroid craters. There is a neat feature that allows you to automatically align your revised map to the others in the surrounding region. You can zoom in and out as you desire as well as rotate the map 360 degrees. With a large population and a lot of animations in effect this action can stutter a bit even on the fastest of machines, however considering the amount of action happening it is understanderble.

You start by laying out the roads and place zones for residential, industrial and commercial activities. Depending on how attractive these are to the citizens they will arrive, build their homes, start their business's and pay taxes. All of this is done in the wonderful 3D environment that also includes both day and night sequences (car headlights and streetlights are excellent touches and there are rumours that zombies can be spotted in the graveyard at night).

The economic model in the game is extremely complex but very intuitive in it's delivery. Everything you build or change has some effect - either directly to your budget or how the people in your city feel. If you were to build industry further away from the residential areas the traffic during rush hour can become a problem, and people will become unhappy with the travel times. Put it closer to the houses and pollution will become an issue. These problems can be allieviated by building better roads and transport systems or instituting clean air regulations all of which costs money.

Commercial and Industry types are in part determined by the education level of the people in your city. By building schools, colleges and universities you can increase the level of education and attract more of the high tech industries to your town. Once again this all takes money and throughout the game you will find yourself referring to the the town balance sheet where you fine tune income of expenditure in an endeavour to keep yourself solvent.

'See we have got our first thousand victims, er I mean townspeople and they want to build us a mayoral mansion. Mind you they are complaining a bit about the water shortage and the amount of garbage on the streets......Well yes Phantom I suppose if all we can afford is a city dump I suppose it will have to do, however is it advisable to put it right next to the towns water supply?..'

As you progress through the game, your happy townspeople reward you with gifts of a mansion, a statue in your name and community projects such as churches and universities that will further enhace the community as a whole.

A city runs on water and power and these are one of the prime headaches as the mayor of the city. You have limited options starting off with income only allowing basic wind power generation and simple water towers. As you progress you gain access to more sophisticated utilities such as gas generation, coal fired power stations and ultimately nuclear power. It's not just a simple matter of building the facility - you also need to lay pipes and power lines to your city areas to ensure they all get their fair share. Not anough power will see industry buildings fall into disrepair and not enough water will result in hightened fire danger.

'Fire, fire!....what do you mean we have not built a fire station yet? Quick slap one down and send an engine off to the fire......man look at that engine go... see how the fireman jump out and start directing water onto the fires?'