Hi there,
I just bought Sim City 4 for the Mac, and I would like to express a bit of disappointment in the product which Aspyr delivered. I understand that this is a port of the PC version, but it would have been nice to see the company work a bit on making it a more successful port.
For example, the minimum system requirements state that one needs a 500 mhz G3 processor, a Radeon 7500 or better, and 256mb of RAM. Looking at these minimum requirements, I figured that it would be no problem getting this game to run smoothly on my 1.2ghz G4 processor (more than twice the speed of the needed processor), 768mb of RAM (three times the amount of needed memory), and Radeon 9200 (much newer video card than the 7500). However, to my dismay, performance is pretty abysmal once the city in the game reaches any sort of decent size. I've tried stepping down the resolution and color depth, along with detail settings, and this helps SLIGHTLY, but not much. The game is supposed to more fun as you go along, but it is more of a damper once one gets into the game as it becomes unplayable.
My complaint with Aspyr is twofold. First of all, look at my system and look at the minimum requirements. My system is not fast enough to realy produce an enjoyable exerience, and I am CERTAIN that someone with the minimum requirements, even with all the settings as low as they go, could not have an enjoyable experience with the game either. This, in my opinion, is very deceptive marketing as I'm sure children received this game during the holidays to play on a computer which cannot really handle the game.
Second, I feel like Aspyr made a rushed port of the PC game, with little to no optimizations for the Mac platform. For example, to learn the game, I took one of the tutorials included with it. All was well until the tutorial instructed me to right click. Considering that Aspyr publishes so many mac games, I would have thought they would know the average mac really only has a one button mouse. On top of that, the game didn't give me the option to use "control + click" instead, and that combination of keys does not work.
Aspyr rushed this game out the door, with very little testing or recoding. I'm not sure if the problems I talked about are patchable, but if so, when can mac users expect an update in order to receive more of a quality product from Aspyr? Furthermore, can it be expected that all future PC ports from Aspyr will be of similiar low quality? If so, I would like to let a few magazines and websites know so we can try to avoid rush job PC ports.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
