Mac game publisher Aspyr Media noted Thursday that its long-awaited Mac conversion of the hugely popular strategy game SimCity 4 is now in duplication. It should be appearing on store shelves soon. The company announced earlier this month that SimCity 4 had reached its Final Candidate development milestone.
Developed by Maxis and published for the PC by Electronic Arts, SimCity 4 is the latest evolution of the game that lets you create and run a simulated city of your own design. SimCity 4’s Mac conversion was handled by i5works, the same developer Aspyr Media previously collaborated with to bring Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon to the Mac. SimCity 4 sports new simulation and graphics engines, new “regional” game play, and the ability to track the lives of individual Sims — the virtual inhabitants of this computerized metropolis.
SimCity 4 lets users design the topographical features of their city by creating mountains, valleys, forests and wildlife, but there’s more, too — rather than just making an individual city, you can create a metropolitan area of interconnected urban landscapes. You can also personalize Sims that occupy your city or cities, and decide on how to improve your metropolis by seeing whether the Sims are happy, sad, angry or frustrated with what’s around them.
System requirements for SimCity 4 call for Mac OS X 10.2 or later; G3/500MHz or faster; ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce2 MX or better video card with 32MB VRAM; 1GB hard disk space; 256MB RAM.