Then again, they also have no qualms with setting fire to trees and wind generators that have already been set up on the map, so maybe they're terraformers, or even Abusive Precursors. Or maybe they exist just to Troll the player.
Annoying Video Game Helper: Right after you load up a city in Easy mode, your city planner in SimCity 4 Rush Hour, Neil Fairbanks, tends to pile obvious advice (e.g. create new zones to expand your city) on you in the form of multiple popup windows appearing in sequence:
New Residential Development Stymied By Limited Choices * click* (window dismissed) Sims Scout for Office Advantages
*click* (window dismissed)
Industry Needs Room To Expand
*clickclickclickclick*
Awesome Music: From the SNES port of the original onwards when the games started shipping with background music. See here for the full list.
Breather Level: The Las Vegas scenario in SimCity 2000. All you have to do is lower the crime rate by building lots of police stations and keeping them fully funded. And with all the money you rake in from legalized gambling, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just simply use the map to target high crime areas and build stations in those areas. Also, this is the the one scenario in 2000 that doesn't require you to reach a certain population level, giving you one less thing to worry about. Once your crime rate is below the required level within the time period, you'll win.
Catharsis Factor: Nothing is more relaxing than building up a city, then imagining your rival/enemy living in one of the residences, and then unleashing a UFO attack or meteor strike on said residence.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Ask anyone who has succeeded (or at least attempted) at achieving the "Megalopolis" goal in the SNES port will tell you that the best map to use is # 061. It has the least amount of water and the river is mostly out of the way in the lower half of the map; thus giving plenty of build space. There's also a small island where you can safely put your airport to negate the effects of pollution and plane crashes.
There is a map in the SNES port that has no water at all called "Freeland", but you only can use the map if you've completed all scenarios, and being listed as a scenario, gifts are disabled in Freeland.
Trucks, especially trailer trucks, in Rush Hour. Running into them is instant death. While the police siren can cause them to move out of the way, trailer trucks leave their trailers behind, and those still kill you.
From the Disasters side: Floods and Hurricanes, if you don't know how to halt them.
Earthquakes, especially in the SNES port. Since this disaster can destroy buildings and start fires practically everywhere on the map, they can be a very big headache (unless you have a small village that's easier to focus on). The San Francisco scenario is scripted to have the first major earthquake at its highest intensity, which could be problematic if you lack fire coverage.
Nuclear Meltdowns. Not only do they start fires, but the loss of a power plant can also cripple your city's power supply if you don't have a backup source. Also, they spread radiation around a certain area of the map (which cannot be removed by you), rendering those spots unbuildable for "generations" (according to certain game manuals).
Tornadoes, due to their difficult to predict pathing and destruction they leave behind. If it hits where you have a lot of buildings, you might need some time to rebuild, particularly if you're lacking in fire department coverage.
UFO attacks in the SNES port, which are exclusive to the Las Vegas scenario. Not only do they destroy random buildings, the fact they leave behind fires could put you in a bad predicament if you want to pass the scenario. You better hope they don't destroy any Fire Departments you have on the map!
2013 for having a severely botched release due to a variety of technical and PR issues (see its page for details) and being a Creator Killer for Maxis as a result.
Franchise Original Sin: Every version of SimCity has a few quirks that make aspects of the simulation not run quite as they should. They were always there, different for each game, but SimCity 2013 alerts you when something is wrong, including when the error is entirely due to bugs; earlier games would have other bugs, but the game was less likely to berate the user for them. All the alerts in 2013 create noise that make it easy to miss actual real problems. Tying into this, the series was always guilty of not being able to simulate certain intricacies and glossing over them instead; for one example, 2013 actually tries to make fire fighters, police, etc respond to disasters and path their way to them, removing the "gloss over them" part of the sim, but in many circumstances it doesn't work as expected and causes more frustration than before. The agent system discussed under Scrappy Mechanic is another example of the same thing.
In the original for the Mac, typing FUND gives you money. There's no limit. "imacheat" does in the PC version of SimCity 2000 as well. FUND is still in that game, too, but now it gives you money in the form of a bond with a ridiculously high interest rate. Then again, go look at Good Bad Bugs to see how this too can be exploited.
Disaster Relief in 3000 could be exploited for tons of free money with a handful of cheats. At the start of the game (i.e. before your city has anything that you don't want destroyed), turn on the "iamweak" cheat (new buildings cost nothing), then do the "all buildings available" cheat, and use it to build a ton of Space Ports, Fusion Plants, or anything else that's expensive (the more so, the better). Then set them all ablaze with the disaster menu and watch the free sympathy money roll in.
The Toll Booth in 4 can be used to generate a mountain of revenue, as described in detail here.
With the Rush Hour expansion, players can constantly repeat a mission that involves catching a robber (assuming they don't unlock the Deluxe Police Station) for easy money.
Plopping a military base at the edge of your city makes it easy to get money in SimCity 4 with the Rush Hour expansion. Simply keep redoing the "drive the tank to the edge of the map" mission for 70,000 simoleons a pop.
Gameplay Derailment: The SNES version's "million dollar cheat code" described below. While some like it because the sky's the limit and allows building your dream city with ease, others feel that it negates the intended skill behind the game, which is to keep taxes and expenditures at rates that will allow for sufficient funds without people leaving your city.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In fact, Simtropolis is a Canadian fan site (the biggest one), and there are enormous German modding teams to prove this trope true.
2000 included a joke "cheat" that gave you a 25% APR loan, which is obviously a bad idea, except the game calculates regular loan APR based on the size of your city and outstanding loan APRs, so if you get two 25% loans and ask for a regular loan, the calculation overflows and you get a negative APR loan; your yearly "payments" are in negative dollars, so you gain money. This bug was removed in the Special Edition of 2000.
There actually is a version of the overflow cheat that wasn't fixed. If you type in "FUND" and accept loans until you can't any more (roughly 50 times) and repay back three or so, it overflows as well. However, this becomes something of a Game-Breaking Bug as over time you'll make less money as the compound interest is catching up to the negative one.
The "Million-dollar cheat code" from the SNES port is actually a bug. First you spend all your money, including on something that generates expenditures. Next you reduce the tax rate and expenditures on the tax screen to 0%. For some reason, holding the L button prevents you from gaining/losing money from the fiscal budget at the end of the year; when you go back to the tax screen and increase the expenditure rates but keep the tax at 0%, you'll get a net loss. Once you release the L button after the calendar rolls over to January, you'll have a negative bank balance. This is instantly pushed it to the maximum value, which was truncated to $999999.
The L button somehow delays scripted events until you release the button. For example, the scenario where you must deal with a nuclear power plant meltdown can be averted by holding L, bulldozing all of the existing nuclear plants, releasing the button (there will be no meltdown as there's nothing to explode), then building new ones.
In 4, cutting all funding to the Waste-to-Energy plant will make it stop producing power and only give minimal air pollution, but it will still consume garbage as normal.
SimCity 2000 Network Edition was a network multiplayer version of SimCity 2000 that only had a limited run in 1996 due to being a commercial failure. While the game has never been rereleased, EA would try something similar with SimCity (2013) with disastrous results at launch, to the point they made multiplayer an option and can now be played alone, but this was too late as it effectively killed the series.
In the Boston 2010 scenario, there's a scenario which you have to fix a nuclear meltdown during a football championship. One year later... (Granted the nuclear meltdown in the Tohoku earthquake was caused by an earthquake, but ouch.)
Clean energy (such as windmills) in Societies has the BP logo on it due to Product Placement ... which is suddenly much different after BP's environmental fiasco.
In 3000 you can build and then bulldoze the World Trade Center. You could even have a plane crash into them in pre-2001 versions (though this was obviously taken out with every new version and game after 2001).
Also in 3000, the ticker "Hang Up And Drive" Say Citizens Against Cell Phones isn't so humorous now that people using smartphones while driving has become a serious issue that has taken many lives in some countries.
Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the fake radio commercials in Streets of SimCity is for a monster truck rally promising an "invasion of the killer tires." Sounds like the plot to Rubber.
Just Here for Godzilla: Avid players of The Sims 2 have picked up SimCity 4 just so they can make new maps for that game, due to neighbourhood maps there being made from city save files.
"Reticulating splines", a joke termnote The developers have stated that it's just technical-sounding jargon meant to sound important from the original Loading Screen became a franchise-wide Running Gag (parodied with things like "Gesticulating mimes") and appears as a Shout-Out in other games, such as World of Goo and Minecraft.
The city advisors in 2000. The Transportation Adviser always took any funding cuts very badly. "YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!◊"
This one became something of an Ascended Meme in the 2013 release, with a mission given by Police to expand their department entitled "You won't regret this".
And all those llamas...
The game's name itself. In other games that involve some sort of townbuilding, people often describe the careful placement of buildings for aesthetics rather than optimization (for example, placing Houses in rectangular blocks, rather than in less intrusive positions or as part of a wall, in Age of Empires II) as "doing a SimCity".
The "zzz" sound you hear when you put down a power line in Sim City 2000. Although it is also the sound that the alien monsters' ray guns make.
The "WHUMP-PACHING" sound you got placing a government building in 4.
For the 2013 game, since the background music variety depends on your population, hearing the opening notes of Town and Out signals a milestone, not to mention having three additional (and more pleasant) tracks added to the jukebox.
The Obliterate City option in 4 allows players to wipe a region free of all traces of civilization, letting them keep hard terraforming work and whatnot in case they make an irreparable mistake in city design. Invoking said power is no minor affair, though. First, bursts of light emerge in random locations of the city, obliterating small sections of it. Then, the winds begin to howl, the sky begins to flash, the ground begins to tremble and roar, and motes of light begin to rise from the surface of the Earth. The screen finally turns a blinding white, and from within the noise emerges a wail, a scream, of something Sim and yet not. All goes silent, the blinding light subsides, and all traces of Simkind are gone. Primordial Dream plays over the empty landscape.
Busy wiping out city.
The radioactivity issues in various installments, but especially the way they're portrayed in 3000; if a nuclear reactor is destroyed in a disaster or explodes from overuse (one could argue this reflects poorly on the realism with which nuclear power is portrayed, but that's another story) then a large area surrounding the remains of the reactor is littered with these strange radioactivity symbols implying radiation poisoning, in which case the whole area becomes abandoned, and if you zoom in on it you hear an eerie high-pitched noise accompanied by the clicking of a geiger counter.
Made from crude oil and metal ore, one must wonder what exactly Omega is... Leading to some very scary fan interpretations.
The song Primordial Dream from SimCity 4, which is unchecked by default is an unsettling ambient piece which goes from unsettling to somewhat eerie. Worst yet, if you check it then it's the only song which plays, and sometimes it just checks itself by accident...
From 3000 there's "Illumination" which is also similarly eerie.
The monsters in 2000. Watching them blink at you with that red eye is creepy.
And speaking of 2000, most disasters in that game are accompanied by an ominous tornado/civil defense siren in the background. Ditto for 3000.
The SNES port of the original SimCity is largely considered to be superior to the PC version, substantially improving on the graphics while adding background music, an advisor (Dr. Wright), and reward buildings, features which would all eventually be ported back into the PC games.
The Windows version of SimCity 2000 is consider the best version of the game due to the fact that it has smoother graphics and 4 zoom options as opposed to 3 in the original Macintosh version or the concurrent DOS and Amiga ports.
Any of the console/handheld ports of 2000 (special mention going to the Super Nintendo, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance versions of the game), including the Nintendo DSSimCity 2000-disguised-as-3000. Poor control response, slow save loading times, and overall sluggish performance are to blame. Technically, this is caused by the port target having less processing power and memory than Maxis' initial platform - a 25MHz 386DX for PC, or 16MHz Motorola 68030 for Mac, with at least 8MB of RAM was the absolute minimum. Most of the handhelds and consoles the game was ported to had nowhere as much RAM and processing power.
Also, the Mac ports of 3000 and 4. These were not done by Maxis in-house, and it shows. 3000 left the PC interface intact rather than modifying it for Mac, and was missing several features like the Building Architect tool. 4 likewise was missing several official tools the PC version had as well as playing extremely slowly and routinely exhibiting the kind of behavior the PC version only saw if there was a plug-in conflict - running the Windows version in an emulator was more stable.
So Bad, It's Good: SimCopter. The cars look like they were made by kindergartners with construction paper, the "people" were two-faced, gibberish-speaking... things, and the gameplay was simple, repetitive, and full of escort missions. However, the game is still fun - even now. The ability to import cities from SC 2000, have them rendered in 3D, then fly around them, was amazing in its time, and still hasn't been done on that level with any other game.
"Stop Having Fun" Guys: The modding community for 4 takes itself very seriously. Creating buildings that deviate from real-world structures may result in hard-core designers criticizing your designs and ideas.
SimCity Creator's "Global Warming Age" in Challenge Mode. If you didn't set your facilities correctly, you're pretty much screwed. The Moneybags Cheat tends to help though...
"Dullsville" in the original game; turning a backwater town into a megalopolis in 30 years and with a meager $5,000 initial budget. A population of 100,000 citizens is hard to achieve even in sandbox mode starting with $20,000.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Societies was substantially less detailed than its predecessors, and not developed by Maxis. Fans and reviewers were not impressed.
In the French translation of 3000, the bland name of the financial advisor Mortimer Green has been replaced by the Meaningful Name "Harpagon Dupingre" ("Harpagon" is a famous fictional miser and "pingre" means "stingy").
The French translation of 4 translates "Neil Fairbanks'" name as "Justin Paux", which sounds like "Juste Impôt" (Fair/just tax).
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