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kool!! First, some history: I've been playing SimCity since the old DOS version. I loved it (all of Will Wright's sim games, like SimAnt and SimEarth), and loved the series even more when SimCity 2000 came out. I would spend sometimes all day playing it, and using SCURK to make my own buildings. When SimCity 4 came out I begged my mother to buy it for me for my 21st birthday (she did), and I played it once - then didn't play it ever again until just a few weeks ago. I finally got into the game then. Let me tell you - don't play SimCity 4 unless you've got Rush Hour or Deluxe because you'll never manage to get a city up and running. In no time there is too much traffic and the budget is terrible. You only get property taxes and an incredibly tiny amount of fares for public transportation (no wonder the CTA has never made a dime) as income, but everything else comes out of your pocket - hospitals and clinics, schools, fire and police protection, as well as maintaince for the roads, pipes, and other infrastructure to keep a bustling metropolis going. Rush Hour (or Deluxe) makes it all better - your city has many more, sometimes cheaper, alternatives to transit, which helps reduce your burden. Use larger avenues for increased traffic, and place tollbooths on them and make a few hundred simoleons a month extra. Create elevated rails in your car clogged downtown and elimiate both traffic and pollution at once. On top of that, you now have easy/normal/hard modes that start you out with a bit more than the original 100,000 (500,000 in easy). Also, I swear, your population, jobs, and demand are more balanced in the expansion than the original game. It is also easier for commuters to get to jobs too - I haven't seen a single No Job zot over any houses yet, even though my city is physically larger than any I'd created in the original SimCity 4. On easy, you also get more from taxes than the other difficulty levels. Create cities next to each other and sell services, or better yet, put your power, industrial, and garbage in the next town - and your residential and water in the first and sell back and forth. Use a few avenues to lead up to the industrial and place a tollbooth on each one and watch your revenues rise. Just remember, though: read the manual - SimCity 4 is really really complex and hard to understand at first, but is worth it!