The Zone

You know you want to...

Unfortunately, no. If the Photoshop-montage didn't already give it away, this is NOT how SimCity 5000 will look like (although it'll be nice if it did!). In fact, it won't even be called SimCity 5, straying away from the previous version, SimCity 4.

Going away from the thousand and number naming convention, the fifth installment of SimCity will be called SimCity Societies (yes, you may groan now).

Even worse, it won't be handled by Maxis (not Celcom and DiGi's rivals), but has been 'outsourced'  to the developers of the Caesar IV (that's 4 to non-Roman folks).

As you can see, now the 'Societies' tag kind of makes sense.  In other words, SimCity is no longer going to be what it's known for - building Arcologies. Oh sorry, that went out after SimCity 2000 - both SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 lacked any Arcologies.

So in yet another groaning move by EA, who has bought over Maxis since the earlier SimCity, we continue to see leading gaming titles be butchered by the gaming juggernaut. Will SimCity Societies be yet another title that gets washed down the drain like the other increasing EA titles? Or will Societies actually open up a whole new genre of gaming not known before? Only time will tell when Societies come out.

Source (and Screen Captures!) : 1UP

In the mean time, feast your eyes on the previous SimCity titles:

SimCity 4:

SimCity 3000:

...and the greatest SimCity of them all, SimCity 2000:

The ONLY SimCity to have Arcologies (4 of them!), a SuperSim superhero in random cities to help fight emergencies, Nessie the Loch Ness Monster in random lakes (which eats boats!), hydroelectric dam power, trains which you can blow up, planes which can crash into tall buildings near the airport, four types of military bases (navy, missile silo, army, or air force) which are randomly chosen based on your city terrain, a secret highway gantry bridge building procedure, newspapers which will insert your name into stories, witty newspaper articles to read...etc.