What's Ahead: It'll be interesting to see how SimCity 4's city building, which takes into account the exact location you place each building, will turn out. Will it be frustrating to always have fires pop up across town from your fire station? Also, though we were able to see fires, volcanoes, and tornadoes at E3, we're looking forward to the game's other natural disasters.

We're actually glad that we did some shouting over SimCity 4, the upcoming sequel to SimCity 3000 from Maxis. SimCity 4 looks very promising, especially since it will let you build your own versions of real-life cities like San Francisco (our own home turf) and populate them with sims--the nonsense-speaking citizens of SimCity and the stars of The Sims. Though if you choose, you'll be able to take apart San Francisco--and any other unfortunate city you happen to create--with the sequel's improved "god mode," which lets you rain natural disasters, such as fires, erupting volcanoes, and whirlwinds, on your city if you happen to like that sort of thing. We here at GameSpot know that most of our gentle readers would never be vicious enough to send a tornado after a helpless family of terrified sims.

SimCity 4 will have a lot more to it than just knocking down buildings and terrorizing innocents, of course. As we saw at E3, the sequel will let you easily create a city, completely from scratch, by building it on whatever fully 3D terrain--hills, valleys, lakes, and so forth--you prefer. And just as in the previous games, you'll be able to track the progress and general status of a single sim--but this will take on a whole new meaning with SimCity 4's improved neighborhood system. Through your sim's eyes and ears and nose and that little happiness bar at the bottom of the screen, you'll be able to keep track of how well each of your neighborhoods is doing--you'll see if people are happy, how much money they make, and so on. SimCity 4 will try to make your cities seem like they're truly alive. As we saw, the game will have day-and-night cycles, weather, and real-time changes to neighborhoods. If you place a noxious factory in the middle of a residential area, you'll see angry sims move out by the dozens and the neighborhood itself gradually change from a sunny, happy community to a run-down slum. SimCity 4 shows a lot of promise, and now that we've seen it in motion at E3, we can't wait to get our hands on it and play it.