Sim City 4 Deluxe captures everything you wanted to do with a city.
In this game you must take control of whatever you want, you must start with a small village and move up to a giant megatroplolis in which thousends of people live. As usual there is residential, commercial and industrial and these are split into, low, medium and high density, with density saying how many people can cram into one area. Its a good system which makes the building blocks of you city, and when you drag out a square to make your zone, you get streets to connect all your houses up, whther this work or not is your opinion as most of the time they are just a hinderance and you need to upgrade them to roads really quickly depending on how quickly your building speed is.
When you start you get an overview of sim nation, the area where you can build, just select one of the blocks and it will load up that area and your away, there are some starter ones but i'm sure you will want to just crack on and do your own.
You will then want to build schools, hospitals, police and fire stations but in the early game it is reccommend that you stick to the bare needs, which is a some residential and some jobs in industry, and you should build up later on with higher density.
Once your city does grow with lots of income and many different schools etc...You can change the taxes and the money going towards individual hospitals etc...To help only the poeple that go there so you are not wasting money. There are also your advisors, 7 people dedicated to helping your city any way it can by giving you advise or information on what you do. They can get a little annoying at times espically when your in the middle of building and they just crop up with some information, they are helpful when new but in the end they just get in the way.
You will also get reward buildings for example, getting 15,000 people in your city and a school grade on 95, rewards you with a university and vise versa.
On with the looks, you can see every little detail in the closest zoom in which there is between 3-6 different levels depending on which size map you have. The transistion however between zoom levels is bad and it takes time before the game can catch up with what you want it to do, when it has however it is fantastic. The panel to build on is also very clear and works well because it has to cram on lots of information like the amount of people, current money, a mini-map, zoom and rotate buttons etc...There is also 3 speed levels and the ability to pause the game and you can still build when it is paused.
Overall this game is brilliant, Sim City 4 Deluxe captures everything you wanted to do with a city and more to give a well-rounded city building experience, good luck mayor!