As someone who does this game-reviewing gig alongside serving as a real-life mayor of a small town in Canada, I come at a game like SimCity from a different angle than most. Not that different, mind you. The multiplayer focus and always-on Internet demands of Maxis' latest city-builder are beyond irritating. And the cramped borders that force you into constantly demolishing and rejigging your bulging-at-the-seams mini metropolis are almost enough to drive me to adopt the pastimes of another Canadian mayor who has been making the rounds of late-night talk shows recently.

But what really bothers me is the missed opportunity. This fresh take on SimCity comes a full decade after

One other problem lingers from the game's horrendous launch early this year. You still have to connect online to play, and there are still regular periods when the servers cannot be accessed. I didn't play the game in the spring, when it went through long stretches of being unavailable, so I can't comment on whether or not this issue has gotten better. But during the course of playing the game for this review, it regularly refused to run because it could not connect with the servers. This generally lasted for no more than five- to 10-minute stretches, and was usually much shorter than that (although there was also one five- or six-hour outage). Still, these outages remain absolutely unacceptable, especially for a game that you should be able to play solo. The always-on Internet connection requirement needs to be removed so you can take your single-player city-building offline.

All that said, SimCity can hook you for lengthy stretches of time before the frustration of dealing with its flaws wears down your patience. The game excels in a number of areas. You couldn't ask for a tuitive interface. A glance at the menu bar tells you immediately if you've got trouble brewing with the water supply, schools, police, electrical grid, and so on. The needs-and-wants heart of the gameplay is handled very well, too, so you're never left in the dark over such vital information as why businesses are failing or why citizens are loving your town. Click on any structure in the game, and you instantly get a rundown of what's good and bad in your city, from the perspective of the sims who live or work there.

Go too big at first, to allow for eventual growth, and you soon wind up demolishing buildings to add roads allowing more space for homes, businesses, and industries.

Visuals and sound are superb for the most part, though the graphics get oddly blurry at times when you're down near street level. Cities boast neat lived-in details that you can see when zooming in on your sim citizens, and the soundtrack includes a jazzy score and atmospheric effects that always tell you what you're looking at (though the developers could have chosen a less-disgusting glug noise for those moments when you're checking on sewage flow). All of this just accentuates the letdown in the end, though, because you're always aware of how much better this game could have been.

Whether you're a mayor or a wannabe or a constituent, SimCity is a big disappointment. As the first game in this classic series in a decade, it should have been something special that took the city-building concept in exciting new directions that let everyone see what it's like to serve as a mayor. Instead, the developers got tangled up with a multiplayer concept that is little more than an albatross hanging around the player's neck and never addressed the many, many ways that this look at a mayor's life could have been made both more realistic and more enjoyable.