SimCity/YMMV

SimCity

Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the monsters in SimCity 2000 just sadistic bastards, or are they Well-Intentioned Extremists? They do drop water, trees, and wind generators sometimes, after all.
And the Fandom Rejoiced: When the 2013 SimCity game was announced...until it was discovered that disasters and various building styles will be DLC and you'll have to always be connected to Origin.
Crowning Music of Awesome: From the SNES port of the original onwards when the games started shipping with BGM. See here for the full list.
Canadians and Germans Love SimCity: In fact, Simtropolis is a Canadian fan site (the biggest one), and there are enormous German modding teams to prove this trope true.
Demonic Spiders: Trucks, especially trailer trucks, in Rush Hour. Running into them is instant death. While the police siren can cause them to move out of the way, trailer trucks leave their trailers behind, and those still kill you.
Canon Discontinuity: Societies
Funny Aneurysm Moment: Clean energy (such as windmills) in Societies has the BP logo on it due to Product Placement ... which is suddenly much different after BP's environmental fiasco.
Game Breaker:
- In the original for the Mac, typing FUND gives you money. There's no limit.
- The Toll Booth in 4 can be used to generate a mountain of revenue, as described in detail here.
- With the Rush Hour expansion, players can constantly repeat a mission that involves catching a robber (assuming they don't unlock the Deluxe Police Station) for easy money.
- Plopping a military base at the edge of your city makes it easy to get money in SimCity 4 with the Rush Hour expansion. Simply keep redoing the "drive the tank to the edge of the map" mission for 70,000 simoleons a pop.
Good Bad Bugs: The overflow glitch in the SNES version of SimCity which allows you to max out your funds as early as the end of your first year as mayor.
Hilarity Ensues: Although not as many funny moments as The Sims, it's still funny to watch cars driving directly into an oncoming tornado.
- The "Puzzle Game" Sideshow in SimThemePark. You could alter the cost of playing while a visitor was using it, and increase it all the way to 10000. When they finished, they would be charged the whole ten grand, and you'd just have to reset it to normal for another visitor to play. Repeated use of this could easily get you up to a million Simoleons, but the fleeced visitors would immediately leave the park, their pocket money in the negative thousands.
Good Bad Bugs: 2000 included a joke "cheat" that gave you a 25% APR loan, which is obviously a bad idea, except the game calculates regular loan APR based on the size of your city and outstanding loan APRs, so if you get two 25% loans and ask for a regular loan, the calculation overflows and you get a negative APR loan; your yearly "payments" are in negative dollars, so you gain money. This bug was removed in the Special Edition of 2000.
- The"Million-dollar cheat code" from the SNES port of SimCity is actually a bug. First you spend all your money, including on something that generates expenditures. Next you reduce the tax rate and expenditures on the tax screen to 0%. For some reason, holding the L button prevents you from gaining/losing money from the fiscal budget at the end of the year; when you go back to the tax screen and increase the expenditure rates but keep the tax at 0%, you'll get a net loss. Once you release the L button after the calendar rolls over to January, you'll have a negative bank balance. This is instantly pushed it to the maximum value, which was truncated to $999999.
Jumping the Shark: EA stated that it was going in a new direction with Societies, which isn't so much city building as theme building, or "social engineering". Apparently the game had gotten too complicated for the general audience, so they want to bring back the original demographic they were shooting for. Sound like jumping the shark?
Memetic Mutation:
- "Reticulating splines", a technical term from the original Loading Screen became a franchise-wide Running Gag (parodied with things like "Gesticulating mimes") and appears as a Shout-Out in other games, such as World of Goo.
- The the advisors in 2000.
- The Transportation Adviser always took any funding cuts very badly " YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!"
- And all those llamas...
Most Wonderful Sound: The "zzz" sound you hear when you put down a power line in Sim City 2000.
- The "WHUMP-PACHING" sound you got placing a government building in 4.
Nightmare Fuel: The Obliterate City option in 4 allows players to wipe a region free of all traces of civilization, letting them keep hard terraforming work and whatnot in case they make an irreperable mistake in city design. Invoking said power is no minor affair, though: the winds begin to howl, the sky begins to flash, the ground begins to tremble and roar, and motes of light begin to rise from the surface of the Earth. The screen finally turns a blinding white, and from within the noise emerges a wail, a scream, of something Sim and yet not. All goes silent, the blinding light subsides, and all traces of Simkind are gone.

Busy wiping out city.

- Not to mention the radioactivity issues in various instalments, but especially the way they're portrayed in 3000; if a nuclear reactor is destroyed in a disaster or explodes from overuse (one could argue this reflects poorly on the realism with which nuclear power is portrayed, but that's another story) then a large area surrounding the remains of the reactor is littered with these strange radioactivity symbols implying radiation poisoning, in which case the whole area becomes abandoned, and if you zoom in on it you hear an errie high-pitched noise accompanied by the clicking of a geiger counter.
Porting Disaster: Any of the console/handheld ports of 2000, including the DS' SimCity 2000-disguised-as-3000. Poor control response and slow gamesave loading times are to blame.
- Also the Mac ports of 3000 and 4. These were not done by Maxis in-house.
Porting Distillation: By contrast, the SNES port of the original SimCity is largely considered to be superior to the PC version, substantially improving on the graphics while adding background music, an advisor (Dr. Wright), and reward buildings, features which would all eventually be ported back into the PC games.
So Bad It's Good: SimCopter. The cars look like they were made by kindergartners with construction paper, the "people" were two-faced, gibberish-speaking... things, and the gameplay was simple, repetitive, and full of escort missions. However, the game is still fun - even now. The ability to import cities from SC 2000, have them rendered in 3D, then fly around them, was amazing in it's time, and still hasn't been done on that level with any other game.
The Scrappy: The Wren Insurance building, which might tend to repeat a lot in your big cities. A mod has even been made to reduce this repetition.
- Societies, judging by the Fan Disillusionment.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Societies was substantially less detailed than its predecessors, and not developed by Maxis. Fans and reviewers were not impressed.
Vindicated by History: A wibbly-wobbly meta case of this. Societies took a little bit of criticism by the die-hard fans of the series, feeling that the significant reduction in complexity ruined the point of the game. After Societies came out, a few High-Complexity City Simulators hit the market, such as City Life and Cities XL. They didn't fare very well, arguably worse than Societies did.