I was browsing through Youtube videos when I stumbled across a movie trailer for the movie Ride Along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE_Fn-fLsZw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE_Fn-fLsZw). Go ahead and pause it around 0:09-0:10 and let me know if that doesn't look like a slightly edited shot from SC4.
It's a real life shot but it's color graded like the new sim city. The colors are very saturated and they used an anamorphic cine-lens for the air shot, that's why the edges are blurry similar to the tilt-shift-effect in simcity.
It actually does!! I'ts amazing how much SC4 resembles real life from that camera angle :)
The first couple times I rode a plane after really getting into SimCity 4, I was amazed at how much most of the cities I passed over had in common visually with typical SC4 shots. Especially with flat and well organized Midwestern style cities like Milwaukee and the eastern suburbs of Denver, it looked like almost everything could be reproduced in game given the right set of mods and loads of time.