 SimCity 3000 for PC
SimCity was originally released in 1989 by a tiny company called Maxis, which in the tradition of many computer software companies, began out of its founder's apartment. SimCity wasn't like anything anyone at the time had seen. You were placed in the position of mayor of a town, one that was as yet unborn. You literally would build it from the ground up: zoning areas for residential, commercial and industrial use, building power plants, water facilities, police and fire stations, roads, and so on. You had to do this with a limited amount of money, and you had to meticulously balance your expenditures with your income to make sure you didn't go broke.
SimCity 2000 was released a few years later, around 1995 or so, jumping the gun on the "name every new product Something 2000" trend by a full five years. Many, many, many hours were lost forever while I stared at the screen playing SC2K, which added some new twists to the original game. Most obvious was the change from a top-down view to a 45-degree isometric one. This allowed you to actually see in great detail the buildings your constituents, or "Sims," built, ranging from the smallest house to a huge skyscraper. Many new levels of technology were added, with superpowerful powerplants, water treatment and desalinization plants, subways, highways, and more. You also had to make sure you connected your Sims to water with a network of pipes. If you advanced your city far enough, you could even build massive structures called arcologies. These were essentially entire cities within a building the size of a skyscraper, and building these was the key to jacking your population through the roof Š I managed to get one of my SC2K cities up to a population over 6,000,000 using arcologies.
Since it was actually SimCity 3000 I intended to review here, I suppose I'll get started. Initially, the people at EA/Maxis envisioned SimCity 3000 as a fully 3-D version of the game, allowing the player unprecedented access into the workings of their city. A grand vision, to be sure, but not one that was really feasible at the time, and one that probably wouldn't be very feasible even now. Eventually what they settled on was a reflection of the tried and true "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy, and the end result, while not earth-shattering or particularly spectacular, is easily the best game in the series.
The first obvious area of upgrade is in the graphics. The buildings in your city are far more detailed (each building has four discrete sides, rather than one panel repeated four times) and much more varied, with something like four times as many available buildings as SimCity 2000. The buildings will vary in size and appearance, depending on the density and type of zoning you do. If you zone light residential areas, you'll get expanses of small homes and yards with picket fences. Zone dense residential, and get high-rise apartment buildings. Some of the most spectacular buildings occur in dense commercial areas. If your city becomes large enough and successful enough, huge skyscrapers will sprout, giving your city a skyline to rival any in real life. A nice feature allows you to designate buildings as historical, so that if you get one you particularly like, it will stay intact throughout the game. You can also add specific real world landmarks to your city, like the Gateway Arch, the Jefferson Memorial, Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, and may others.
Another graphical coup is the increased zoom capability available to you. You can now zoom further in than previously possible, so closely that you can watch pedestrians walking the streets, and see specific vehicles interacting as they make the way around your city. It seems like an impressive but fairly pointless feature at first, but later in the game as your city grows, you can seek out areas of high pedestrian and auto traffic, and make changes (such as adding bus stops or train stations) to alleviate the congestion.
The gameplay is essentially identical, requiring you to zone areas, build roads, provide power, water, entertainment and so on. The deeper you get, though, some significant changes begin to crop up. Most significant is probably the need to manage the garbage your Sims produce. This was never an issue before, but it's a realistic addition, and it can be a challenge. Depending on what start date you choose (you can choose from 1900, 1950, 2000, or 2050) you may or may not have all the garbage disposal facilities available. Initially, you will only have landfills. Your only hope here is to place it far from your residential areas, since the pollution is enormous. As the game progresses, you can also use incinerators, recycling centers, and waste-to-energy incinerators. All pollute heavily to varying degrees, but they are all necessary evils, unless you utilize another new feature of SC3K, the neighbor deal.
In earlier versions of SimCity, your neighbors were merely there to give you a gauge of how your city was developing. In SC3K, however, you're given the opportunity to interact with these neighbors. At some point during the game, you will be contacted by a neighbor offering a deal of some kind. Most likely, you will be contacted with an offer to take some of your excess garbage for a fee. You also will receive offers of power and water, and you may also be contacted to sell these commodities if you have a surplus.
The sound in SC3K is uniformly excellent. All your activities produce a satisfying and appropriate sound clip, and the music is especially satisfying. There are several tunes that cycle while you play, all with a very smooth jazz feel, and none of them are very grating or intrusive. They usually just kind of fade into the background and add a nice atmosphere and accompaniment to your city-building and God-playing.
Overall, SC3K is neither revolutionary nor extraordinary, but it is a satisfying game to play. New players of the games should be especially delighted, as this is definitely the crown jewel in the SimCity series. They can finally discover the hardcore addiction that can come with playing the game, and the joy and pride you feel when you finally realize that your city is going to succeed. SimCity veterans will enjoy themselves as well, but possibly to a lesser degree, since at its core, the game plays almost identically, with a few minor changes, and their interest may not be as long lived.
Review by Mario Speedwagon |