Gog.com had a sale this past weekend on select EA games. The prices were excellent. I bought SimCity 2000 and Theme Hospital. I had been wanting to play SimCity 2000 for a while. A few years ago I even tried buying the game off of eBay, but had some bad luck trying to get a copy. I won an auction for a boxed copy of the game, but the seller ended up sending SimCity Classic in a SimCity 2000 box. On the bright side, the seller also included 5 other “Sim” games. Purchasing the game at Gog.com was simple and there were no problems getting the game running on Windows 7 as the game is configured to run in DosBox.
I am not an expert at SimCity. I enjoy playing games in the series and dedicated a decent amount of hours in SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. SimCity 2000 is not as complicated as SimCity 4, but it is still a blast to play. The beginning of the game is a little slow as there needs to be planning of how the city will be laid out. I am fairly sure everything is explained in the manual, but there is no hand holding within the game. You need to know that you need to place a power plant and create a water supply for buildings to begin construction.
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| Newspapers will appear occasionally making you aware of recent events in your city. |
The game gives you no sense of direction of what you are supposed to do. You are free to try out many different building styles and attempt to build a realistic city with complex travel systems and adequately funded schools. If the generated map that you are given is just not working out, you can take advantage of the terraforming options. In one game that I started I took advantage of these tools to create a metropolis and fill out the entire map with dense residential/industrial/commercial zones.
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| I think those people are about to have a bad time |
Time is another aspect that keeps the game interesting. You are able to zoom through time and watch your city grow before your eyes. There are risks and rewards with doing this. The further you progress into the future, the greater the advancements are in technology which is crucial for power plants. Speeding time up also has risks such as having your city being hit with a natural disaster or having your power plant explode, which is normal as they only last for fifty years.
There is a lot that can be done in this game. While I did put in a good amount of time into SimCity 2000, there is more city building options that I have not even touched. Also included are scenarios, but I do not have any interest in those. I feel like they would take away the main appeal of SimCity for me. Playing SimCity 2000 did get me even more excited for the release of SimCity 5. I did create a time lapse video of the city I worked on this weekend. It is the biggest city I have ever built in any SimCity game and I willingly destroyed it.
Laneous Missile 