SimCity 2000 is a simulation, city-building game developed by Maxis and
published by Electronic Arts. It was originally released for the PC, as
all Sims games are, before being ported to a wide-selection of platforms
through the years, eventually making it way to the Sony PlayStation.
Right off the bat I have to comment about the box. For some reason the
box is made to contain three different discs, but there's only one. Is
there something I'm missing? Why can't it just be a regular case? What
does it need all the extra space for?
You know how when you get a
new game, you're excited and you put it in without even touching the
instruction manual? Yeah, you're not gonna want to do that with this
game. This is the kind of game where you're gonna want to read the
instruction manual before playing, otherwise you're going to be lost.
Fortunately, the manual has a boot camp that doesn't take very long in order to learn the basics.
If
you don't feel like creating your own city you can load up one of the
many pre-made ones. No matter where you are you'll have a cursor you can
move around. While in your city you can move this up to the many
different icons (these are your tools) on the top, left, right and
bottom parts of the screen. Highlighting one will show you a set that
goes with it.
As Mayor, you are responsible for the health,
wealth, and happiness of the Sims living in your town. In order to do
this you'll want to plan your strategies well. You'll want to keep tabs
on things like water, power, and transportation. Provide government
services, education, recreation, work on the city's budget, taxes, and
land manipulation. Don't worry about building houses, stores, factories,
or other buildings as the Sims will take care of that themselves.
They're almost like people that way.
There are several menus in
the game you can check out any time. Speed, Options, Disasters, and
Newspaper. Speed allows you to change the speed of how things run,
options let you edit sound, music, budget, have it automatically go to
an important event in the city, and turn off disasters. Disasters range
from fire, flood, airplane crash, tornadoes, earthquakes, monsters,
hurricanes, and riots if you really want to be mean.
With the
Newspaper Menu you can have a Subscription, which delivers a newspaper
to you twice a year. You'll receive an extra copy only during reports of
important occurrences, inventions, and major development. Depending on
how large the city is affects how many Newspaper selections you have.
When
you get into building your own city you can choose the difficulty
setting and the year. Depending on what year you choose will affect the
tools you can use. At any time you can edit the map through the Edit New Map option on the main menu. There is also a Load Scenario selection on the main menu, which is actually recommended before going through boot camp.
All
in all, this is definitely a thinking and patience game. If you're not
big on patience or just looking for a game that doesn't require much
thinking, this is definitely not something you'd want to pick up. If you
are a patient gamer and like to be challenged intelligently, this is
the game for you. I'm not sure if it matters which port you get it on,
but I'm going to take a leap of faith and say the PC version is probably
superior, but there's nothing wrong with the PlayStation version if
you'd rather play it on that.
Try it
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