Monday, January 16, 2012

SimCity 2000


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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