SimCity™ 2000 Special Edition

Don't get this. This is the inferior DOS version of the game ran through DOSbox you're better off finding the original disc under your couch and running the game through a Win XP virtual machine. It'll run better and will also display in wide screen

A few years ago I fired up this game in Dosbox to see how well it had aged. Next thing I knew, it was 6 AM and the sun was coming up! Just as when I first played the game 18 years ago on my 33 MHz PC, the game had again sucked me in. Its memorable music, intuitive controls, and charming pixel art graphics have only gotten better with age. This truly is a timeless classic and your owe it to yourself to check it out!

There's a reason why Simcity is one of my top all time favourite franchise. Simcity 2000 being one of the most memorable in the series. There's also a reason why city planners and architects play this game. At the start of the game, you name your city and the game randomly generates a terrain map for you which you can edit as much as want if you wish. And as the mayor you start off laying the basic foundations of the city with the starting funds. Your new city will require power, in which you build a power plant and power lines. You build the roads that run through your city, the water pipes and water pumps which pump water to your buildings. Now, buildings are built through the zones that you lay; zones that define the areas where you allow Residential housing to be built, or commercial buildings or industrial factories. What zones you need to build are defined by the RCI demand graph which is present in all the Simcity games, the higher the bar the more demand more it, the lower the bar the lesser the demand. You can either choose to zone a light zone or heavy zone. Light zones consist of low level buildings and housing while the heavy zones consist of the skyscrapers and heavy factories. Buildings pop out depending on the density of the zones and the conditions nearby affecting the land value. Simcity is not just a build and forget type of game. You build as your funds allow which require you to think and consider carefully what is needed and what is not. At the very start you satisfy the basic needs of your citizens: power and water. Then you gain money through taxes and some ordinaces as you grow your city, raise your taxes too high and everyone will leave, set it too low and you'll might go bankrupt. As your city expands even bigger, you start to face the problems that plague real-life mayors and governments. The city you build is like a living thing. Problems like pollution, unemployment and traffic start to come in, also the population will be concerned whether the city is equipped with enough amenities. Buildings like Police & Fire Stations will eventually have to be built around the city, so do hospitals, schools, libraries etc. If your city is full of heavy traffic, you'll need to consider laying highways, laying more roads and simply, starting a public transport network that consists of buses, trains and subway and simply thinking off a way to ease the traffic. The population will want hospitals and healthcare taken care for them and they want to live in a nice looking city which means parks, recreation areas and trees. Airports and seaports to help expand the city. You can enact ordinances to enhance certain laws, welfare or to simply add more taxes and fines. The population will give their feedback through the newspapers. As the years go on in the game and as your city develops, you unlock better technology and reward buildings like better, more efficient power plants and eventually the Arcologies. There are also disasters for when you're just in the mood to destroy the entire city and like to see the mayhem that follows. The beauty of Simcity is that it has no winnable goals so to speak. You set your own goals, and most importantly what type of city you wanna build. If you wanna build a laidback, quiet town, go ahead, if you wanna build a metropolis with a skyscrapers everywhere and a huge commercial hub go ahead. SC2000 came with SCURK tool, with it the good old Simcity community came out with various custom buildings that you can use in your own cities to create your city of your dreams, more info here: http://www.sc3000.com/sc2000/scurk/. At the end of the day, you'll be smiling proud, looking at the city you developed from scratch, you'll be fascinated by the hustle and bustle of your city and the magic the game can help churn out. Enjoy this iteration and the next 2 Simcities down the line (if they ever come to GoG) which add alot more to the Simcity mix and brilliance, even more so with fan-made custom content.

In the days when it wasn't 'illegal' to loan a friend a software disc my best friend gave me hers to try. From that day endless hours of my days and nights disappeared into the blackhole that is Simcity 2000. I loved it so much that I bought my own boxed copy even though the disc wasn't required to fire up the game. I still have that box, the game disc and the manual stored away very carefully. Last year I reinstalled it on my laptop and everytime I play it the hours still slip by pleasantly. Its easy but hard. It makes you think and then it makes you grin at some silly message that just popped up. Just buy it.