SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited

What else can I say, the game is amazing and far better than the newest Simcity. There is a resolution fix I've been using for years now with this version and I've noticed no one talking about it in the reviews. If you go to this link I'll paste here you'll get a file to download that automatically tries to find your GOG copy of Simcity3000U and applies a patch to your game. now keep in mind if you use GOG Galaxy it will try to "update" your game but make sure before it does that you go into the setting for Simcity to turn off auto updates for that game only or it'll override the patch. Happy playing!! http://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-SimCity-3000-Resolution-Patcher

So whoever was in charge of game preservation / compatibility at GOG did a really poor job with this one. For me it would just keep crashing straight after startup with none of the commonly suggested workarounds changing that. Ultimately, it was this thread https://www.gog.com/forum/simcity_series/fixed_these_problems_using_dxwnd_map_scrolling_speed_high_cpu_usage_small_textui/page1 combined with a plain lucky observation that enabled me to finally get it stabilized, but dear lord was that a journey to get there. Maybe I'll update this review once I've actually played this game for a while - for now I just want to warn people that this product, despised advertised for modern systems, will probably NOT run out of the box and requires a lot of special attention that may or may not get it to run the way it should.

My chief complaint is that the screen scrolls very fast and there isn't an option to slow it down. The sensitivity to dragging any where close to the edge of the screen is too high and if you're building and want that last inch of zoning your screen shoots immediately to the opposite side of the map. There isn't an undo feature either. Congratulations you just zoned your whole map industrial and have to pay to fix it. The natural disasters that happen are very frequent. I was getting earthquakes, whirlpools, and tornadoes every other month. Building some things like bridges or highway on ramps aren't intuitive. Hell, because of leveling the land, building just a road is sometimes a pain in the butt. Why couldn't it just auto level and make you pay more? If you pay attention to proposals and have your town connected to neighbors they will ask for things constantly. Every time they asked for power it wouldn't say how much power. When I'd accept it there would IMMEDIATELY be a notice that I canceled it and had to pay the fine. I just wasn't a fan of this iteration of Sim City.

SimCity 3000 adds some more depth and better graphics compared to SimCity 2000 without the complexity of the regions in SimCity 4. It's a great game that I've played many times over the past nearly two decades. Unfortunately, it does not run on Windows 10 version 1909. Starting the game will cause a changing of your desktop resolution and the game will end up at a darkened logo screen with no way to exit out of the game or even to switch away from it, forcing you to do the three-finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to log out and then log back in. I tried multiple compatibility mode settings with the same frustrating result. It may be best to avoid this game if you run Windows 10 version 1909 until it gets fixed.

Firstly, like others, I have a lot of nostalgia for Sim City 3000; particularly of playing it on my first PC during the halcyon summer of 1999. And like others, the inability to play it over the last few years due to compatibility issues have made the nostalgia all the more intense. Sadly, the game doesn't hold up. The most fundamental problem is that the cities don't feel very alive. Load up a map like London or Seoul and you'll see what I mean. A few cars trickle around here and there, there's the odd pedestrian wandering around; the cities feel more like a sleepy mid-western commuter towns than world cities. The buildings also repeat way too often. Look at the screenshots on this page and you'll see what I mean on both counts. Cities in SC4 feel truly alive with the day-night cycle and the intersecting transport networks filled with cars, monorails and elevated trains; a visual inspection alone was enough to tell you where the traffic issues were. People complain that SC4 is too difficult but the Rush Hour expansion addresses this and it's hard to go back to a game without its expansive transport options. There are also some irksome bugs; scrolling is way too fast - hopefully GOG will address this. There also seems to be a lot of missing buildings in the scenarios which leaves ugly gaps everywhere. On the plus side, the game runs well and the buildings and overall design are still charming. The music is outstanding and gets you in the mood to build. Watching neighbourhoods grow and develop is still a fundamentally enjoyable experience. Time seems to march on at African swallow speed these days and sadly it hasn't been kind to 3000. It was worth paying the few dollars to relive memories of getting up early during that summer to build my cities as the hours passed listening to tracks like Window Washer's Dream but if you're looking for a good city builder now, SC4 is the one that will truly make you feel like the mayor of a bustling metropolis.