Does it get any better than filling the entire map in SimCity2000 with Earth Arcos?

I don't think so

I was the tender age of 8 when I got one of my first original games for DOS - SIM CITY!
Being not a native english speaker there was a lot I couldn't understand BUT with the Italian-english dictionary I managed to get the important part of the scenarios included.
First one I try is Bern- Objective is "Reduce traffic in five years".
Now, my candid young brain suggests me something- and I solve the first scenario in 5 minutes.

I ERASED THE STREETS! :D

Pure kids genius. Sadly nowadays games would never allow for such "emergent" solutions. :P
Maybe it's better, though. :)

Cheers!

Hahahaha! Thank you! :)

I have a few stories. One about people and three about games:

STORY #0 - The Store Owner:
Next to my elementary school was a little shop that sold sweets, magazines and everything else little school children's hearts might desire and their wallets affort. The shop owner was a relaxed, friendly man. I was a regular customer and enjoyed talking to the guy. Anyways, due to a combination of sickness and other unfortunate curcumstances I had not been able to visit the shop for some time when my brother told me the store owner had inquired about my well being, told him to say "hi!" and said he had games magazine that he thought I would like. When I was finally able to pay the store a visit, a new issue of the magazine had arrived, but the store owner had kept a copy of the older issue just for me, because it came with a game that he thought I might like - That game was ZEUS. And I liked it a lot.

The Game stories:
(This is a long time ago, I might confuse a few details.)

STORY #1 ZEUS
I built I custom scenario, populated the world map with lots of cities, so I could do lots of trade. And because I was extra smart I decided to make every city a vassal city with extra high tribute. My idea was that I would be able to sustain my city with tributes alone and sell what I did not need to my other vassals. This way I would save valuable space that I could fill with houses instead of farms and thus create the most populous city ever.
Thinking to myself how awesome this is going to be I start my new game. INSTANTLY I receive ~20 hostile messages from discontent vassals who for some reason really do not like me. They see I have no military. Everyone revolts. And unlike me, their cities are fully developed and powerful. Man, these first five seconds did not go as planned. Anyways, lets get to building my city. I place a single dirt road, then receive ~10 messages: The Enemy is on their way!

So here I am, with a dirt road, no houses and at war with every single city state in greece. Well... I still managed to build a half decent city until I failed to pay the horrendous tributes and a punitive mission razed my city to the ground. Oh well...

STORY #2 ZEUS
So I make another attempt at building a perfect ZEUS / POSEIDON scenario: This time I just place a few cities on the world map and set their attitude "philanthropic", hoping this will placate them somewhat. I build a decent city map, everything is good - Until I discover the event editor. NICE! I can add about almost any event, good or bad, recurring or one time, with a set date or random date etc. Amongst them are monster Invasions. Monster Invasions allow you to recruit heroes to your city to slay the invading monster and serve in your amry. Also you'll get to build a nifty monument each time a monster is slayn. So I decide to add a few recurring monster invasions by copying the settings from another easy sandbox scenario. I set the spawnpoint at some very far of isolated corner of my map. My expectation was that every 24 months a monster will spawn in a remote corner, waiting for a hero to come and kill it. As long as the old monster was still alive, no new monster would invade and the old monster would safely stay in its corner.

Start the game...
MONSTERS EVRYWHERE! Whatever I tried to do in the settings, the result was that every month a monster was spawned on every viable spawning point. Half of the monsters spawning were never defined in the scenario settings! And of course they did not stay in the remote wilderness. They were more aggressive than in any other scenario I have ever played. They headed straight for my city and burnt everything to the ground and killed all citizens. I manage to build at least a few hunters huts and a farm. The hunters are killed by the Hydra, the fishermen are eaten by Scylla. The farms that are not currently being burnt down by the Minotaur are actually producing some food, though.
"YOU HAVE ANGERED ME!" Demeter turns up and curses my farms.
"YOU HAVE ANGERED ME!" Harmes turns up and kills all my carts with food, then destroys my silos with the remaining food.

I look at the pile of burning rubble that was supposed to be my most glorious city. In the distance a pile of unlucky sea beasts had the misfortune of being spawned on a mountain plateu and are now thrashing around helplessly. My last three houses are on fire and my population is on its way to 0.

"AN ENEMY ARMY IS APROACHING"

Are you serio-...!?

"AN ENEMY ARMY IS APROACHING"

ARGH!

"YOU HAVE ANGERED ME!"

AGAIN?!

"IMMIGRANTS AVOID YOUR CITY."

Good for them! This city should be avoided at all costs - By deleting the savegame, the map and the scenario. I never touched the event-editor again.

I think the ancient greeks would have liked my predicament: I had the tools to make everything perfect, but I somehow screwed it up so hard that it angered even the gods.

STORY #3 EMPEROR
Once you have built a palace, the game allows you to collect pets, mostly for purposes of gifting them to foreign cities and for bragging rights.
Advanced cities require not just food, but a variety of different foods, something I completely mismanaged in the beginning. All of a sudden my houses de-volved. Any attempt at fixing this was thwarted by my insufficient workforce. A neighbouring city produced the kind of food I needed. I decided to send them a gift to improve my relations and then ask for a trade deal. I sent the diplomat on his way. Emissaries actually start their journey at the gates of the palace/administrative building and have to walk across the city to the edge of the map, just like an ordinary walker. At the same time however my workforce had dwindled so much that no one was left to watch the pets in the garden. My tiger escaped, ate the other pet and then proceeded to eat first the diplomat with the gift and then the diplomat with the trade proposal. So much for that.

STORY #4 CEASAR III

I always ran out of space for my city before reaching the highest housing level. I spent hours on this game as a kid, but never managed to figure it out. To this day, this game is my nemesis.

True story: Beginning in 1989, before the days of public internet, I spent a lot of time on my living room floor trying to build the elusive megalopolis (a city of over 500,000 people) in my SNES cart of Sim City. In my attempts, I would often leave the game running overnight as I slept, or throughout the day as I worked, only to find upon my return that disasters had wiped my poor city out.

One night in 1992, I was off to another great start. My buddy and I were going out that night, so I left the game running as usual. When I got home I found that, after three years, I had finally broken that 500k barrier! Excited, I decided to call my buddy to let him know, and as I raced across the living room to grab the phone, I accidentally kicked the SNES, which promptly crashed, displaying some nasty pixellated glitches while screaming out a never-ending note of buzzing death.

That's not the worst of it. To rub salt in the wound, it didn't strike me that I hadn't taken a picture of the screen (which was the old school way of proving an achievement) until I opened a later issue of Electronic Games Magazine that stated that, to that date, they had not heard of anyone reaching a megalopolis, and they were offering a reward for the first person who did it. No matter how many times I loaded that city, I was never able to get another megalopolis.

Wow. Even telling this story makes me feel the pain all over again. Thanks, GOG! :)

I really don't remember much since i probably played it in 2003 or 2004,but seriously i always made myself being paid more into my own account in caesar 3 which saved me in one or several scenarios when i got low on money and simply take the money from my account and put it to good use and thrive my cities,they were usually rich anyway so why not give me more money.Caesar wasn't happy but i had many fests which was never really a problem,was there even a tribute i could pay them?
Which i probably did if that was part of the game and probably sended gifts.
Even played the game fully through on hard without realizing it that it was on hard for a first time playing caesar 3.Mostly went with military campaings though since i found those easier,once i didn't chose military campaign and it took me quite a while to beat that stage where barbarians lived in it.I needed a few luxury palaces and i didn't have much space but i still managed to do it somehow back in the day.

I still do have bravo screenfun caesar 3 game but i can't find the serial key for it though.Not like i intend on playing it again currently.

i love the city building genre of games but most of my spectacular moments are related to me utterly failing as a ruler.

When I was playing SimCity 2000, I wanted to experiment with large scale urban plans, but it took forever to get the city large enough and intermediate stages were incompatible with my long term plans. So I reverse-engineered the file format and wrote a C program that laid out my ideal street and train track grid on a perfectly flattened space. All I needed to do was to experiment with building placement. I still have that old C program buried somewhere on my hard disk and it still worked the last time I installed the GOG version of SC2K.

When playing Children of the Nile, I had build a beautiful city along the Nile. This was the first scenario of the campaign in which the goal was to build an actual pyramid. However, the city itself was completely functional and running with all tasks done long before the pyramid was complete. Everyone was happy, well-fed, well-educated, well-supplied, but there was still a lot of stone and marble mining to be done before the pyramid could be completed.

I decided to turn up the speed of the game, while I went doing something else. I had calculated how long it would take for the pyramid to finish and when that time was up I returned to the game to watch the pyramid. What had happened in the city below the pyramid however was that without my control, scarcities began popping up, people didn't get the amenities they wanted no more. More and more people in my city took a sign and held it up in protest on one of the city's squares and the mob there grew and grew. The pyramid was complete, but was surrounded by a city in riot because of my neglect.

I am surprised to see that Caesar III, Zeus, Emperor, among other titles in the catalog, do not include Spanish among their available languages. I have them original and are perfectly localized in Spanish.
It hurts not to be able to play in my native language to these titles in GoG ... they are my favorite games that accompany me in all the PCs that I have had to date.

They are great titles, enjoy them!

The game: Caesar III
The mission: Carthago

The story: Rome has finally triumphed over Carthage in the third and final Punic War (Carthago deleta est, as it were). I was dispatched to build a Roman city in the newly-conquered province of Carthago, but was warned that remnants of the Carthaginian military were still operating in my area and might be trouble. I went about building my city, and was attacked several times from the south by Carthaginian troops, some of which caused minor damage.

With that in mind, I built walls around the south of my city, but foolishly expanded too far west. I had not yet been attacked from that direction, and failed to anticipate the chaos to come. The most recent attack from the south had killed most of my legionaries, and since the city did not have iron as a native resource and I was low on cash, I was having trouble equipping new legions, leaving me with only a handful of cavalry and javelin auxiliaries. I was warned that an attack would come in a few months, but was confident that my fortifications would hold.

Then the attack came. Not from the south, but from the west. Like a sea of death, a horde of bloodthirsty Carthaginians swarmed out of the desert, driven mad by the desert sun and ravenous for Roman blood. With no walls to stop them, they poured into the streets, burning down everything they touched and slaughtering my citizens. I frantically dispatched my few available legionaries, which were promptly slaughtered. A few valiant prefects attempted to help, but lasted only seconds against the invaders. As the horde advanced, destroying half of the city, I preemptively destroyed my own governor's mansion to prevent them from stealing my personal funds.

I was about to give up and load a previous save, when something amazing happened.

A squad of Carthaginians was gleefully murdering hapless civilian walkers, when a new walker arrived. Not a helpless trader or an unarmed carter. No, this was a gladiator, and he immediately tore into the Carthaginians with a ferocity that would have brought a tear to the eye of General Maximus Decimus Meridius. As he plowed through a half-dozen battle-hardened soldiers, I right-clicked on him and for the very first time heard those immortal words:

"I'll teach you to attack my city! I eat guys like you for breakfast!"

And then, in wonder, I saw not one but two lion-tamers and their feline companions to the north, who were also attacking the invaders. So I right clicked on one of them, and heard:

"Look, leo! Fresh meat!"

In seconds, several of the Carthaginians (perhaps weakened, I'll admit, by the efforts of my vanquished soldiers) were devoured, and the squad was routed, fleeing in panicked terror from the beasts. Meanwhile, I had my few surviving javelin auxiliaries launch hit-and-run tactics, using the city streets to evade their foes, diverting them away from the cavalry forts whose troops were swiftly regenerating. Soon, the thundering hooves of Roman cavalry were heard on the tiled streets, bringing death to the now-terrified invaders. The few survivors nearly made it to the western edge of the map before my cavalry cut them off, and slaughtered every last one of them.

By the end of the months-long battle, my city was a shambles, half of it in ruins and deeply in debt. I could have simply reloaded to a previous save and fortified the western edge, but to do so, I felt, would dishonor the sacrifices of the brave Roman citizens who gave their lives to defend their home. And so I persevered, rebuilding the city and reviving the economy, and constructing a grand new gladiatorial arena as it centerpiece. By the time I left, Carthago was thriving. The Carthaginians launched a few more attacks, but they were weak and ineffective, as if they were unwilling to actually enter the city and face its citizen-defenders again..

And so the city of Roman Carthago was saved, not by its soldiers, but by its gladiators and lion-tamers. By its people.

i never played a city builder game but i did redecorate my home in playboy: the mansion. still i didn't finish even that game because it was too boring

During my years at high school my ‘friend’ organised me Caesar 3. Ok, I installed it, first mission was easy-peasy, second one far from it. I started to build a row of houses, consisting for example 15x1 tents, I didn’t know English, there were neither tips nor helps how to play this game efficiently. So it ended in one big spectacular catastrophe I suppose. Many fires, lack of water, disgruntled citizens, angry Caesar in Rome, monstrous debt. Later I started to grasp ideas what should I do and what I shouldn’t do in this game. Now, nearly twenty years later, this is love-hate relationship. I love this game, when my own ideas work perfectly, using less space, prefects, and so on. When I use something never mentioned on net boards and it works. Hate, when for example that stupid market walker is going to another city it seems, not mine and this destroys that pampered villa block. But now I’m older, I know this is only a computer game and next time I win. Only question is when, not if. And I win on my terms, not terms set by game.

Hahahaha this!

I also seem to recall the Tokyo scenario started with a nuclear power plant meltdown within a couple of years. I replaced the nukes with the cheaper/less efficient option and that was it.

Hurt myself laughing.