SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited

A game where you try to profit off of building cities while balancing the demands of your citizens. For someone who's not played before, it may be rough to start where some of what you need to do isn't obvious, like maximum distances away from roads, education, water, traffic, pollution, crime, etc. These things could result in going bankrupt quickly where there's little you can do. So I'd suggest referring to online tips to play the game properly. But once you get over the initial hurdle it becomes addictive in that you get a good sense of progression where you are expanding your city at an accelerating pace to the point where you have more money than you know what to do with. Then it becomes an open sandbox where you are free to use your imagination and try out some different city layouts without having to worry about money. There are still some annoying quirks. -Like the fact that power, garbage, and water buildings will eventually expire and demolish themselves and cannot just be auto-renewed. -No auto-saves, so the game could (and did) crash and you could lose progress. -Some kind of bug with water distribution, where if you get to a big enough city size, only water towers can supply water to the remaining parts of your city. -Sluggish controls at times.

The game is showing its age but it's still my favourite of the SimCity games thanks to its jazzy soundtrack and the fact it hits the sweet spot of not being too simplistic like the original SimCity but not as complex as SimCity 2000 (with respect to micromanaging industry tax rates) or SimCity 4 (with respect to the managing of multiple cities and the sheer number of options available). Recommended!

This is the single best SimCity game. The iteration that followed was worse. And the newest is pretty terrible. Some people claim that the SimCity games are impossible in the late-game but this one seems pretty doable at metropolis size and density. I've dropped several hundred hours in it.

It's got it all: Style! Humor! Music! Flare! Disasters! Scenarios! Other stuff! Seriously, though, this one outshines the rest. It improves upon 2000 in many ways: nost just graphically, buy through play mechanics and dynamics as well. Unlike SC4, it has personality and soul. SC4, unfortunately, suffered from the EA syndrome where they buy a company, milk the IP for money, then liquidate everything after the initial cash grab (all of The Sims integration was just to sell more boxes of The Sims). Don't even get me started on whatever SC5 was supposed to be. SC3K is just one of those games that is fun, start to finish, all the way through, it's enjoyable— even when your treasury is in the red and everything is on fire, it finds a way to make you giggle. The news ticker is perhaps the best part of all. You'll be laughing the whole time you're building. I hated the music at first, but over the years it grew on me. It's a sort of techno-infused jazz that is simultaneously Art Deco and Post-Modernist. As others have mentioned, it doesn't have the complexity of SC4 in terms of region management and other things, which I didn't particularly care for. SC3K is far more attractive than four as well and features a wider area of visuals and building diversities. Your cities feel real and they grow and evolve along with you. No two ever really look the same no matter how much you try. No matter how many times you've played, it will still challenge you and every time you try something new, it'll push right back and make you do it better and faster. It loves to make you second guess your expenditures. I've been playing this game off and on since 1999 and I will probably play it off and on until I die. It's just one of those rare games that holds up to the test of time. You can't consider yourself a real gamer until you've played it, IMHO. You can skip the rest of the series, but this one is a must in anyone's gaming education.

When I tried SimCity 3000 back in 2000s, this was beyond anything I could imagine in terms of creating your own city. Even today I believe this game to be the pinnacle of the genre with so many aspects of gameplay and design being on such a great level. Even without any additions, SC3K offers a variety of opportunities to start a community as you see it: a small town or a large megapolis, editing the terrain, type of landscape and setting the general layout for the streets, quarters, government buildings and sights among many other things. Oh, it has so many famous places of interest from around the world! 😍 With SC3K Holiday Theme and Unlimited you got a chance to celebrate holidays, build news structures, set European or Asian feel and do much more. I also enjoyed the Architect tool, coming with this game: it allows you to recreate your own house or buildings from your home town. Unfortunately the game isn't stable if you upload too many new structures at once, but it's still fun. 😎