SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited

Up to 1080p? Check! Compatible with Win10? Check! Cloud saves? Check! Thanks GOG!

I spent hundreds of hours on Sim City 3000 as a kid and teenager, but I hadn't played it for several years before deciding to dust-down my old copy. Sadly, Win10 doesn't work with the disc version, unless you're skilled enough to find a (safe) workaround. I bit the bullet and spent 10 euros on this, and boy was it worth it. Here's why I'd recommend it: 1.) It actually works! I have Win10, a big GPU etc, and the game runs as smooth as you like. It's nice to be able to play classic, older games on the latest stuff, hassle-free 2.) It's mindlessly addictive. Like Civ or the Sims, you'll end up spending 10 hours perfecting your ideal city when you only intended a quick 20 minute session 3.) It's challenging while remaining forgiving. SimCity 4 is a bit difficult to grasp at first, and remains quite a challenge. This one is easy to learn and is more relaxed. However, you can make things more difficult for yourself and engage in some pretty tricky scenarios, so experienced players have something to do 4.) It's balanced. Some similar games ca be waaaaayyyy too easy. SimCity Societies is a good example. This game, provided you start in 1900, doesn't let you start with everything, and makes you develop your cities, which are at the mercy of their populations 5.) It has top-quality cheats.

I hate city management games. To me, they never felt particularly rewarding, contained a lot of mechanics that I considered somewhat unnecessary and got rather dull very fast. I did get into mood for a management game the other day and SimCity 3000 came out on GOG with quite pretty graphics, so I thought "What the hell, might as well give it a shot." 4 hours and 3 unsuccessful cities later I felt somewhat hooked. After 6 hours with a successful one I felt addicted. SimCity 3000 contains an extremely robust system of advisors to ease you into the game and answer early game questions, easy to navigate system of petitions to see requests of your cities occupants and the game itself provides very tactile feedback to see if you're doing well or not (providing services and increasing quality of land immediately results into visually more impressive structures, constructing more robust means of transportation clears up roads etc.) The game also provides you with a lot of customization options, allowing you to construct cities just like you want them. Additionally, there's nothing I'd flatout miss in the game as far as ease of use goes - forming terrain is simplistic yet powerful, you can get graphs and graphical representation of important factors like crime values, power/water coverage etc. Interface is nice and easy to navigate. All in all, I'm enjoying my time with SimCity 3000 tremendously and it's become my favorite city builder I have ever played. Highly recommended.

This game is my personal favorite of the series. It had nice, crisp graphics and more in-depth simulation than SimCity 2000. It was also easier, in my opinion, to balance the budget and design a prosperous city than SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4. Highly recommended for nostalgia purposes or for someone looking for an introduction to the SimCity series.

It booted just fine on my Windows 11 PC though there is no high resolutions past what the game released with. Highest is 1280x1024 I believe. There is a patch in an official support page I have found. I downloaded it but have yet to use it. I had some issues with playing on my Linux Mint laptop using Lutris, But turning on dgvoodoo2 in the Lutris settings got things going. Which is a setting for old school games and it ran just fine afterwards. I have good memory's of this game. I do wish there was more mods and community support for this game like there is with Sim City 4 which is a better game in many ways but was super slow on my old PC back in the day. Heck even with my RTX 2060 Super and Win 11 this game by itself still seems to still stutter when a lot is going on but only for a second or two then it is back to full speed for a bit.