SimCity™ 3000 Unlimited

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.

This games gets overlooked because of its successor Sim City 4, but in my mind this is the best entry in the series.

I had heard high praise for this game when I was young and wanted to play for many years, but had to settle for competitor city builders until finding it on GOG. My experience was OK, but nothing like the hype around sim city led me to believe it was going to be. Mechanics are finnicky, you often have to fight with terrain to do what you want to, and the often praised music isn't nearly as powerful as Martin's work in The Sims. Competitors often fail at being fluid, but SC3k is too fluid for me. The laissez-faire transport systems are good for just getting it up and moving on with the game, but after years of transport sims it really rubs me the wrong way for it to be so effortless (or sloppy). I can see why someone would fall in love this game if they'd come in earlier when sandboxes were generally rougher, but I believe being the first of its kind accounts for its huge popularity more than it standing on its own merits. Game's enjoyable if you want a city builder you can just jump into and play casually, but it doesn't strike me as legendary. I might still try one of the earlier versions and probably enjoy it more. Also know there's an issue with scrolling around the map in SC3000 on modern PCs. It scrolls really fast so you have to baby scroll, and there's no good fix for it.

Everything in life is relative. My five-star review is somewhat biased given a pre-existing passion for SimCity 3000, but I want to address the fact that this GOG release is particularly good. SC3K was released in 1999 and was a joy to play as a teenager. As others have said, it incorporates many of the elements that made SC2000 so great and turns them into a brightly-coloured game with a bubbly GUI. It lacks that slightly edgy feel of SC2K (have a look at the Draco arcology in that game if you want to know what I mean - or the fact that you can crash a helicopter by clicking on it with your centring tool). With SC3K, it's just a smooth, slightly benign city-builder, and there's nothing wrong with that. The landmarks are some of my favorite in any Sim game, including 4. SC3K lacks the complexity of 4, and depending on your mood, that can be a good or bad thing. I oscillate from liking 4 better and then sometimes gravitating toward 3000. When I can't decide between the two, I just assert that 2000 is the best. I originally had the Mac port of SC3K and while it ran fine, it didn't allow for the same number of custom BATs that the Windows version does. This GOG version is great, because it just *works*. No, it's not widescreen, but there's something endearing to that. It also wraps nicely in Wineskin, making it playable on Mac. Given how easily this works, it's kind of a wonder why GOG hasn't provided this as a Mac/Linux download as well. In any case, buy the game and enjoy.