![]() Now people could be seen walking the streets, and cars travelled the roads not simply to show congestion but following their actual routes between home and workplace. This tile set, among others, can be downloaded from David Fairhurst’s Mac-specific SimCity 2000 website.īustling as it was, SimCity 2000 lacked a citizenry, something that SimCity 3000 included. SCURK artwork by Stephen McGlen replaces the arcologies with well-known New York City landmarks, including the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Mac and Windows versions of SimCity 2000 can still be found in discount software retailers (a hybrid CD edition including the SCURK retails in the UK for about £12), and a version even exists for palmtop computers. These typically replaced SimCity 2000’s built-in “arcologies”, strange super-buildings incorporating homes, offices, shops and factories and awarded to successful mayors able to guide their cities to a certain level of prosperity. Other people handcrafted landmark buildings like the Sears Tower, Chinese pagodas or European palaces. Some of these could be across the board modifications of the existing building sets, called tile sets, so that your city could include not generic American buildings but ones from Rome or London. SimCity 2000 portrayed the city as bustling metropolis, albeit a cartoon-like one, with movies playing at drive-ins, animated aeroplanes, trains and sailboats, even stoplights at junctions.Īlthough cartoon-like and limited to 256 colours, cities produced with SimCity 2000 can be amazingly rich and satisfying.Īs Quake was open enough for mappers to create new adventures, so SimCity 2000 allowed players with artistic talent to design extra buildings to place in their cities, using a special add-on called the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, or SCURK. The view changed from a top-down two-dimensional view to an isometric three-dimensional view (which was then revolutionary, but now familiar to us in games as disparate as Civilization and Diablo). Though the original was fairly plain and looked rather like a map, the next version, SimCity 2000 supplied plenty of eye-candy. What has changed with each new version of the game is the graphics, with the cities becoming steadily more realistic, complex, and active. Spicing up the game are rewards, typically something for the ego like a statue or a mayoral mansion house, and there are occasional disasters like fires and alien attacks to keep the player from getting too complacent. Choices the player makes for things like the location of police stations or funding of public transportation have subtle, long-term effects that can help or hinder growth of the city, and most importantly, inefficient distribution of resources quickly drains the city’s bank account. ![]() The job of the player is to create an economically viable city by developing the right balance of residential, commercial and industrial zones each of which interacts with the others by producing labour, revenue, pollution, crime and so on. Though the gap between the release of SimCity in 1989 and the latest version of the game this year, SimCity 4, spans fifteen years, the basic gameplay has remained surprisingly consistent. Like Quake, SimCity has a long history and is available in a succession of versions, all four of which are still being played. Though it doesn’t give the player the same adrenaline rush in dealing with a chainsaw-wielding ogre with nothing more than a shotgun and an axe, SimCity is still a remarkably addictive and compelling game. This week’s offering is a very different game: SimCity. Last week I looked at Quake, a first-person, shoot ’em up game from id Software that despite being eight years old remains one of the most popular games in its genre.
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