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SimCity 3000 © Maxis/EA

I have been a fan of the SimCity series since I was thrown in front of a CGA monitor and handed a copy of SimCity. Immediately I became immersed and wasting countless hours on this game. This later evolved to SimCity 2000, still very addicting, now we have SimCity 3000. While I'm sad to see it not in 3D as when first announced, and only a modified/updated version of the SC2K engine, I still think Maxis, along with EA, have come out with a damn fine fun game.

As like in the previous SimCity games, you of course make and manage a city/town. At the beginning of the game there is a menu where you can start a city from scratch which is a cool feature that lets you use real-looking terrain or you can use a starter town. This already has most of the basics for a city already in place, which can save you a considerable amount of time. When you first start the game you can choose what difficulty level you want (which affects how much money you get to start with). You can also choose what year you want your city to start off in, 1900, 1950 or 2000, what size of city you want (affects grid size) and other small things such as the name of the city. If you have ever played the original SimCity or SimCity 2000 you know what this game is all about, place roads and areas for residential, commercial, and industrial areas, and govern your city and make it a successful one. The map area allows you to change the terrain of your grid before starting off the game, this helps because bad terrain is hard to work with and costs money to fix during the game. The interface of SimCity 3000 is very easy to use and very similar to SimCity 2000, making it an easy transition over to the new game. Everything you need is on a toolbar on the right so you can select what you want to do. I found that being chaotic was the coolest part. Some fun things to do, which are very destructive to your city, are to start disasters. The disasters are very entertaining because you can zoom right in on the action. Some of disasters are fire, tornado, earthquake, riot and one of the more entertaining UFO's. Even though you are demolishing the city you worked hard to build it is still fun to watch!

At maximum zoom, the graphics look somewhat choppy, but this zoom is only used to watch people walk the streets. If you use the default zoom, though, the graphics are superb. The cars, houses and people roaming the streets are very good quality and highly realistic. All the buildings in the game are in 3D. The music is well done, has some cool jazz tunes and of course the SimCity theme song. The sounds are clear and add somewhat to the game. This also takes advantage of 3D Sound cards to add to the realism, and if you're fortunate to have a four speaker setup, you'll sometimes think your actually in downtown New York.

I found SimCity 3000 an interesting and fun game. It was a good successor to the SimCity tradition. It is also something fresh at the same time. Some downfalls of this game are that it has not changed that much from what I remember from SimCity 2000 and still uses an old engine, but the changes are enough. Some multiplayer features would have been nice. Maybe we'll see a SimCity 3000 Multiplayer Gold, and see who can build the biggest city the quickest. This is definitely worth a consideration.

GAME TYPE
SimCity!

REQUIREMENTS
P166, 32 Megs RAM, 200M HD, DirectX 6.x, 4X CDROM

PRICE
$49.99 USD / $89.95 AUS

REVIEWER
S. W.


INFORMATION

Published

03/17/99

Demo?

Yes, But Very Large

Release date

1/99

82%

Quick Summary:
A quality adversary to the SimCity series.


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