Sim City 2000: The power of running your own 20th century city

Sim City 2000 Released in 1993 was devastatingly impressive for its time. When you start out raw at the beginning it’s quite a good idea to have more than a cursory glance at the manual. It’s not that you won’t pick up the idea by yourself, it’s just that there is so much to do that unless you are forewarned the only indications you will have that strings are going wrong are slow growth and messages in the town newspaper that all is not well and the citizens are unhappy. The City Chronicle is one of the most important aspects of the game and you should ignore its often ridiculous ramblings at your peril.

It is a gauge of public opinion and, in general, if you fly in the face of this people will migrate elsewhere. You can start off at the simplest level back at the beginning of this century with a lot of money or, once you’re ready for a real challenge, you can enter at the end of the century when technology exists and you have to move quick to remain competitive. One way of raising more cash is to issue bonds to the populace. This is expensive but you can’t be prudish about borrowing if you’re the mayor of a modern city, remember though that ultimately, in order to succeed, you have to pay these bonds back, so you can’t squander them.

Well, maybe. Actually it’s great fun squandering bonds and building massive metropolitan nightmares, your ego swelling along with the city limits. And, once you’ve mastered the game you can relieve the hard work of having to build another city and test out your skills on a number of existing scenarios, cities supplied by Maxis with more trouble on their collective plates than any normal mayor could possibly handle. If you’re confident of your skills you can take one of them on and see how well they recover under your nurturing influence. Control by mouse is easy and the quality of the graphics means that you are never in doubt as to what you are doing at any stage. There is plenty of help from fiscal advisers, but you have the ultimate decision on what happens.

news source: various sources / image source: GenerationAmiga / watch on Youtube / download Simcity 2000 MS-DOS and Amiga