SimCity 3000
Company: Maxis/Electronic Arts
Estimated Price: $49.95
http://www.simcity.com
I’m not a typical computer gamer. Doom, Quake, Marathon, Tomb Raider, strategy titles, and role-playing games bore me. My Super Nintendo has been dusty for years.
But I have a weakness for the Sim games, and especially SimCity, the classic title that lets you build detailed virtual cities and watch them grow and mutate over decades of Sim time. It started when I pushed the limits of my Mac Plus after the release of the original (Mac only!) SimCity in 1989, sometimes letting my metropolises run overnight to see how they’d turn out.
Sim Expectations
1993’s SimCity 2000 was a marvel, a whole new Sim world, with its new 3D views, wonderful 256-color graphics, huge playing area, vastly expanded repertoire of infrastructure and building options, cool music and sound effects, and “real-life” city scenarios. After I somehow lost my original copy of SC2000, I tracked down another one at a used software shop in 1997 and started playing all over again.
As you’d expect, I was pretty hyped-up about the Mac version of SimCity 3000 which arrived this summer about a year after its Windows sibling. And though I can’t say I’m genuinely disappointed, the new version of SimCity isn’t the knockout I expected, like SC2000 was in its day.
First of all, the game is obviously a port from Windows. That’s not entirely terrible. The fine folks at Software MacKiev in Ukraine–some of them former Russian nuclear scientists–are known as some of the best software port programmers anywhere, and they have done an excellent job with their SimCity 3000 contract from Maxis, especially in making sure that keyboard shortcuts and the installer, for example, work in a sufficiently Mac-like way.
But the port has its prices. Although SC3000, like the previous games, has its own interface standards separate from the operating system, this time that interface has a decidedly Windows feel, including white Arial-font text on blue window title bars, filenames with cryptic extensions like “.sc3”, and Windows 95-clone Open and Save screens.
Sims Great, More Filling
The Windows port has made the system requirements hefty too, even in these days of 500MHz G4 chips and 10GB hard drives. For comparison, SimCity 2000 needed a Mac II or better (even six years after the Mac II was introduced) and 8MB of RAM (pretty standard in 1993), and once installed, you could run it from your hard disk. SimCity 3000, on the other hand, requires at least a 200MHz PowerPC processor (excluding anything more than a couple of years old), 128 MB of RAM under Virtual Memory (with at least 32MB of real RAM–64MB recommended), and a titanic 260MB of hard disk space–even though the game requires its CD in the drive to run!
The second thing that makes SC3000 a bit of a letdown is that it is exactly what its name suggests: another version of SimCity, but no more. Yes, the simulation area is four times the size, and you can now zoom in far enough to see individual cars and people moving around. Yes, the music is much more realistic, and there are more landmarks you can place. Lots more landscapes are available, including real cities such as my home town of Vancouver, and the interaction with your advisors, neighboring cities, and Sim citizens is more detailed.
But it’s still basically SimCity 2000, with more. If you played SC2000, you’ll know exactly what to do. Some things are new: you have to manage garbage now, for instance, and you can make deals with neighboring cities beyond the edge of your map. Some things are easier: power lines only have to cross open non-zoned terrain, not connect every building. Some things are more annoying: disasters like fires and earthquakes switch to slow speed so you can respond to them, but you can’t speed them up and watch them run wild either; and you can no longer build hydroelectric power plants.
There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Sim
If I sound like I dislike SimCity 3000, I’m misleading you. None of the problems I’ve mentioned detracts from the gameplay. If you have a sufficiently beefy Mac and don’t mind seeing the occasional Windows-style interface element, you’ll have a great time. On my beige Power Mac G3/266, zoning and building are occasionally a little jerky, but otherwise the program runs smoothly and the simulation engine certainly seems to take advantage of the PowerPC processor: if you set its speed to maximum, the months fly by. The graphics are great fun, with lots more animation and four full sides of detail to each structure. The more you play, the more subtle and ingenious detail you discover.
SimCity 3000 is just as addictive as its predecessors, and offers an even deeper canvas on which to let your city-building dreams play out. With the explosion of the Internet since SC2000’s release, you can now find a lot more neat stuff, from pre-built cities to new buildings and landmarks to the inevitable cheat codes, online both at the official SimCity site and at dozens of fan sites such as the SimCity 3000 Resource Center. You can even import cities from SimCity 2000–although you’ll probably have to make some major alterations for them to work well in the new environment, and some elements disappear entirely during import because they work differently in the two games.
Apparently, Maxis originally wanted to make another quantum leap from SimCity 2000, taking you right down to street level where you could roam the sidewalks of your city and talk to people face to face. Yet they realized early on that the hardware requirements for such a game would be so steep that almost no one could run it. They wisely chose instead to improve on the masterpiece they already had. Anyone who liked the previous SimCities will love this one, too.
I wish SimCity 3000 had been more revolutionary, true. But I still can’t stop playing it!
Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com
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