Alien Attack in Sim City 2000
In anticipation of the new Sim City release I’ve spent the past week playing Sim City 2000. And it’s pretty good.
I first played Sim City when it was brand new on the Super Nintendo. I still have the game cartridge, and I remember looking at the lesser graphics of the classic computer game and wondering if there were any trade-offs on the console version.
Not long after, I received Sim City 2000 for the PC. The game had seemed amazing and complex, with the water and pipe system bringing it over the top in terms of level of technical detail. I played with disaster mode off, because I didn’t want anything I created being randomly destroyed.
In February, when the publicity for the new Sim City launch started to hit, I re-installed Sim City 2000 on the DosBox emulator. I wanted to see how it would compare, and how much of the gameplay the original 1994 design had nailed.
One of the first things I noticed was the size of the auto-generated map and how small it initially seemed. This quickly became a plus, because I found it to be both time consuming and difficult to fill without the city going broke in the process. The speed settings were helpful, but it left me wondering how the speed of expansion on my city compared to the expansion of cities in real life.
In all, Sim City 2000 has aged remarkably well. After adjusting to the older user interface I found it to be just as enjoyable as any modern game. I’m still playing it, and I can’t seem to be bothered to try Sim City 3000 or even Sim City 4. I still haven’t played the new Sim City yet, but when I do, I’m going to keep disaster mode on.