Post by Ayen on Jan 16, 2012 9:45:39 GMT -6
SimCity 2000 is a simulation, city-building game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It was originally released for the PC, as all Sims games are, before being ported to a wide-selection of platforms through the years, eventually making it way to the Sony PlayStation which is the port of the game we'll be looking at today.
Right off the bat I have to comment about the box. For some reason the box is made able to contain three different discs but there's only one disc alongside the instruction manual. Is there something I'm missing? Why can't it just be a regular case? What does it need all the extra space for? But I digress.
You know how when you get a new game, you're excited and you put it in without even touching the instruction manual? Yeah, you're not gonna want to do that with this game. This is the kind of game where you're gonna want to read the instruction manual before playing otherwise it's basically going to be a lot of trial and error on your part. Fortunately the manual has a “boot camp” that doesn't take very long in order to learn the basics of the game.
If you don't feel like creating your own city you can load up one of the many pre-made ones to play straight away. No matter where you are you'll have a cursor you can move around with the directional buttons. While in your city you can move this up to the many different icons (these are your tools) on the top, left, right and bottom of the screen. Highlighting one will show you a set that goes along with the icon your cursor is over. To find out more about it press the Triangle (Shift button) and Circle button (Cancel button) at the same time then press X if you want to select it. For example say you're in Tokyo and the citizens want you to build them an airport, hover over the appropriate icon and give them an airport.
As mayor you are responsible for the health, wealth and happiness of the Sims living in your town. In order to do this you'll want to plan your strategies well. You'll want to keep tabs on things like water, power and transportation. Provide government services, education, recreation, work on the city's budget, taxes and land manipulation. Don't worry about building houses, stores, factories or other buildings as the Sims will take care of that themselves.
Any time during the game you can press select for the available menus; Speed Menu, Options Menu, Disasters Menu and Newspaper Menu. Speed allows you to change the speed of how things run, options let you edit sound, music, budget, have it automatically go to an important event in the city and turn off disasters altogether. Disasters range from fire, flood, air crash, tornado, earthquake, monster, hurricane and riot so if you really want to be mean you can run through those.
With the Newspaper Menu you can have a Subscription, which delivers a newspaper to you twice a year, Extra which only reports important occurrences, inventions and major steps in development. Depending on how large the city depends on how many Newspaper selections you have but in total you have The Picayune, The Courier, The Herald, The Journal, The Times and The Chronicles to choose from.
When you get into building your own city you can choose the difficulty setting and the year. Depending on what year you choose; 1990s, 1950s, 2000s 2050s, will affect the tools you can use as some won't be available until the technology is. At any time you can edit the map through the “Edit New Map” option on the main menu if you want to clear any of your cities or pre-made ones for whatever reason you may have. There is also a “Load Scenario” selection on the main menu which is actually recommended before going through boot camp.
All in all this is definitely a thinking and patience game. If you're not big on patience or just looking for a game that doesn't require much thinking this is definitely not something you'd want to pick up. If you are a patient gamer and like to be challenged intelligently this is definitely the game for you. I'm not sure if it matters which port you get but I'm going to take a leap of faith and say the PC version is probably the superior version since it was made for that first but there's really nothing wrong with the PlayStation port that I can see.
That goes for a lot of games I feel should be solely for the PC since from my experience when they're ported to a console it's not as good.
