Product Description
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You're in charge of creating an entire city from the
ground up. Trade resources with neighboring cities. Import your
favorite city from SIM CITY 2000. Download the building architect
tool and design.
.com
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With SimCity 3000, you have more power than ever before
to build and control your city! Recreate your version of the
world's greatest cities using landscapes such as San Francisco or
Berlin and landmark buildings like the Empire State Building or
Big Ben. To put your stamp on your city, create your own
buildings using the SimCity Building Architect Tool. Then zoom in
close to your metropolis as it comes to life with people and
traffic in living color and full 3-D sound. All new missions and
cool disasters test your abilities to run your city or even
destroy it. For a greater challenge, negotiate and barter with
neighboring cities to strengthen your metropolis. In SimCity
3000, the city is yours.
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Review
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The city simulation that put Maxis on the ranks with
Pac-Man and Tetris as one of the greatest games of all time, so
certainly the Electronic Arts-acquired developer had big shoes to
fill, not to mention a big publisher breathing down its back,
while working on the second sequel. Now that the dust has
settled, either against all odds or to no great surprise, SimCity
3000 is fun, thoughtful, and satisfying, not to mention pristine
and pleasant to the core. Soft, bright colors, an attractive and
intuitive interface, and stylized comic characters all fit
together with an easy-listening soundtrack to make SimCity 3000 a
comfortable, relaxing place to be. Your city exists in an eternal
springtime; no matter how bad things get for your upstart town,
at least it won't rain.
The graphics not only look good, but they tell you everything
you'd want to know: You can see how well a developed area is
doing at a glance, as buildings that look expensive probably are,
and those that are ramshackle and sparse are probably worth a lot
less. The graphics are much more detailed than SimCity 2000's,
but only along the same lines - that is, you can zoom in closer
than ever before, down where you can see individual pedestrians
and automobiles, and everything looks real. At the same time,
there isn't much variety in types of buildings, nor do you get
seasons, nighttime, or anything specific. In fact, the difference
between SimCity 2000 and 3000 is only skin-deep - it's a cleaner,
prettier game, but if you're familiar with the series, you'll
know your way around.
The game plays like it always has. You set up your residential
zones, which you keep not too close and not too far from your
commercial and industrial zones, and tie everything together with
roads, power lines, and plumbing, and maybe rail- and subway.
With three zone densities to choose from, you can create suburbs
or jam-packed urban jungles as you see fit, though high-density
zones are more expensive. In a nice, new touch, you can even
create farmland with large plots of low industrial zone along the
outskirts of town. As your city grows, you need to provide it
with and fire protection, and with schools and colleges as
well as recreational and educational diversions like museums,
libraries, and zoos. Of course you need to generate revenue in
order to fund growth, and there's no good way to do that without
taxes. High tax rates are tempting since they'll leave you with
plenty of money to spend, but then again your long-term vision
may be for naught if no one's going to stick around to tolerate
your exorbitant tax demands.
But all that's SimCity standard fare. In 3000, you'll face
decisions previously taken for granted. For one thing, you need
to worry about garbage. You need to zone for landfill, a
necessary evil if you hope to keep your city clean. Just don't
expect anybody to live anywhere near your dump. Zone landfill
with room to spare, and you'll hear from the mayors of adjacent
cities asking you to take some of their share for a fee. You can
also sell excess electricity and water to your neighbors, or if
you're at the other end of the stick, you can buy these resources
from them as well. At other times, petitioners will encourage
city ordinances, from a public smoking ban, to homeless
sheltering, to parking fines. These have short-term and long-term
benefits and disadvantages, and to help you decide whether to
enact them or not, you can consult your advisors who'll tell you
frankly what they think you should do. Your advisors are good at
their jobs - their suggestions are usually right, although once
in a while you'll wish to respectfully decline their advice
(sure, it's a waste of real estate, but you know you want to
build that exclusive country club). You'll know when all such
decisions are at stake, or whenever anything's awry in your city,
thanks to the convenient news ticker along the bottom of the
screen that'll keep you ever-informed, if not in good humor.
Things are bound to go wrong at some point. Your power s and
water pumps will grow old and require replacement. Or worse yet,
disaster may strike in the fearsome guise of tornado, earthquake,
fire, or even alien attack. You can disable disasters if you'd
rather not deal with their consequences. But the ultimate
challenge of SimCity 3000 remains the same as it always has, and
that is to keep growing, and to keep growing better, while
conquering the problems inherent to that growth. And to that end,
you have far more landmass to work with than in SimCity 2000, so
you can keep busy for a long, long time.
Along the way, you'll run into the occasional quirk. The news
ticker and your advisors tend to be extreme, one minute telling
you your city plumbing is hopelessly inadequate, and the next -
once you've remembered to link that new city block with pipes -
that your sewers are the nation's envy. There are plenty of other
too simple either-or situations, such as with traffic, garbage,
and education. Other design decisions are half-baked; while
SimCity 3000 contains dozens of historical landmarks, from the
Kremlin to the Statue of Liberty, they are optional items that
have no effect on your city save that they take up space. You can
place up to ten of them at any time, making the act of doing so
feel rather pointless.
Other frontiers remain unexplored - for instance, your role as
mayor is never reevaluated, and your city exists only on the
macrocosmic scale, meaning you can't place a coffee shop by a
book store, and instead must remain content to watch your light
commercial zone develop as it sees fit. You'll become familiar
with all the city ordinances soon enough, there aren't too many
new technologies introduced into the 21st century and beyond, and
your advisors aren't going anywhere.
Given the facts, it's both tempting and valid to criticize
SimCity 3000 for what it isn't while futilely pointing in
directions it might have gone. Then again, you need but recall
the game's torrid development cycle to know that its culmination
in SimCity 3000 is probably for the best. The game that began as
an ambitious, full-3D renovation of the series was scrapped in
favor of something not so very different than its predecessors,
no doubt because the old adage about not fixing what ain't broke
is, in fact, true. As it stands, SimCity 3000 is a stable,
attractive, finely balanced game with just enough new features to
satisfy veterans of series. -- Greg Kasavin
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot
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