back to article SimCity 2000

The summer of 1995, I remember it well. I was but a slip of lad at the time, slightly console obsessed perhaps, but about to embark on a period of PC gaming that would put me at the forefront of cutting-edge videogame technology, nearly bankrupting my parents as I went. It was my birthday and I’d just finished hooking up my …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Educational Value

    I don't doubt it. Used to play this and my kids did too, and they learned about political trade offs concerning various budgetting, planning and utility issues and all the other things simulated in this game much younger than was able to. They've grown into very smart adults. Anonymous coward, cause I don't want to embarrass them.

  2. Andy

    id take a 486 dx-50 over a p60 anyday!!.. those p60s were cack! intel didnt get it right with pentium till the p75

    1. Danny 14

      I deed I stuck with my amd dx4 100 until I got a p133

      1. The Serpent

        I also played this perfectly well on my 486 DX4 100, but it did also have a Vesa Local Bus graphics card with a whole 256KB of dedicated memory. A mate of mine ran it on a 486 DX66 but with a better S3 Virge card to make up for it. The game itself ran the same, the difference was in the scrolling speed as your moved around the map.

  3. Test Man
    Thumb Up

    Oh God, I'm going to have to get my copies of SimCity 2000 (DOS AND Windows!), 3000 and 4 out and migrate it all to my new Windows laptop... AGAIN!

    :D

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IIRC...

    One particular version of SimCity (3?) had a 1920 Berlin version. I remember that being my first sucessfull city well into 2150, with taxes so low and happiness (people immigration...) so high that people would COMPLAIN THE TAXES WERE LOW and you didn't value your city, despite the fact you had plenty of cash to spare anyway.

    If I recall correctly... SimCity 2k was one of the few games that could have their variables searched and replaced. Have $2350, search 2350 on the game files (your save)... have 2000, search 2000.... now replace 2000 with FFFF and watch magic happens...

    Off-topic:

    You can still do that (plain text editing) in Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3, except it is even easier because it is a plain XML file. It spells out for you "Planes contact points" with coordinates. If your plane has no contact points, it can't be shot down. Except that you cross the airport runway towards the center of the earth and blow up. So, search for contact points with Z coordinate equal zero, and those would be your landing gear, and keep them. Microsoft Age of Empires 3 is prone to the same quirk, for the same reasons. But it helps to customize the game beyond any SDK having XML files to script your game.

    /offtopic

    These games were fun both playing straight and messing up with the code to watch outlandish stuff happens.

    And I believe anyone applying for mayor should play any version of SimCity and make a respectable 'win' before even becoming a candidate.

    1. NomNomNom

      Re: IIRC...

      You can still do that kind of stuff with games,

      Because minecraft servers send all world blocks around the player to the client, not just the blocks the player can see, I spent a good amount of time trawling through the minecraft process memory trying to identify world chunks so I could find all the diamonds nearby the player and plot them into a bitmap.

      I could have instead modified the client but aside from probably being illegal, worse the server would probably detect my client was modified and I would be banned. Easier to just get another process to read into the memory. This wasn't to cheat it was more to see if the concept could work.

  5. Lee D Silver badge

    Reticulating splines

    I remember reading about this years ago, from the man himself, I believe, but "reticulating splines" was just a bit of nonsense.

    "Will Wright has stated in an interview that the game does not actually reticulate splines when generating terrain, and he just inserted the phrase because it "sounded cool"."

    Admittedly Wiki doesn't give a citation for this, but I've seen it enough times over the years, including things like histories and interviews about the game, that I'm inclined to believe it's completely true.

    Random elevation maps have little to do with splines at all. Hell, they are closer to fractal plasma algorithms that have been running around for years prior to SimCity 2000.

  6. Mike Brown
    Mushroom

    yeah simcity is great....

    but civ was better.

    1. reno79

      Re: yeah simcity is great....

      Partially agree, but Civ had less replayability for me. Once you "won" that was pretty much it

  7. Mondo the Magnificent
    Pint

    SC2K FTW!

    I loved this game like no other.

    It was such a huge improvement over the 2D original and the fact one can terraform your map prior to building your virtual empire was awesome

    Adjusting tax rates, building parks and museums to appease the binary citizens, building right angled highways and prisons made it an experience I shall never get tired of.

    I have to ask just how many SimMayors left the game running overnight to accumulate beeelions in taxes so we go the mega route and build those Arco type buildings,.

    The biggest bous of all for me was integrating your SC2K maps into SimCopter so you could get a real bird's eye view of your creation!

    Yes, I still have a copy but sadly it's been years since I played. Rest assured that this weekend I will dig through my old jewel cased software collection and install it on the Windows box...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Build your home town....

    When SimCity 2000 came out I built a representation of my own home town (Glenrothes), turned out to be just as uneventful and boring as the real thing, still a couple of disaters later and I was able to rectify most of the town planning issues.

    I wonder if the new SimCity will have Councillors/politicians with their own adgenda ruining bits of your city with pointless crap like speed bumps, skate parks in the middle of pension residential areas, industrial estates being build all around the permimeter of the town, that end up well within town boundaries when the next random expansion of residential housing begins.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. jason 7
    Happy

    When can we have a Master of Orion 2 retrospective?

    Just saying.

  10. Mayhem

    May have required the next version of the game

    But I still remember the astonishment when this little feat came out for SimCity 3000.

    Especially the horrific underlying nature of life in such a city.

    http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-largest-and-most-terrifying-simcity/

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Daniel B.

      Re: May have required the next version of the game

      Yipes. That city looks like the Limbo landscape in Inception. Heh, I do remember doing some cities with less roads; subway stations were pretty good for this thanks to the three tile limit. Put the subway stations at 6-tile intervals, layout a grid of these stations and you could build up a pretty dense population zone in the area...

  11. reno79

    Sim City 2000 was and still is my favourite in the series. I regularly break out my DOSBox and play for a few evenings. As much as I'm looking forward to the new one (not that my ageing laptop can handle it) I am sceptical it can replicate the enjoyment and distraction levels that 2000 did, and to a lesser extent, Sim City 4. From all the vids I've seen it's too focussed on management either on a micro scale or grand, city wide scale. 2000 happily struck a balance between all three.

    I'm going to have to return to one of my many metropolises tonight.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  12. Iain Black
    Thumb Up

    Great, great game.

    I got it again a year or two ago from GOG and must have played it for another 30 hours or so, not bad value for the $3 on special or so it cost!

    I had it back in the day on my Amiga 1200, incredibly slow and basically unplayable on the stock machine, but with a small spend of around £400 or something silly to get a 030 and extra 4MB of RAM, it ran quite nicely.

    The original SIm CIty was pretty good, but as the article mentioned SC2000 was one hell of an upgrade with so many positives and no dumbing down. I'd bet you don't see that much now days. :(

  13. The Serpent

    I sunk so much enjoyable time into SC2000. I've been known to play it long after 'the day', but not done so for a while.

    I noticed the comments about hydro power earlier - they are excellent at first as they are available fairly early on but the difference between them and any other power station is that they don't need renewing. Build a hydro and it lasts forever. However you do need a lot of them and they are quickly outclassed in cost efficiency by the later power tech.

    I also saw something about not hitting the 120K population for arcologies. Unfortunately in that regard you are rewarded by having the least interesting city - stick to absolutely nothing but completely flat land with a wall to wall grid of roads at 90 degree angles which mark out 6x6 spaces for your zones. That gives maximum density for the most part of the game while you building population and money. Once the 8x8 arcos are available they don't fit the grid well, but they don't have to as it has already done its job of getting you to the endgame.

    I rather enjoyed the use of the newspaper as a means of communication by the game. A lot of the Miss Sim stories were quite amusing - I remember the one where someone wrote in and said they were worried by a dream they had where nothing was real and they were just living in a computer game..!

  14. ammabamma
    Happy

    Easter eggs! Easter eggs everywhere!

    I loved all the little Easter eggs in this game (PC CD-Rom version w/ SC2K, SCURK, and Scenarios all bundled together):

    1. Nessie eating the little sailboats from the marina.

    2. "Maxis Man" superhero flying in to save your city from a disaster.

    3. Shooting down the traffic helicopter with the "Center" tool (double plus good!)

    On a side note, did anyone else have a problem with the military bases? My bases never constructed, they simply remained a useless piece of land zoned for the military... (unless there was some city condition I did not meet)

  15. Peter74447
    Thumb Up

    SIM City 2000 + Sim Copter

    I used to cheat to build the biggest city possible then load the city into Sim copter so you could fly around and watch your city burn in true 3d block graphics.

    Now if you excuse me, i am off to find my SC2K and Sim Copter discs.

  16. parry.lost
    Thumb Up

    SimCity 2k is probably my favourite game of all time. I've tried SimCity 4, and it just didn't have the same soul to it -- it added some more detail and complexity, but somehow these details failed to coalesce into something truly great and enjoyable. 2000 had the feel of being greater than the sum of its parts, and it was always a real joy to watch your city spring to life. I remember having a lot of trouble getting sims to start moving into my town when first playing the game when I was little, and finally figuring that part out made me incredibly happy -- every extra bit of complexity I discovered on top of that just made the entire experience more and more wonderful. I still have my Special Edition CD lying around, and this review makes me want to install the game again...

  17. Christian Berger

    It was responsible for a large part of ParityBoot B infections in Germany

    Because SimCity 2000 only ran on 4 Mb PCs if you had special minimalistic boot setups. So many people booted their PCs from a diskette in order to be able to play the game. And booting from diskette is the main infection vector for bootsector viri.

  18. gisabsr

    porntipsguzardo

    That cheat code is permanently etched on my brain. It's the only one I've remembered from that era.

  19. jaminbob
    Thumb Up

    Inspired a generation of town planners

    This is the definitive version for me personally (although 4 is close).

    During my degree in Town Planning, it was not a surprise given most of the people on it had been 16 - 18 when this came out, that many, perhaps most of the group had been influenced in their choice of career after playing this game.

    Of course the real thing is no where near as much fun, and I'm more or less and IT bod in a related field now :(

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