Monday 14 January, 2008

SimCity 2000 is a simulation city building and planner game. It is the second version of the Maxis original hit SimCity. The object of the game is to build a successful city with a large population. Obstacles include a lack of fund and disasters (Riots, Earthquakes, Floods, etc.). The player must zone land (industrial, residential, commercial) and add buildings to meet "the sims" needs. This includes power, water, transportation, social services, etc.
SimCity 2000 was a game that I loved to watch my father play growing up. After playing the more recent SimCity3000 and SimCity4 I decided to go back in time and give SimCity2000 a try. The first difference I noticed was the lower quality graphics. The game was released in 1993 so I decided to let that slide and proceed. I played the easy mode which allotted me 20000 dollars to play with. The medium mode gave 10000 and the hard mode gave 10000 that I would have to eventually pay back to the bank. As I played I became clear what worked and what did not. I quickly realized the two most important things were power and water. With out these things no people moved to my city. Power was the most frustrating thing because the plants cost about a forth of my entire budget. Once I had power, water, and roads, I looked at the zoning meter to see what zone was in demand. Industrial was in high demand so I began building. A problem that arose was determining how far away from a road could I zone and still have it build. After lots of trial and error three became the magic number. I continued by creating six by six zoned regions surrounded by road, adding different zones as the meter indicated.
My population grew to a meager 1000 people when things started to fall apart. Apparently cities need police, fire, schools, parks, etc. By the time I realized this I was out of money. I had to wait for years to go by as I acquired tax money to build the necessary buildings. This part of the game was not fun so I decided to take out a loan. I was unaware that this was the worst idea only leading me further into debt to pay off the loan. I decided to simply start a new city. I had gotten the gist of the game and was ready to build a metropolis. After a while the game became quite fun as “gifts” were given for achieving a population goal. For instance, at 5000 people I got a mayors house, and at 10000 I got a city hall. It took me about an hour to get up to roughly 50000 people.
At this point I had learned a lot about the game. People really annoyed me constantly complaining about high taxes. Because my city continued to grow I simply ignored them. Traffic also was a pain to deal with. I was forced to add railways which were a pain because I had to demolish existing stuff to add them. Eventually subways were invented so I could add them underground which made it a lot easier and more fun. The game, although simple, was fun and kept me interested. I found myself playing the game and ignoring all the flashing Instant Messenger boxes at the bottom of my screen.

This was an Okay entry. Could you please mark which sections represent what, like Design, Gameplay, and so-on. It's very hard for me to find which paragraph is about design, most of it just seems to be about gameplay. Please, next time clearly mark your sections.
-Chelsea C. (grader)