SimCity 2000 was one of the first major game that used isometric view. Compared to its contemporaries, its graphics still look fresh. You can zoom and rotate the view. It took up astonishing little space, occupying only two floppies, and had incredibly high system requirements. Minimum resolution is 640×480 at 256 colors, but it should be played at 800×600 for full enjoyment. Even a Pentium 60 with a 1MB video card is a bit too slow for smooth gameplay. SimCity 2000 is one of the few games that exist in otherwise identical versions for DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x.

On a Mac, this is probably the nicest incarnation of SimCity to play. On a PC, the older SimCity for Windows is in most cases the better choice, except for the Windows 95 version on a fast PC (2006 fast, not 1996 fast). The 16-bit versions (both DOS and Windows) can run only at fixed resolutions, 800×600 maximum.

The Versions

• Macintosh, 1993.
• DOS, January 1994.
• Windows, later the same year.
• Amiga/AGA, 1994. After Dark Seed, it is the earliest Amiga game I know to run in hi-res only.
• Windows 95, 1996.
• OS/2, 1996.
• SNES, 1996.
• SEGA Saturn, 1995.
• PlayStation, 1996, with a unique walk-around feature.
• Nintendo 64, 1997/8, Japan only.
• Pocket PC, 2003?
• Game Boy Advance, 2003.

There is another Nintendo 64 SimCity game called SimCity 64, released 2000 only in Japan. It is not really a SC2k version, but rather an independent, all-3D game that gives you the ability to walk through your city and even ride a subway.

A kind of spin-off was the SimCity 2000 Network Edition, a multiplayer version for Windows 95 only from 1996. Sales were so poor that Maxis didn't implement multiplayer in SimCity 3000.

Surprise, Surprise

Some time ago, I had bought the SimCity 2000 CD collection in the jewelcase. It contains the DOS, Windows 3.1 and 95 versions, the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK), scenarios, bonus cities, all the manuals as PDF files, and was originally released 1996.

Later, I got the Macintosh version somewhere else, but only the game itself, so I thought I'd try and put the CD collection in my Performa 630 and see if I could import some of the bonus cities or scenarios. They are supposed to be cross-platform.

Imagine my surprise when I found a complete Macintosh version on this CD - complete with an Adobe Acrobat installer for the manuals. The CD cover had given no hint.

System Requirements

It is hard to come up with realistic system requirements for SimCity 2000. I play the Macintosh version on my Performa 630 (a 68LC040 with 33/66 MHz and 36 MB of RAM) with full enjoyment. Official requirements were considerably lower, a 68020 I think. I have not tried that out yet. In any case you need system 7 or higher and 256 colors (or grayscales). Having a large monitor and a high screen resolution is more fun. I hooked up two 17" monitors to my Performa 6400 in the hope of a vast panorama, but I was disappointed. While I could push the window freely to and fro between them, I could not resize it to fill them both.

• If you have a 660AV, switch the desktop to 256 colors manually, don't let the game do it. Otherwise the newspaper may display incorrectly.
• Turn off screensavers.

While there was a PPC update, there was none for OS X. SimCity 2000 was eight years old at the time, and, more important, SimCity 3000 was already out. It does run under the Classic Compatibility Mode, some say good, some say not so good, but it does run.

For all three PC versions, official system requirements are a 386/25 with varying amounts of RAM. This is absolutely and utterly ridiculous. I have a fairly fast and well-tuned 386 of these specs, and it would not run the Windows 3.1 version at a remotely playable speed. When I clicked on a button on the toolbar, nothing would happen for a full second.

I would recommend a Pentium at the very least. Though even on a Pentium 60 with a 1 MB video card there was no smooth scrolling at 800×600. On one download site for the Windows 95 demo I found requirements of a Pentium 166, 32MB RAM, and a 2MB video card. That sounds realistic.

Links

• Download the SimCity Windows 95 demo.
• SimCity 2000 Castle is still hosted on geocities, which is nostalgic in its own way. Last update July 1999.
• Jason's Sim City Archive: Cities, buildings, tips and cheats for SimCity 2000 and 3000.
• Ian's Simly Simsational SimCity Site has many downloads (cities, historical tilesets) for Macintosh and Windows.
• Scott's Addictions

Reviews

• The graphics are sharp on the Pocket PC, and kept the style of the PC version, JadeDragon notices with satisfaction:

  For the young and the furious, SimCity 2000 could be an ambitious game: imagine someone asking you what did you do today? and you answer, I built a city! But for the rest of us, SimCity 2000 satisfies our sense of nostalgia. Ported from the PC to Pocket PC by ZIO Interactive, SimCity 2000 brings back memories of the long running classic hit with exact game play and very familiar graphics and terrain layouts.

• Full Fat, the game's developer, does deserve credit for keeping the GBA version faithful to its PC counterpart, Frank Provo admits, but unfortunately there are limitations that the game can't overcome:

  A few compromises were made to get the game running comfortably on the GBA, but they'll probably only perturb those people who were hoping to take an exact duplicate of the PC version with them on the road. Most of these changes are graphical cutbacks meant to lighten the load on the handheld's CPU. For instance, in the Mac, PC, PlayStation, and Saturn versions of SimCity 2000, you can observe cars, buses, and trains moving along on the streets and rails of your city. The streets in the GBA game are completely bare and don't display vehicles of any kind. Underground features, such as sewers and subways, are also absent from the GBA game.

The SimCity Games
SimCity									SNES	89
SimCity 2000									SNES	93
SimCity Classic
SimCity Enhanced										94
SimTown
SimCity 2000 Network Edition										96
SimCopter
Streets of SimCity										97
SimCity 3000										99
SimCity 4										03