"Non-strategy gamers will serve to hate this but the intense fun of creating your own city is definitely a nice thing."

Fancy to become a mayor, controlling either a huge city like New York or Tokyo or maintaining a tiny, miniature city that looks more like a village? Either way, you’re sure to enjoy playing SimCity 3000, an exciting and engrossing game from Maxis, all truly upgraded from the ol’ SimCity 2000. There’s a lot more new features to tinker with, enjoying a whole lot new stuffs as well as tearing up your hair in frustation when your budget runs low.

Graphics – 9
The graphics are not really that great as this is only a strategy game, that doesn’t require any high-tech 3D graphics to view with. In fact, although you can still rotate your city as though the game is in 3D, you’ll just be facing only one side of the city, like a 2D game. The models of the buildings are quite great as they’re made in 3D dimension and they will get taller and taller as well as brighter and brighter when you advance more through the game.

The colours that are used varied from building to building and of course, depending on how well you had managed your city, you’ll get better and ‘cleaner’ buildings for either of your residential, commercial or industrial zones. There are no background, of course. It’s just a simple plain green lying on the game with a well-measured black grids covering your entire city.

When you load up the game, you’ll see that even the animation is quite poor and you can see the frames and tiny boxes if your computer is slow. Other extra animations in the game that you can see if you turn the option on are like smoke coming up from industrial buildings or dirty power plants to show that you city is actually polluted, your Sims walking about the city and all sorts of transports flying about and cars driving on your road.

Music – 8
The background music sounds a bit common, with some touches here and there by playing in a piano and other instruments. When you load up the game, there will be music sounded by a piano which leads you thinking immediately that there will be lots of other background music that you can hear. Right, there are more music but most of them are simply terrifying in the sense that they’re horrible, plain and nothing to be excited about.

The best feature that I can think of is that you can disable any background music if you like or disable all background music, allowing the game to run and load faster. While the music is worst of the lot, some of the sound effects sound almost the same too. Sure, it’s nice to hear birds chirping about and elephants trumpeting when you put a zoo on a spot but hearing it repeatedly can get too repetitive. Clicking on one particular building and then another will only result the same silly ringing that goes into my head. Luckily enough, most of the sound effects are different than another so you can try ahead by selecting any buildings that you desire.

Gameplay – 9
Build your city. Make it nice and wonderful. Make your Sims happy. That’s the basic of SimCity 3000, where your mission is to accomplish and finish making a fantastic and beautiful city of your dreams. Sounds simple, isn’t it? Not until you try it out and cry in despair as you keep getting the minus red mark that is trying to show you that you have low cash in hand as well as more expense than income.

Making a city requires logic and it is mostly based on real-life. Remember, you can’t simply build a city on top of water or air, or making buildings float on space. When you first load your game, you’re required to type in your city’s name, the mayor’s name, select the date that you want to start off (which will affect which type of buildings you have), select how big you want your city to be and select whether to be in the Easy (where you start off with 50,000 Simoleons), Medium (start with 20,000 Simoleons) or Hard Mode (start off with 10,000 loan).

Then, you’ll have to make the basic layout of your city, whether to be have water in the middle of your city, plenty of mountains to climb about and trees that give your Sims fresh air and absorbs air pollution. You’ll be given a choice to do anything you want, whether to put different sorts of zones and putting special civilized buildings. The zones, Residential, Commercial and Industrial are three different zones (initialized as RCI) which will have different sorts of demand from time to time.

You can always use the View Data feature to see whether your city has full police and fire station coverage, water and electric are running down your city, how far is your overall city’s education quotient and health. Start using the tips that you’ll get and you’ll see the logic of not putting Residential zones near Industrial zones.

And of course, there will be always disasters that can strike your city. Truly an exciting sight to see when you see a swarm of UFO’s flying around in your city and zaps buildings into it. Or perhaps a huge tornado destroying everything in sight. Or maybe a fire that raged your entire high flammable city or a gigantic earthquake that will half-damage your city. Riots can even occur if your Sims are very, very unhappy with your skills of mayoring your current city. All of these damaging disasters can be prevented, with the exception of the UFOs that will appear whenever they like. There are nothing to prevent this except to use the Emergency Alarm to tell your Sims about it.

If your Sims are happy from time to time, they will give you presents and rewards based on your population as well as other aspects that can be looked out. Keeping your Sims’ aura (happiness) as well as land values high will result your city the best and happiest city ever. Of course, don’t forget that you’ll need to dump your city’s garbage and putting power plants for the electric and water stations for the water. You can also enact ordinances if you like, to give certain goodness to your city. Some of the ordinances will have their own problems, like having too high money to be enacted, driving the industrial demand away and so on.

There will be petitioners appearing from time to time, offering you some sort of wonderful building, commenting on how bad is your city, giving you surprising praises and so on. Your ministries will also give you few tips and advises on how to run the city well. Remember that you’ll need to control your city’s budget as well as raise taxes or lower taxes when due. All of these helps to shape a successful city out of a new, young one. And of course, there will be no ending to this game. You can play until the year 2800 and the game will still not end. Surprising.

And of course, if you want to go on further, you can use custom terrain to use for your city or real-time terrain, which you can use Tokyo or even Washington. You can even have a great mayoring time on trying to develop a city to resemble Tokyo or Hong Kong. Maybe not. As there are simply too many things to put on one single city, you’re likely to hate this game even more.

Replay Value – 8
If you’re in for strategy games, then you’re sure to build more and more cities as you’ll never be satisfied. I’ve been creating the 15th city or so and still not yet fully satisfied with its current looks. Humans are thought to be greedy and you’ll crave for better goodness than ever. If you’re impatient and start to develop everything immediately, you’re sure to result in failure. Patience, the only thing that you must have in SimCity 3000. Oh, and more time too if you care.

Overall – 9
A truly inspiring game with many features for you to play, in fact, too many features for you to control. As you can see, the horrifying graphics in the outdated SimCity 2000 is over. But with the horrendous music, this game looks like an immature game to play. If you’re still stuck, it’s possible that you want to rate yourself as a cheater and use cheats. “Only those with patience shall succeed, but those who don’t will tear their hair out in frustation”. Ah, a nice quote from me.

SimCity
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+ It's fun to control a city!
+ The graphics are definitely great.
+ You can even make a real-time city!

2000
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- Horrible music. Simply horrible. Not even worth to hear.
- Introduction is a bit blur and you can see frames and boxes if you computer is slow.
- Tremendously hard if you're impatient. You'll need time to learn more about this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/20/00, Updated 10/20/00