SimCity 2000

"Slow as a Snail"

This game is plain and simply to slow to warrant you spending your good money on. If you want a good Sim City game go look in the PC bargain bin and you will find a the better game at a fraction of the cost. I've played Sim City 2000 for both the macintosh and the playstation and honestly the very little has changed, except for the speed on the playstation version moves as slow as a snail.

The whole premise of this game is for you to become the city of a chunk of land and build it into whatever type of city you like. You control almost everything around you including taxes, landscaping, building government buildings, running road and power lines, all the way down to planting tree's and running creeks(if you want to). That is actually a great concept that has worked several times before, but it doesn't translate very well onto the playstation platform compared to others.

My major gripe about this game is it's major slowdown from the other versions. Even at speed setting ''Cheetah'' the playstation version crawls slower than the computers' ''Turtle'' setting. Probably any computer that can handle 256 color's will play this game much better. You may think that the game being slower doesn't really affect the fun factor of this game, but it does, especially when your trying to build a large city (which is a major objective in the game) and it will take around 8 minutes to get through a single year (or at least it feels like it), which is at least four times longer than any decent computer. That may not sound bad, but multiply it by 100 or even 800 and that ends up being an extremely long wait to gain enough money to work with( I've had cities on the Mac go well past 800 years). Plus the trick that you could use on the computer of just leaving the game running all day to raise money is a dangerous thing to do to on your playstation, considering that you could easily burn out your playstation if you leave it on all day very often(especially the older ones).

The fundamentals of the game have not changed, and they have even added a few nice additions. Such as the ''Drive Around Town'' option, which seems great until you actually see it in action. You soon see that almost every building in the city looks close to the same, and they are all flat ugly polygons' that have a poor texture map on them. In addition to that there are extreme pop-up problems in the ''Drive Around Town'' mode, you can't see the next building unless you're within a few building blocks(not city blocks) away, so most of time you sit there and look at the fog in front of you.

It's not that the concept of this game is bad, in fact I would probably give this game four stars if the were an original concept (or even an original game), not just another copy of the same game that's on all the other platforms. The game still controls quite well even without the mouse, and the same music that they used in all the other games is still there and works quite well. I would actually recommend this game to anyone who doesn't have access to any other gaming platform, and has an incredible amount of free time and the patience to go with it. Otherwise you may never even have enough time to figure out what your doing (or trying to do is more like it), although it does have a rather good ''Mayor Boot Camp'' (training session) it will require a lot more experience to understand. It is purely the fact that this games' speed is so bogged down that it makes you feel like your watching the grass grow, and will leave you looking for something else to do ultimately. If you have good access to a computer then I highly recommend you getting the PC version of this game if you want a more entertaining version of the same game (yes, it's about the same game in every way), before you even consider the playstation version.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/10/01, Updated 11/10/01