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Simcity classic4/30/2023 ![]() ![]() During one of my “explore my 5.25″ disks” sessions, I found a few of my old cities from the mid 90s, and I was able to pick up where I left off almost immediately. This game has been on every PC I’ve had since it was released and I go back to it, skipping over Simcity 2K and 3K. With my current i5 Wintel setup, running in DOSBox at full tilt, I can get a year or two to go by. ![]() I remember on my now ancient 386 33 MHz box, as a city grew, it could take upwards of ten minutes for a year of game time to click by. For awhile, my mother would actually bring out the SNES on her own and play Simcity. Simcity Classic has none of that, making it very accessible for people new to the genre. Later releases in the Simcity series added things like public transit, water supplies, trash disposal, neighboring cities, and more. (Tip: Oddly enough, you can forgo building any roads and use only train tracks to connect your entire city, reducing traffic to zero, thus aiding city growth.) Bored with this? You can inflict disasters on your city! Crash a plane! Flood it! Burn it! Shake it in an earthquake! You did remember to build a fire department or two, right? Unlike the Sims, or later Simcity releases, you won’t actually “see” your citizens, only where they live, and depending on traffic level, nondescript cars. Where is your crime? Where are people flocking to? Where are they leaving? Want to make a Megalopolis (500,000 people)? Get to work, it’s very difficult. Do you want a sprawling suburb, or a tightly packed city where it’s all apartment towers? Either way, you can make it happen! There are a multitude of charts and graphs with data plotted out over time, available for you to peruse. Will people live next door to a coal power plant (sort of). For a 25 (!!) year old game, the simulation is fairly complex, but simple enough for a child to grasp. Get too big, people will want a stadium or a seaport. Do you have enough cash and income coming in from taxes? Raise them. Do you want to make the city larger? Build more zones. So, zone, power, build some roads connecting the mess and boom, you have a village. Hopefully, other people agree with you, and move into these zoned areas. those never happen right?) In Simcity, you don’t actually “place people”, you give a guideline, via zones, where you think things should be. Besides zoning, you need electricity, so you can build a coal power plant (which causes pollution) or a nuclear plant (small risk of a meltdown. Each zone is a 3 x 3 block square that will only allow things of that type to build, so no factories are built next to houses on a residential zone and no house are built where factories reside. You’ll develop a love of zoning with residential, commercial, and industrial zones. You are given the task of ‘building a city’, but other than this lofty goal, you are free to do as you wish (within your budgetary constraints). Simcity is rather open ended, and as a result of this it’s rather difficult to describe in detail. ![]()
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