Some things that weren’t obvious to me at first were that you’ll need to connect a road to at least one neighbour in order to get people moving in, while power lines have to go literally into a zone to power them (unlike water pipes, which can just be dug out underneath the roads). You can then zone areas by selecting commercial, industrial or residential and if all goes well, you’ll soon see buildings popping up as people move in. You’ll build power stations and water pumps to keep your citizens going, connect them with cables and pipes, before dragging roads that allow citizens to get around. However, once you get going this is a classic SimCity experience. You can change the game speed but this only really affects how fast your city grows. R2 and L2 are used for zooming which is a pain on Vita (I mapped it to the front touch) and in general load times are just too long, with the game feeling laggy for the most part. Controls are awful – you’ll need to move a mouse-style icon to various tiles to build, while screen scrolling only works while you have something selected. There’s a nice challenge to just spawning something random and building around it though, so this was my preferred option.Īfter this, it’s right into gameplay with no explanation. These kinds of things will matter as you’ll need water supplies to keep your population alive, trees to absorb pollution and flat land for proper zoning. Your initial options are to spawn a random map, or create your own by shaping the terrain in the vein of Populous. Thankfully I’d played 3000 so I found my feet fairly quickly, but it is a bizarre oversight that I can’t say is only in this PS1 port or not as this is the only version I’ve played. So the first thing I noticed is that very little is explained to you – there’s no tutorial, so you’ll be relying on prior SimCity knowledge or the in-game manual or an online guide. Sound is a midi selection of songs that can be catchy on occasion – not as good as the Sims titles, but decent all the same.Īn early pioneer of the city-building and simulation genres, SimCity 2000 feels quaint by modern standards but there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had with its surprisingly deep gameplay. Even the PlayStation addition of being able to drive around your city in first person is ugly, with blocky buildings, although I did love the cutesy charm of the little arm that leans on the window as you look sideways. This is especially evident in the newspaper interludes that are difficult to real with blurred text, or the mouse-style UI that just isn’t intuitively designed for playing with a gamepad. The title doesn’t feel optimised in any way for PS1. The models are isometric sprites and hideous, your city doesn’t evolve over the years meaning a lot of repeated structures which makes things feel stale beyond the opening hours and worst of all, everything is just laggy as you’re scrolling around your kingdom. Maps are dioramas in the sky that made me nostalgic for this more simple era of gaming, you’ll be able to drive round the city in first person and there’s visual cues for everything from electricity supply to buildings going up. So I do give praise to the game for its use of colour, which is extensive and vibrant, as well as the fact that for the most part, buildings and land resembles what it’s supposed to. Like so many Maxis titles, there’s no overarching plot in SimCity 2000 – you’re simply given free reign to build the metropolis of your dreams.Įven by the standards of its competitors such as Theme Park, the graphics in SimCity 2000 are barely passable on this console, looking garish and ugly for the most part.
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