#SIMCITY 2000 ARCOLOGY LAUNCH PC#

One of the first things you need to do after building a power plant is place down a road system connecting to the highway running alongside your city limits. The next major change that seriously messed up all my initial plans is the road system. The rewards are worth it though, as these great sites will bring in more people and profits for all the cities in the region.

You’ll need to research and put more funding into it to build it up. With the arcologies in particular, after spending a million dollars on it, you’re only developing the base feature. Placing a great work isn’t as simple as saving up and then having whatever you want built. Within the region is a specific spot near the middle where you can place an airport, space station, or even freaking arcologies (no it won’t launch into space). You’ll find that you want to manage multiple cities, as the more cash you can ultimately generate, the sooner you can build a great works site. Jumping from city to city is an asynchronous deal, so time will stop in the cities you’re not actively in until you switch back. With the more than plentiful resources I accumulated in my first city, I could focus on other endeavors in my second city as I fed it my excess resources. My first city got pretty efficient by the end of my play time. I didn’t dabble too much with managing two cities within one region, but the possibilities intrigued me. I played for roughly six hours while at Maxis, and the more sucked into SimCity I became, the more I realized that I was okay with the idea of the multi-city concept. None of the cities appear to be able to ever connect immediately against each other, so there will always be untouched open spaces where nature can thrive. Now, you’re literally limited within a specifically sized zone for your city. Before, I could fill up every square inch of a map with whatever I wanted. That was the first thing that played against my sense of total world domination needs. And to put doubt quickly to rest, you can play these maps all by yourself, or keep your regions public so anyone can jump in and work alongside you. The lowest-tier region can hold three cities, while the biggest region can hold 16 cities. One of the biggest changes with SimCity is that you’re playing in different-sized regions, each with the possibility of creating multiple cities within. While a bit jarring to my sense of nostalgia at first, I quickly found myself getting sucked into the experience. I went in with the strategy I used to use when creating my utopias in SimCity 2000, but quickly found out that my old plans wouldn’t cut it. I’ve certainly kept up with all our coverage, but it didn’t really prepare me for what I was about to experience. Last week, I got to visit Maxis’s offices just east of San Francisco where I finally went hands-on with the city simulation title.

#SIMCITY 2000 ARCOLOGY LAUNCH PC#

Now that I own a beast of a PC rig, there’s no way I can pass up the new SimCity, even with as intrusive DRM measures as there are.

I never got around to the other Sim City games after 2000, largely due to becoming primarily a console gamer. I lost hours of my life managing the shit out of my various towns, altering the land to best serve my capitalist needs, and repeatedly failing to save Oakland after the firestorms. One of the very first games I ever owned that truly showed me the joy of gaming was SimCity 2000 for the Mac.

Simcity 2000 arcology launch