Sim City 3000 Reviewed by: Mike Brinkman Review Date 12.2.99 Publisher: Maxis/Electronic Arts Macintosh version by: Software MacKiev MSRP: $49.95

One of the best selling series of all time has finally returned to the Mac. Sim City 3000 promises "the power trip of a life time!" Unfortunately, it can't deliver on the promise. I hate to say it, but I must: SimCity 3000 is a major disappointment. There were a number of elements in the game that were very nice. The graphics were very good, and add a very strong visual appeal. If you like Jazz music, you'll probably enjoy SimCity 3000's sound track. It's very tastefully done. If you want humor, Sim City 3000 delivers it in quantity. It's not always funny though as puns involving broccoli and llamas will only go so far. The caricatures of your city advisors and the denizens of SimCity are nicely and humorously drawn (The fact that your environmental advisor was also one of those "cat-ladies" who was always attending conferences cracked me up!). Also very nice is Sim City 3000's web site support. It offers playing tips to help those of you who are still going to buy Sim City 3000 in spite of this review. "Gee Mike, Sounds good so far," you think to yourself, but that's not the whole story. Great graphics and sound do not a great game make. There are also elements of game play and user interface. On these two points, SimCity 3000 fails miserably. As a centrally planned economy game, Sim City 3000 presents very little challenge. Even at its fastest setting, Sim City 3000 still lollygags along the way. One of the nicer features of Sim City 3000 is its news ticker, a horizontally scrolling hyperlink bar. It alerts you to when something is awry. Unfortunately, most news is out of date by the time you read it. But this only scratches the surface of the flaws in Sim City 3000. Without a doubt, one of the largest errors was the omission of a map editor. SimCity 3000 gives you a very limited map generator which allows you to alter the amount of water, mountainous terrain and trees, but there's no way to create a map of your own town. PC players get a building architecture tool (BAT) which allows them to create their own landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower. The included buildings are very nicely done. There's even a landmark building of Apple's campus. However, it seems this was done on the PC, since the building editor will not be made for the Mac. (On a side note, I tried to download the Apple Campus for a few screen shots. Alas, every time I tried to unstuff it, I got an error message saying the file was corrupt, and couldn't be opened by Stuffit Expander. It seemed par for the course...) Changing between views on the map is clunky. Often times it will take several seconds to go between the subterranean view and the City view. Furthermore, navigation around the map is difficult. Sim City 3000 would have benefited greatly had they taken a cue from real time strategy games such as StarCraft or Myth with their mouse scrolling of maps. Zoning is problematic as well. You can't zone or have buildings on uneven terrain. I wonder if the makers of Sim City 3000 have ever been to San Francisco? The laying of roads, pipes and power lines are too difficult. Whenever you try to lay a road on a coast line, the road invariably ends up in the water, and you get a red line preventing you from putting down the road at all. Likewise with pipes and power lines. I'd like to extend kudos to Software MacKiev for a well done port of a mediocre game, even making a few minor improvements. Most noticeably, was the color icons (they're black and white on the PC version). Now if they only could have done something about that ugly, big old white Windows '95 mouse cursor! Bottom Line: Sim City 3000 is more fun that watching paint dry, but just barely. Nice graphics and sound, and occasional humor are not enough to save this iceberg-bound luxury liner. With its clunky interface and unchallenging game play, SimCity 3000 gets a thumbs down. Score: 6.5 out of 10 System Requirements: OS 7.5.3, OS 8.1 or higher for G3 200 MHz PowerPC or G3 260 MB of hard disk space, 100 MB for virtual memory 32 MB RAM, 64 MB RAM recommended, 128 MB Virtual memory 4X CD ROM Quicktime 3.0 or later Current Reviews