I’ve been reacquainting myself with an old friend recently. We’ve known each other for a long time, and even though we occasionally forget about each other and don’t spend much time together, we always get back together again sooner or later.
I’m talking about SimCity 2000.
The first time I even heard about SimCity 2000 was back in late 1992 I think. I saw a preview of it in some computer magazine, and I thought that it looked cool. I actually had never played the very first SimCity so I didn’t really know what all the hubbub was about, but I thought it looked neat. The graphics were crisp and the game seemed like a perfect waste of time for a teenager such as myself. I think I also had just gotten ahold of my first Super VGA-compatible graphics adapter, and I looked forward to it.
And when it was released and I got it… I played it so much. I spent hours devising the perfect city, giving myself various challenges and exploring the open-ended toy that it was. I built arcologies and took my city into the distant future. It was, for lack of a better description, totally awesome.
Sure, there came other SimCity-games after 2000. I bought 3000 when it came out in ’99 and I played SimCity 4 as well. Not too long ago I gave SimCity Societies a go. These were all interesting in their own ways, but none of them came even close to having the insane replay value that SimCity 2000 has had over the years. None of them appealed to me in exactly the same kind of way that SimCity 2000 has for more than sixteen years.
There’s a lot of games which I consider absolutely immortal. The Sims for example. That was also a huge timesink and a joy to play. Or Dungeon Keeper 2. Or Doom.
But if I had to choose just one game to claim the prize as the best game I’ve every played, my money would be on good old SimCity 2000.
Here’s a screenshot of me playing SimCity 2000 Deluxe in a virtualized Windows XP. It works just fine under Wine too, but it gets a little confused unless you run Wine-applications in a faux desktop of their own. This just worked better for me since I already had the virtualized XP running.
