rgathright's Full Review: Sim City 2000 for Game Boy Advance (GBA)
Sim City on the Gameboy Advance is a faithful port that does a good job with the memory and processing available. The game is a fun alternative to the PC version but only for a short time. The graphics and sound mimic those of the full sized PC brother, yet the gameplay is not. So many features have been removed or toned down that you can become confused with how to play and what is actually happening to your sim.
Sim City is very popular game among the PC gaming community. The game gives you the opportunity to create your own cities and micro manage every aspect right down to the zoning of neighborhoods. Sim City 4 is the most recent release, complete with 3D graphics and the ability to interact with individual sims. The challenge to the game is creating a city without going deep into debt. You can adjust industrial, commercial and residential tax rates to increase income or encourage growth in a given sector or your micro economy. PC versions allow you to interact with neighboring cities to make deals on water, electricity and garbage. Sadly, the gameboy clone does not.
Gameplay
In order to make this game work on the Gameboy platform several features we expect in Sim City were removed: water piping and water towers are gone. City to city trading is missing as well. You cannot see traffic on the city streets either. While a version of Sim City without these features might seem unentertaining, the game can be fun. In fact, without the hassle of managing these resources you spend more time focusing on building zones and power production.
Building cities is easy, managing them is not. Every day that passes brings new and old abandoned buildings. An abandoned building is not unusual in Sim City. However, in this version the buildings seem to vacate much faster than normal. Even worse is the fact that they do not attract new tenants. You are forced to bull doze the building, then bull doze the lot. I got real tired of this because in any given year on a freeform map, you have to bulldoze at least 100 different buildings. If you do not do this, the city will quickly lose population. Finally, I could never figure out how to check my population! The only way I did this was looking at revenue generated by residential taxes.
Only three freeform maps are available. You cannot randomly generate maps. A handful of scenarios are in the game as well, but they are all hard to manage because of the slow down the hardware causes when a large map is loaded.
Only one game save is available because each city requires a massive amount of memory. The save dialogue box actually tells you how many blocks your city required. You can judge the complexity of your city by the number of blocks your city saved. My personal best was 577 blocks of data. I have to admit now that I own two copies of this game! The first copy is used to complete the scenarios and save them. The second is used to store my massive freeform cities.
Replayability
I had fun for 20 hours playing this game because all the events in Sim City are completely random. After this, the constant bulldozing and small screen were just to much to keep playing.
Graphics/Sound
The graphics are all 2D, boring sprites. Please consider a DS Lite if you play because the graphics are very small. You can zoom and rotate the map to gain optimal viewing angles. The menus reminded me of Windows forms. The game can generate some charts and statistics though, if that's your thing. Disasters are fun because the explosions make the game a little more lively, but they slow down the game so much they should be avoided if possible. Overall the graphics seem like a bunch of SQL Server database developers designed the game, they are good with numbers but not the best group of artists out there either (I should know).
The background music and effects are so repetitive that I never played with the sound on.
Tips
In 1970, you are given the ability to build wind generators. The little wind machines generate max power all the time and have not maximum life span assigned to them. They only require one block of land and produce 4Mw per block. They have a nice low price to. I wish someone would reveal cheats for this game.
Summary
Sim City 2000 overpowers the Gameboy with numerous number crunching activities. As a result the game is hard to use and only the die hard fan would enjoy it. Do not expect pinballs or little race cars to zoom by as you play this game. I recommend only those over the age of 12 and you must have played Sim City on the PC as well. On the bright side, $10 is a good price for 20 hours of entertainment.
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