Reviews / previews
As Mel Brooks' character Yogurt gleefully declaimed in
Spaceballs, life is all about "moichandizing." Once you've designed a good product and made some money, you've got to turn it around twelve different ways and make some more. Quality isn't important; hitting the market quickly is. If it's a movie, sell action figures. And if it's SimCity 3000sell a graphics add-on.
That's what SimCity 3000 Unlimited is all about. Graphics. You get to customize your SimCity world with new terrains, trees and buildings. You can also design your own buildings. But note that none of these changes are more than skin deep. Choose a desert terrain, by all means, but don't expect fires or water shortage to be anymore of a problem there than in your standard SimCity surroundings.
Much the same can be said about the group of new disasters: toxic clouds, space junk, a plague of locusts, etc. Granted it's fun to watchonce. Then, as with a movie trailer, you're ready for something with substance to follow-which, in SimCity 3000 Unlimited's case, doesn't happen.
The closest you'll get to a genuine change is in the thirteen new scenarios added to the game. You can also build your own scenarios for trade with other players, though I admit I find this an arid exercise compared to growing my own cities.
What else might Maxis have included in this add-on release? For starters, we might have expected Sims with different national and regional preferences to match those different landmarks you can plunk down-Sims in Tokyo, for instance, who wouldn't mind high density work areas or an absence of parks. Maxis could have added more to the economic model, expanding the neighborhood deals system in new and interesting ways. They could have given us futuristic achievements (frictionless railways, Internet residentially-based businesses, pollution-free industries) in exchange for futuristic nightmares (antibiotic-resistant diseases, terrorist attacks, the Greenhouse Effect). At the very least they could have made the thirteen new scenarios they included into twenty-five and thirty and linked the lot into a randomized campaign, complete with honorary governorship for the winner.
Great game add-ons are seldom encountered. Thus, for every Heroes of Might and Magic III: Armageddon's Blade-with its random map generator, thirty-five new standalone missions, and six new multi-scenario campaigns-there are half-a-dozen products like SimCity 3000 Unlimited, with its nice, spanking new graphics. You like nice graphics? Go and buy it. Otherwise, stick with your current copy of SimCity 3000 (or if you don't have the original yet, get it with a good discount) and save your kopeks for the new crop of exciting releases scheduled to hit stores in the next couple of months.-- Barry Benesal / GamePro
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