So, recently I watch a video by the brilliant LGR covering SimCity 3000 nearly 25 years later. It got me thinking about the game again seeing as I played the original SimCity 3000 and SimCity 2000 a lot when I was a whee bunny. I own a copy of SimCity 3000 Unlimited, which was its successor that came out a few years later with additional features and tilesets.
Upon watching LGR’s video of it, it was then brought to my attention that it was possible to bolster the screen resolution far higher than the original settings! Intrigued, I decided to spend an evening figuring out how to do it. After a few hours, a hex editor, No-CD Patch, and another compatibility patch to make it run smoothly, I got it to run just like I remember it! Rather than use the base SimCity 3000 that I was very familiar with, I decided to give the Unlimited version a go this time.
I think (I could be wrong) but they did some re-balancing between SimCity 3000 and the Unlimited version, so getting a city off the ground was much harder than I had anticipated it would be. After creating a coastal city area with a river near the middle, it took a number of false starts to finally figure out what I was doing wrong. It felt like a combination of building out too quickly and enabling way too many ordinances off the bat causing my budged to be overblown before the city was established.
However, once the city was established and becoming self-sufficient, all I started to do was small baby steps to get it to grow and then adjust the ordinances as the city asked me to do or I saw necessary. Ultimately I ended up… spending 3 hours not even realizing it working on this city. It has been an absolute blast revisiting this game after all of this time and at 1080p resolution no less!
I very much look forward to filling out the entire city available land eventually, and seeing what nifty new buildings I either come across or can add in as I get a bigger flourishing city.