The Let's Play Archive

SimCity 2000

by Moon Slayer, Deryl

Part 1






Welcome to the SimCity 2000 Let's Play thread! I'm Moon Slayer, and I'll be jointly putting together this thread with fellow goon Deryl. And we'll be playing through the Sim game nearest and dearest to my heart: SimCity 2000. This is our first LP, but we're both big fans of this subforum and I hope we've picked up enough to make this an enjoyable LP.

The original SimCity was released in 1989. I never played it, but Deryl tells me it was not that great. SimCity 2000 came out in 1993 for MS-DOS and Apple Macintosh. For some reason my sixth grade English teacher had a version of it on the crappy Mac computers our impoverished public school used in the mid-90s, and it was there I got hooked on the game.

As you all know, there have been several sequels, including SimCity 3000, SimCity 4, and the newest one, SimCity Societies. I played 3000 and enjoyed it, but never did play the others. From what I understand they started to get away from the "fun" aspect of the game and more into the "serious urban planning" aspect. SimCity Societies was released last month, and according to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia posted:

"SimCity Societies is different by being a 'social engineering simulator' rather than a city-building simulator."

The version we'll be using for this LP is the Sim City 2000: Special Edition. This version was released in 1995 because the original release version could not be run on Windows 95. The Special Edition also included the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK), which was a sort of scenario editor. With the SCURK you could, in theory, build your own structures to put in the game. I mostly used it to change the colors of already existing structures to make ridiculously painted buildings. The SCURK also included extra "pre-built" cities and an ability to replace structures in the game itself with "historical" structures. For example, you could load the city of Paris, then use the SCURK to stick a representation of the Eiffel Tower in instead of the stock building with a sign saying "Eiffel Tower" that was there before. Also included in the Special Edition was "WillTV," four interviews with Will Wright himself, the man who created everything "Sim."

So, how is this LP going to work? Well, like I said it will be a joint LP between myself and Deryl. He'll be doing the playing and screenshotting, and I'll be doing the writing and some of the posting. You guys will be making the major decisions about what direction we want our city to go in. Usually there will be several ways we can approach city design, and you guys will vote on which path to take. You will also get to vote on some budget stuff, as well as what city ordinances we will pass.

First things first, lets start this up:

Intro Video

First, some easy decisions to make:




This really won't come up except for in the periodical newspaper articles in the game. The company name, to my knowledge, never gets mentioned again.

And now we are at the main menu:


Fantastic



We'll be selecting "Edit New Terrain," but first a quick look at what else we can do. "Start New City" will start us on an already-existing map. "Load Scenario" will give us a pre-built city, usually a disaster of some kind to deal with right off the bat, and an objective to meet. Most of the cities will be real, and some of the disasters we have to combat will also be real, such as Huricane Hugo hitting Charleston, or the 1991 Oakland firestorm. Other scenarios give you a historical city but a fake disaster, like a nuclear bomb going off in Barcelona during the Olympics, or mass lawyer riots in Washington D.C. Some scenarios don't give an immediate disaster, but a long term goal, such as reducing crime in Las Vegas. I mostly remember these being fun to just sit back and watch as everything got destroyed.

WillTV will, as mentioned earlier, let you watch interviews of Will Wright. We may upload those later, or just find them on YouTube.

Finally, "Load Tile Set" will let you load up custom scenarios from the Urban Renewal Kit.

So, we click on "Edit New Terrain," and this is what we get:



We can edit this any way we want. We can raise or lower the water level, put in a river, a sea coast, or both, make it really flat or mountainous, and make forests or leave it as a desert.

So, Goons, this is where you come in. What we need from you now is the name of our new town. Also, we need the general location of the town. There's no "location" in the game, but this will be important for the "storyline" of this LP, as well as the terrain type. Do you want our town to be a New Mexico desert town, a Colorado mountain village, located deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, or somewhere else entirely? Also let us know if you want a river, a sea coast, both, or neither.

And after that, we can get started on the important business of running our city! May god help our citizens.

Table of Contents

Chapter #1: Long live the Mayor!
Chapter #2: Meet the City Council
Game Mechanics #1
Game Mechanics #2
Game Mechanics #3
Chapter #3: Sweet new digs
Chapter #4: The Industrial Revolution
Chapter #5: Expansion
Chapter #6: Things start to get weird
Chapter #7: Radios and other sinister things
Chapter #8: City Name Sports Team
Chapter #9: The first Twin Peaks reference
Chapter #10: The second Twin Peaks reference. Also mass transit.
Chapter #11: Missed connections
Chapter #12: Disaster-ific
Chapter #13: Statuesque
Chapter #14: Psychobabel
Chapter #15: The Runner
Chapter #16: Strange Goings-on
Chapter #17: Demands
Chapter #18: Answers

Bonus Content!


By The Deadly Hume


By Pander18


By leftover