Sim City 3000 is a very fun game at first. I bought mine second-hand from a shop for a few pounds, but you can get them used off amazon.co.uk for just 45p! Well worth it for quite a bit of play! It's the most addicting game the first time you play it, but I got bored of it very soon. It's not the newest version, because Sim City 4 is out too, which is supposedly much better.

The concept of the game is that you build a city and increase your population whilst controlling money at the same time. It can be hard to play at first, but once you get used to it, it becomes easy and this makes the replay value drop considerably.

You start off by building roads. You will need roads to access all the areas, and they will need to go right up to buildings or certain spots such as the rubbish dump area. There are three different areas which you can build: Residential, Commercial and Industrial. You can choose light, medium or dense areas, but choosing dense will have no effect if your city is brand new and not developed. The idea of the game is to build the best city with a huge population, and then maintain it and have fun! The fun arises from actually building the city and making it larger, rather than sitting there watching the pixel people walk around after zooming in once it's all built!

There are also a variety of famous landmarks that you can put in your town such as the Eifel Tower and other famous buildings. It is disappointing, but the Twin Towers are also there because this game was made after the 9/11 attack. You must power and supply water to your shops, homes and factories or your town cannot support life! This can be done by building water stations near fresh water, then building pipes. Also, you must make power centres and have power lines coming out from them. The requirements are specific, such as a water pipe must be within 6 squares of a house for it to receive water and the same applies with a lot of other things too. This makes it quite like a strategy game, by finding solutions to build a good-looking but efficient city.

You can also grow your town and build schools, museums and parks and many more things. Your sims need to be educated, or the quality of your city will be lower and full of idiots! You will receive warning messages and messages from speakers who perform in certain areas (such as money, or fire department) to give you feedback or suggestions on what to do. For example, you may receive a message along the bottom bar that is always moving with messages saying that your police men are on strike because of low wages! Then, you will have to increase their wages for them to get back into work. Crimes can break out as well as fires, and a fire can destroy your whole city given time! That is why firemen and police are very important, so you must regulate them and have stations of certain numbers in your city to make it a safe one!

The game is very fun and progressive. You can alter the speed of gameplay, and time will pass by in days, months and years. You can start in easy mode or hard mode with different amounts of money to begin with. You can choose large cities or small ones to have land for. You can roughly choose the land of your city by choosing how many trees you want, how mountainous you want it to be, as well as how much water you want there to be. This will then come into place when you regenerate the terrain, until you find one that is perfect to build your dream town on!

You can choose whether you start in the year 1900, 1950 or 2000. Depending on the year, different things are available such as an airport or seaport or even fast train lines and more! More things become unlockable such as better power plants and more efficient water supplies, which you will need for when your city grows.

Overall, it is probably worth it if you enjoy this kind of game. For such ridiculous prices (under 50p on amazon.co.uk), this game will provide a good amount of play-time and fun too! It is very addicting at first, and great fun to build your dream town or try and replicate other real life towns and cities with the good variety of landmarks, buildings and more available to have! However, the replay value is terrible as once you play this game a few times, it seems really repetitive and boring.

Thanks for reading,

- Recon -