SIMCITY 3000 UNLIMITED NO CD UPDATE
On the "DirectX" tab, select Filter Fast Bilinear 2x, this will make the text readable and get rid of most pixelation. SimCity 3000: Unlimited was an update of the previous SimCity game, SimCity 3000. On the "Input" tab, select Correct Mouse Position and Release Mouse Outside Window.
When you start the game, go to options and select 640x480, this way you will have big user interface but zoomed-in to a bigger window. Down, below type Initial size 928x704 (depends on your desktop resolution) and check Desktop Work Area, this will give you a borderless window occupying all available vertical space. Scrolling problem solved! Now, to scale the game to a big window with big text: In the "Main" tab, check Force Aspect Ratio. You can fine tune this value to your tastes, 20 is fine for me. In order to force framerate-limit, go to the "Timing" tab, in the "Frame per second" area, check the Limit box and type 50 (msec). First of all, right click and select Add, to add a shortcut to the game. When you use DxWnd for the first time (just right-click and select Run With Wine), be sure to select "Expert Mode" at the menu, this will show many more tabs, including the Timing one. It has various features such as forcing games to play in a window, scaling resolution up, bilinear filtering, forcing framerate-limit and much more.
If nothing else, SimCity 3000 gave me an appetite for getting to see people’s lives as something other than numbers in a capitalist macroeconomic model.In order for me to be able to play the game with 1) Map scrolling with reasonable normal speed and 2) Big user interface so I can play the game in a big window while being able to read everything easily, I used a program called DxWnd. My advisors might have disagreements with each other on the best approach for me to take, but they were all arguing within the same unspoken framework. Otherwise it’s just taking the models on trust, and sub-sub-Onion human interest headlines scrolling along the news ticker between the actual updates, or rather the actual updates and other updates which turn out to not be there any more when you click on them. I appeared to be stuck with the views of the people being filtered via the equivalents of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. You do get the occasional petition from individuals, but you can’t be proactive or selective about who they are. Maybe some of the were happy with the lack of police and would prefer funding to go to some other alternative approaches instead?Ĭould I ask them? Well, no. When I got messages from my public safety advisor in her police uniform telling me that police coverage was poor, “many parts of the city have no police protection at all, and Sims walk in fear” I had to wonder whether Sims really all had that same experience. Bullfrog turned this type of game and the possibility to act horrendously in them into a source of satire, but SimCity has never had that kind of sharpness The conservatism of not shaking it up more extends to some of the assumptions underlying the simulation. Playing essentially the same game again for a third time, connecting up water and power and starting to see the machine of the city whirring into motion, it’s hard not to think a bit harder about some of what hasn’t changed. Though there is a scenario in the world version I played where you manage Seoul through the 2003 World Cup (does being wrong by a year get around some rights issues?), but I doubt anyone was going in for the topicality. And it’s not like the world of football management where you have changes in a real world sport to provide the impetus of updates. Against that, additions like being able to cut a water deal with your neighbouring city and manage waste disposal looks, well, a bit rubbish. But SimCity 2000 already did all of that five years earlier. If this was a first follow-up, taking the original game and giving it an isometric 3D makeover and a few tweaks might be enough to seem fresh.
SIMCITY 3000 UNLIMITED NO CD SERIES
There would continue to be plenty of space for games to thrive on the PC, but there wouldn’t be enough for many hits this big, and hits with ‘Sim’ in the title were all about to come from elsewhere.Īdding to the impression of its time being up, SimCity 3000 doesn’t take the series very far forwards at all. But in 1999 the PlayStation had not only taken the top spot for games, but was in the process of lifting other consoles up with it, and this type of game just didn’t work for it. Britain fell for this kind of management game hard in the early ‘90s, with our own Bullfrog mastering it from Populous to Dungeon Keeper, from Amiga to PC. It already feels like the dying of something, though. SimCity 3000 was not the last SimCity game. SimCity 3000 Unlimited (Maxis/EA, 2000 – expanded from the original 1999 game)