![]() Importance is put on increasing the standard of living of the population, maintaining a balance between the different sectors, and monitoring the region's environmental situation to prevent the settlement from declining and going bankrupt, as extreme deficit spending gets a game over. The objective of the game is to create a city, develop residential and industrial areas, build infrastructure and collect taxes for further development of the city. SimCity 2000 is played from an isometric perspective as opposed to the previous title, which was played from a top-down perspective. It is the successor to SimCity Classic and was released for Apple Macintosh personal computers in 1993, after which it was released on other platforms over the following years, such as the Sega Saturn and SNES game consoles in 1995 and the PlayStation in 1996. ![]() And it reminds me of the link that all civilizations share, no matter how big our cities are.SimCity 2000 is a city-building simulation video game jointly developed by Will Wright and Fred Haslam of Maxis. Then the song springs back into motion, like a stop light turning from red to green, and we're off and running again.įor a game with no plot but the one you make for it, SimCity's soundtrack takes an unusually holistic and affecting approach to music, especially for its era. You can't help but envision massive skyscrapers, streets packed with cars, and bustling foot traffic.Īnd yet, at about the 1:30 mark, we hear our old melodic friend, played at a slow tempo by a single trumpet, as if to remind us of where we came from and how far we've come. When you finally get there, this tune greets you - a pulsing, vibrant song that seems to channel the urban energy of a Gershwin composition. I never reached the Megalopolis stage without using an infinite-budget cheat code (and even then, it wasn't easy). Your tiny village has grown up into a place of gritty industry, and the music reflects the difference. Gone are the bucolic flutes and harps of the earlier levels - now brassy horns carry the melody, accentuated by staccato orchestra hits. Here in the Metropolis stage, the motif changes slightly, flatting the seventh note in the scale and altering the tone. The land looks different, but it's still the same village you loved. But then the old melody comes in, as if echoing from the past, and you can sense the strides your people have made. The Capital stage features an entirely new tune for the first 30 seconds, with rhythmic mallet percussion and piano showing the burgeoning maturity of your city. ![]() It's as if the soul of the city never changes, even if the buildings do. But every new tune integrates that recurring melody - sometimes in the background, sometimes as a counterpoint to a new harmony. Each time your city reaches a certain milestone of growth, the music shifts. The six-note leitmotif, based around a prominent major fifth interval, is easily identifiable it forms the backbone of a peaceful, pastoral composition, which fits the feel of your rural community.Īs you see your population start to rise, you leave this particular tune behind. When you first start building your city, you have nothing but an empty landscape, a few thousand bucks, and this song. While other soundtracks of the era often sounded like mixtapes, SimCity's music consisted of variations on a theme - different movements in the same urban symphony. Unlike most games, which present a unique tune for every section of gameplay (often using dramatically different styles and genres), Oka chose to create a single melodic leitmotif and subtly tie it into each stage of a city's development. The biggest feature that stuck out to me, though, was Soyo Oka's SNES-specific soundtrack. But the SNES version does have a few features that earlier iterations lacked, including Nintendo-specific buildings (like a Mario statue) and a rampaging Bowser in place of Godzilla. ![]() It definitely lacks the depth of the series' later entries, and it doesn't have the voyeuristic appeal of virtual-dollhouse title The Sims. ![]() The 16-bit version of Will Wright's classic city-management simulation is hardly the most robust. ![]()
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