I had a huge SimCity 3000 craving recently. Unfortunately, the game seems to hate my current drive setup, and freezes up completely when trying to save or load a game. Really messed up my drives and computer too. In Classic mode, the game can save and load, but the days move by at a snails pace, even on the fastest speed. You can’t play Sim City when it takes over 5 minutes for a single month to go by.

Now, here’s where the blues comes in. Sim City 3000 was ported by MacKiev in the Ukraine. Because of this, there hasn’t been a single patch or update to the game, nor will there ever be.

Right now, EA Games is working on Sim City 4. http://simcity.ea.com/ for the details. This game looks incredible! The terrain is now much more natural: You can actually build bridges realisticly across valleys now! The visuals are much richer, and provide far better visual feedback as to the quality of your city Graffiti appears in crime-ridden areas, trash appears on the lawns when garbage capacity is maxed out, traffic moves on a realistic day and night cycle. You can also track individual citizens, or import characters from The Sims to live in your city. Architecture also evolves now, into three different eras. You can also not only build your city, but the neighbours on the map as well. Deals made in one city can aaffect another, and neigbouring cities can be designed as a sort of Downtown/Suburb/outlying farmlands combination as well.

The problem is this: EA has been really bad at releasing the SimCity series for the Macintosh. SimCity 2000 was cross platform, but not the Unlimited version, or the “Streets of SimCity” or “SimCopter” games that could use imported city maps. SimCity 3000 is essentially abandonware, and the SimCity3000 Unlimited was never released for the Mac.

I’m really hoping Aspyr gets the publication rights for SimCity 4. They’ve done a good job getting The Sims and the expansion packs ported to the Mac, and they’d allow the Sims Character Import.

I really hope they get the rights, and port it quickly… Until they do, the only way I can get my fix of SimCity is to fall back on 2000, which plays nicely in classic.

EA has been notoriously Mac-hostile for a long time.  Unlike Maxis, who created the SimCity games, and made the first 2 versions Mac-first, with the Windows version coming afterwards.  But EA bought Maxis out, and they seem to require at least a million copies sold of every game they release.

Still, Mac publishers like Aspyr, MacPlay, and MacSoft can be very resourceful in getting permission to publish Mac versions of many games.  Aspyr has done very well with The Sims and its expansions.  Just don’t expect the end result to be elegant if the original programmers wrote just for Windows, with no thought of cross-platform compatibility.