SimCity 2000's greatest value comes in that it allows you to create cities that look a lot cooler then the ones in SimCity. As I went over in my earlier review, the original manages to actually play better on account of being so much less demanding of the player - but when evaluating a true sandbox, does that really matter? That is to say, if I'm playing a SimCity game because I want to make a cool looking town, or because I want to watch a town grow, then why wouldn't I just use the cheats available for money and do just what I want to?SimCity 2000 manages to just surpass that threshold between the comfortably complex and interesting and the taxing and difficult to manage. I think one could argue that this is owed almost entirely to the inclusion of elevation - through it we have now to deal with uncooperative terrain and with the hassle of running water to our towns. Yet while these additions mean playing SimCity as SimCity has become more of a chore, the increased possibilities they allow so far as expressing ones creativity in town design pretty much cancels it out, at least if that expression is what one wants out of it. Other additions aid dramatically in this appeal - cities can be planned as things other than a series of 3x3 blocks (less roads and the occasional park), and things like education can be planned for. More detail is available for managing the Sims themselves, such as a much more detailed approach to the budget. The presentation is dramatically improved, sporting appealing sprite-art that holds up well to this day, and including various ways to better personalize ones city (allowing for signs signifying landmarks, the ability to name numerous buildings).
The best part for me, however, lied in the way SimCity 2000 cities could be imported into the excellent SimCopter and the 'interesting' Streets of SimCity - allowing one to explore their creations in real-time. It's kind of hard to get across how cool this is, other than to compare it perhaps to being able to build your own cities for Grand Theft Auto IV. Enhancing this ability was the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, a toolkit that let you build cities completely to ones own specifications, down to choosing individual zoned buildings rather than hoping that the desired one would be built randomly. The sprites themselves could also be edited at will - this effect wouldn't transfer to SimCopter, but it could be transferred to SimCity 2000.
The only downside came in the city building tools for SCURK being significantly more unwieldy than those in regular-ass SimCity 2000 - the best approach that I found was to do most of your terrain design and basic road layouts in SimCity 2000, then jump over to SCURK for placing buildings, although even there it could be tedious to develop a pleasing variety of buildings - there was no 'residential wash' option that would just paint in random residential buildings of a certain style, meaning that large sections would either wind up with a lot of identical buildings next to each other - or take a long time. For the purposes of building maps for SimCopter however, such redundancy is not very noticeable and dense cityscapes make for poorer gameplay than a city with a lot of open space.
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