Tag: maxis

Sid Meier’s SimGolf – Retroview

Since early 90s and until the end of that decade there were two undisputed giants making strategy and management video games in the PC world: Maxis and MicroProse. These two companies are behind a practical grand total of the best strategy games, “five minutes/turns more” style: SimCity (1989), SimCity 2000 (1993), Los Sims (2000), Civilization (1991), X-Com: Enemy Unknown (1994)…

MicroProse (at a later stage, good old pal Sid Meier founded Firaxis) and Maxis had a fundamentally opposed nature: the first offered reflexive, long, deep and slow paced products, while Will Wright‘s company designed kind of humorous games of a certain fantasy fashion. I am excited to imagine what could come out of this joint venture.

Continue reading “Sid Meier’s SimGolf – Retroview”

Taking Sim City 2000 into pieces

SimCity 2000 (Maxis, 1993) is one of my superfavourite games, ever. I’ve been playing it for 20 years and it’s partially responsible of my terrible grades at high school. I have always liked modifying games, but so far I haven’t been serious about decoding the data files of this city simulator. And I have found some quite interesting things!

There were ports in a great number of platforms, from the Macintosh (the original) to GameBoy Advance, but my favourite is MS-DOS, and it’s what this article is about. There are two interesting files: the executable (SC2000.EXE) and the data file (SC2000.DAT). Unfortunately, Windows version didn’t came out in Spanish (my mother language), and Network Edition version works awfully bad (and it is available only in English). Continue reading “Taking Sim City 2000 into pieces”