SimCity 3000 Unlimited is the latest game in the classic urban-planning simulation series. It provides a host of peripheral additions to its 1998 predecessor SimCity 3000 but remains essentially identical otherwise. As such, it's best suited for those who haven't played much of the previous game, although hard-core SimCity fans may appreciate its new scenario-editing features.

Fortunately, the core game has survived the passing months with all its charm intact - the bright pastel colors and intuitive interface design remain good looking by contemporary standards, and SimCity 3000's isometric perspective and simple, tile-based terrain are still perfectly suited to the gameplay. In fact, the game's stylized 2D graphics are anything but passé. Similarly, SimCity 3000's great sound effects and cool jazzy music score still sound first rate, and since there are plenty of different tracks and they all tend to hum pleasantly in the background, you wouldn't think to turn them off even if you've poured hours into the original SimCity 3000.

Then again, if you played a great deal of SimCity 3000 last year, then you might find that SimCity 3000 Unlimited's additional in-game features collectively don't provide enough new material to restore your interest. The more sadistically inclined SimCity players will quickly notice that Unlimited adds several types of disasters that can befall their fair metropolis either at random or at their whim, whichever comes first. These include everything from a ravaging plague of locusts to a brimstone-like rain of superheated space junk. The new disasters are fun to watch, they look good, and they manage to lend a real sense of danger and urgency to the game without being too heavy-handed or serious. Although more-casual SimCity players will prefer never to encounter these ill events, veterans of the series will enjoy having to use new types of tactics to deal with and compensate for the new bad things that can befall their cities.

SimCity 3000 Unlimited offers several new types of terrain that you can build on, but in practice all you'll get is a color swap. For example, you can build your city on whitish, sort of snowy-looking scenery, but it's a purely cosmetic effect that isn't even very noticeable. However, the game also provides two new sets of buildings that you can choose from instead of the standard urban/suburban houses of its predecessor. These European and Asian building sets look good and help breathe new life into the game for long-time players, and the building sets are generic enough that they're suitable for representing cities throughout their equivalent real-world region - especially since the game also includes a huge library of national monuments and famous buildings that you can place liberally throughout your city if you choose to. So between the European and the Asian building sets and the variety of terrain, you'll actually gain a good bit of flexibility in personalizing your city. You can try to re-create a snow-covered suburb in Japan, a quaint French village on the Mediterranean, and more. Too bad your various city-advisor characters, who frequently offer planning strategies and such, don't change depending on your city's building set. Fortunately, the advisors are cosmopolitan enough as it is. Otherwise, as with the terrain, switching building sets has no actual effect on gameplay.