I played my fair share of the old SimCity games, but it was Caesar III that made me fall in love with city builders. While I haven’t played one recently, a user-created widescreen patch for CIII is doing everything it can to make me dig through my old discs and reinstall the sucker.
A user by the name of “Space_man” on the Widescreen Gaming Forums (WSGF) managed to coax the original executable to run the game at 1920 x 1080, which you can see in expanded form by clicking the image above. Unfortunately, the in-game menus are still at the original size, but that’s a minor gripe.
The great thing about these old 2D isometric games is that increasing the resolution doesn’t reduce the quality, because it’s just up-sizing the viewport so more of the world is visible. Whereas with retro 3D titles, filtering and anti-aliasing will only take you so far — you’ll need higher resolution textures unless you enjoy looking at a blurry mess.
As an aside: There’s a funny story about how I came to own a copy of Caesar III. Way back when, I bought a copy of another Sierra game called Alien Legacy. Unfortunately, a bug prevented it from running, leaving me with an expensive coaster. Dissatisfied, I contact Sierra in the US, who let me know it was a known issue and provided me with a selection of games I could replace it with. Of course, I jumped at Caesar III and a couple of weeks later, it was in my hands.
Go go customer service.
Pharaoh, Zeus…on widescreen [WSGF, via Reddit]
Image: Space_man, WSGF
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