SimCity Classic online - serious Time Waster

Watching our friends play SimCity on their Nintendo DSes got so frustrating that we finally went out looking to see if there's a free version that can be downloaded. We didn't get that far, however, because a quick trip to Wikipedia informed us that Maxis - the original publisher of SimCity - offers a version of SimCity Classic that you can play online.

Unfortunately, it looks like this has been up for a really long time, as evidenced by the following error you are greeted with if you visit the site with a Firefox browser:

SimCity Classic Live requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with either
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
or
Netscape Communcator/Navigator 4.0 or higher.

So your choices for popular modern browsers boil down to IE, and well, that's it. Oh, and the other big downside is that to play the game, you have to register giving a username, your first and last name, and a valid email address. And you have to consent to some legal mumbo-jumbo that we didn't read... you should probably read it and let us know if we owe Maxis our first born.

Game play is just as you remembered it - classic and bare-bones, but in full color glory. And it's still really hard.

Tags: freeware, Maxis, Sim-City, SimCity, Time-Waster, timewasters