I've written about Simcity many times over the years directly and indirectly. As Maxis themselves said about their creations, they're software toys. What kid doesn't love a toy?

When I first saw Simcity 2000 running at a friends how it was a toy that I so badly wanted to play with

I'd played a lot with the original Simcity on my 286 Compaq enjoying it's colourful EGA graphics. However seeing this new version running at such a high SVGA resolution felt like a massive leap forwards. It no longer required so much imagination to see the city you wanted, it jumped off the screen with so much more personality and life than it had in the past.

As I poked through the series of precreated cities that came with the game there was one that caught my eye. 

volcano.sc2

The original game was flat, no place for a volcano. However SC2K had variable terrain height, so it could have volcanos - right?

Perhaps it was the futuristic wind generators on the crest or seeing the city itself nestled within the depths of the crater, but something about the map really struck a chord with me.

There's not that much that can be done due to the constraints of the map. No more space within the crater itself and terraforming would be costly and destroy the uniqueness of the map itself.

So I can't say that I spent much time playing around on the map itself, yet it still left a real impression.