Oldschool gamers will like to know that Electronic Arts has put online a free, online version of SimCity Classic. Free registration is required.

While it’s pretty cool to see the first SimCity available as a free online game, and while the game works as it should despite a few UI cursor issues, it’s kind of sad to see they opted for a proprietary, ActiveX-based application, instead of going for some cross-platform, independent solution, as would be the case with Flash or Java or even Shockwave. The game only ran on MSIE on a PC, and not on Firebird (although it issues a warning that it does work on Netscape).

It’s still fun nonetheless. The original Simcity is for me the second best on the series, only surpassed in the fun aspect by SimCity 2000 (3000 sucks, 4 is nice, but they’re just beefed up, slower versions of 2000).