It's good, but I'm one of those who prefers the sequel. I'm probably in a minority, though.

I mean, you could buy published games and load them, but the computers didn't have any hard drives or facility for installing games, that much is true. I could never program, though, which is why I was glad there were so many talented programmers and software houses out there!

It's more likely that the game disk was protected. The game definitely had a save option, but you'd have needed a writable disk for it to work.

Not at all. Sim City only came on disk for the C64, so you'd either save games to the game disk or to a separate blank disk. ☺️

You could save Commodore 64 games to disk or cassette, if they had that option in the game. Sim City had that option, so you could have saved your progress!