I got my city to 500k in the year 2109 and successfully launched a rocket. Since this gives you a “Congratulations!" screen, I'm calling this beaten. I didn't beat any of the Save the City scenarios, since I've never liked doing the scenarios in any of the games in the series that I've played.
This is very simplified compared to SimCity 2000, which had been the most recent game I'd played in the series. There is no elevation, no underground (which means no water system to worry about and no subway system), and no highway advancement (and probably several other things I can't think of). You don't have to run power lines across roads and railroads as electricity "jumps" something like 4 squares. The only time you have to string wires is to cross water. All these concessions may have been made so the DS could actually handle the game. It still has some serious lag when you've filled up most of the map, as it literally takes 3 seconds between the time you press the d-pad to scroll around the map and when it actually starts to scroll when not in the Build screen. Using the touch pad to scroll seemed to have slightly less lag, but if you try to move up and right, there's a decent chance that it'll activate the Build screen as if you're over the button, bringing that screen up instead.
There are several minigames that actually didn't bother me. What did bother me was the annoying people asking you to put in different things, like adding more rail, hospitals, industrial zones, etc. There were many times where this was virtually non-stop, especially the fireman asking for a stadium when I already had about 50 of them.
A major oversight is that as long as a square is powered and has water, once a building is built, it will not be vacated. So, I ended up making a town with no transportation system -- well, half of a town as I got bored of the game, but I could have completed the town. You just have to have a road close enough for the zone to build. After a building has gone up, you can remove that road and not lose that population.
The biggest disappointment for me was not having arcologies. I was going in with the plan to have a city tiled with them.
