Gift guide for great gamers: SimCity (2013)

 

Ah poor SimCity (and by extension Maxis and EA), it was full of promise and before its release perfect in the eyes of Sim fans everywhere. However once it went live, and a few weeks to months after, it suffered catastrophic server failures and lockouts. Needless to say the people who bought the game were not happy (I was just mildly annoyed) and went to the internet with their dissatisfaction. The damage has been done to the players and they have not logged back in since; but I must write to say give this game another chance. It is great fun build your city in your own image: create a shining utopia or slum city U.S.A., be paragon for law or a hive of scum and villainy, be a center for culture and art or a pollution churning industry town – your call. It’s even better now that you can take your civil servicing ideas online and work together with other players cities (or be their worst nightmare mwa ha ha). People I know it’s hard to forget all the crap this game put us through, but it’s the holidays, a time to forgive and forget. Everything works now; a new DLC is just waiting to be uploaded, and hey it’s not like SimCity was the only video game in resent times to have performance issues. So yeah, if you have it, play it now (maybe buy the DLC), if you know a PC gamer who like Sims or strategy titles buy this for them as a present.

 

 

 

 

Game Review: SimCity – It’s good to be the dueling elected public servant

 

Being the mayor is hard. You have to be a man/woman of many hats; leader, negotiator, peacemaker, financial genius, visionary, impartial voice of the law, people person, salesman, and sometimes a symbol. They often have a small chunk of the world on their shoulders everyday they’re in the position and even though we expect them to be the infallible fixtures of the system – they’re human, like us all. You couldn’t pay me enough to be the mayor of anything; I wouldn’t want to screw anything up. That what’s great about SimCity, you can try your hand at running a city without the backlash of destroying a community due to negligence or corruption.

 

SimCity doesn’t have a story, it has an objective: you’re a mayor, find an unspoiled (or if you’re gutsy abandoned) land, start building and running it. That’s pretty much it, but as you’ll find early on in this is a game is that the story is the only simple thing about the game. Now usually I talk about the good things about a game before the bad, but this time I’m going to get the negatives out the way because they’re few and far between in SimCity. First off queue crowding still persist, yes like I reported yesterday SimCity servers are having trouble handling the high volume of players trying to play – which is annoying. They’re still working the problem but its been a week… The other sour note is that the game has a slightly steep learning curve; seriously I’ve ruined five cities before I got the hang of the game and even still can be tough. But I suppose is the point, it wouldn’t be quite the epic game if it was too easy. That’s right I said epic, because SimCity is the best, most complex puzzle game I’ve ever played.

 

This is Sim-Monster (not his/her official name), it likes garbage and destroying buildings. Lucky your city has both.

 

It may not seem like a puzzle game, but it is. The puzzle is to create a successful city; and the pieces are residential, commercial, industrial buildings, utilities, natural resources, money, tourism, gambling, technology, education, and even the land you wish to build on. It’s up to the player to use these tools properly in order to solve the puzzle. Using anyone of these incorrectly can spell doom for your city. Each forward move you’ll make will have a negative effect as well, no matter how slight. Builds some homes for the people but they’ll need a place to work, build factories for jobs but it creates pollution, too much pollution could poison the city’s drinking water, the people don’t like poisoned water so they’ll leave – because it all started with build houses. It almost never ending – I you’ll love every minute of it. Watch as minutes turn to hours, then to days and now to a week trying to create a model of perfection only to be ruin by hubris or a giant rampaging garbage eating mutation (yes that happens in the game – one of seven random disasters in fact).

 

 

 Ranking

 

SimCity is a Zen Garden in game form: you don’t have fight a villain, kill aliens, uncover a conspiracy, lead and army, and unlock the mysteries of the universe – just plop building and drawing roads. As difficult and time consuming this game can be, there is a certain satisfaction of watching your city change and grow right before your eyes. Your SimCity is as colorful or gritty as you make, your sim people go about there daily lives not knowing what behind every corner – do you care about them and there well being or rain terror upon them? Will you be an island in the region or will you work together with other players and create a great things (or wroght chaos). This questions and experiences can only be answered and enjoyed in this title. Give it a week for the servers to become stable then pick up this title, it will change your definition of gaming for the better.

 

 

 

This just in (Or not) – SimCity’s success = an unexpected oversight

 

Yeah if you haven’t been paying much attention the 2013 version of SimCity was a huge success and I’ll add my own praise and criticisms tomorrow but for today I wouldn’t be during my job if I didn’t report the news about biggest thing the about the game currently: basically not being able to play the game due to over crowing. See SimCity is a PC game that is part of Origin, EA’s game service. When you log on you log on to it to play the game and access the servers that contain the players created sim regions and cities. So what happens when tens of thousands of excited and wanting the play players (myself included) try to play a game that requires the use of Origin’s limited number of servers (whether to play by yourself or not) roughly at the same time? I bet you already guessed. So yeah a lot of SimCity mayors up and down the world is playing the waiting in queue line instead and yeah they weren’t happy about it. Me? I expected it, so no big thing, but I would like to add this sort of thing rarely happen with consoles *smirking, not hiding the fact he’s a console fanboi*. Fortunately EA/Maxis has been working hard to fix the problem, apologizing up and down, and even offering free EA games to those mainly affected in the beginning. As of today I’ve been fine logging in so they must be meeting the demand and will be queue-free very soon, if you out there are still having trouble I sympathize, but it’s well worth the wait.

 

 

 

Games & Gear of 2013 – SimCity (3/5/2013)

 

You know I’ve never played SimCity before, I mean really, become the ultimate public servant, build buildings, run an economy, and harass the populous with random natural disasters and the odd ball monster.  No goal, no challenge, and waaaa-ay too much middle managing. However in my latter years I’m starting to see the appeal of the game. Sure it maybe a bureaucracy simulator with a little wackiness thrown in but, like the song says, everyone wants to rule the world – and if not that then at least a city. So fortunately Maxis, Glass Box, and EA is releasing a new / updated SimCity game, complete with new crackerjack features like multiplayer, Co-Op, and even city specializations. After reading up on it people, I’m actually excited for this game about building buildings and running an economy. Because whatever I do, choose, or implement will affect my region and those players in that region as well – and the reverse is also true. In a sense there is a goal (create the greatest, most powerful SimCity in the region) and a challenge (keeping the negative effects of other rival cities to impede my progress) so I suppose it’s worth dealing with a little middle managing for a lot of fun.