FUDGE, FUDGE and more FUDGE. A kid in my sixth grade class used to say that when he was pissed.
So friends, I’m not all celeb news and smoking mirrors. I have other colorful interests. After close to a decade, I have been looking forward to the latest SimCity launch but word on the street is that it’s a complete debacle.
For those of you unfamiliar, SimCity is a computer game which allows you to build and manage a city. (WAIT!!! … Don’t stop reading yet. This game is awesome.)
So you start with a small budget. You are the mayor and you pick your land. Next you start to place your infrastructure and homes on the land. (Still a little boring huh….Hang in there.) And then … if your design is half way decent, people just start to show up out of the blue. They move into the homes. The lights in the homes come on. HOORAY! This is where it gets good. Pretty soon you start making a profit and then you have to build more just to keep up with the demand.
This game is totally addictive. I could stay up to the wee hours of the morning easy trying to build airports and interstates – which are crazy hard – just to attract more people to my city. Even harder is keeping the people. They’re fickle and they don’t want to be crowded. Kids want parks. Families need police protection to control crime. Roads need to be repaired. It’s a really entertaining game for thinkers and those killing time.
However, I hear that the publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is attempting to make SimCity an internet only game. Meaning you can’t just download it onto your laptop and play at your leisure. You have to be connected and you have to play with others. The rationale is that no city was ever built alone. Since when EA? They also believe on-line registering would significantly cut piracy. (place eye-roll here)
This was a horrible idea. The allure of SimCity was the pressure you had as mayor to satisfy your community. As further proof, the servers couldn’t even handle the surge of gamers. Many reported never having the good fortune of logging successfully on or worst yet losing their elaborate city designs. I hear in protest, gamers started over 18 million fires in SimCity. HA!…yes friends, you can start fires as well in the city. I suppose this is gamer humor.
Here’s the simple solution: let people play SimCity offline as single-player. At minimum you’d have no more server woes and it would probably alleviate this bad press you’re getting.
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