![]() |
We have reached the point in the crisis where the gaming media is dangerously close to running out of lede paragraph puns and jokey article titles. Sham City? Sim Shitty? Sim Sleazy? SinCity? There’s only so much we can do with the phonics we’re given. If this crisis continues we’ll run out of lame-ass jokes entirely and be forced to come up with proper headlines.
The SimCity story continues to be a mess. Just to outline the basics for those of you who get your gaming news by jogging past people discussing old IGN threads, the story so far is thus: The new SimCity “reboot” released with this always-online stuff that was either DRM or social networking and multiplayer, depending on who you asked and how cynical they were. The servers couldn’t keep up with the player demand, nobody could connect, the game was broken and crashed a lot, cities would revert to some hours-old state without warning, blah blah blah. It’s the same stupid crap that happened when Diablo III released as a multiplayer-only title, only much worse.
We got a few patches, and then more, and eventually Maxis disabled a lot of the multiplayer features just to give the servers a break. Most painfully, they disabled “cheetah” speed, meaning players that run out of money need to spend more time doing nothing while waiting for the next in-game hourly payment to roll in. All of this brought stability at the expense of making the entire online system completely pointless. (But still mandatory!)
But let’s look at some public statements. Keep in mind that this stuff is a couple of days old at this point. If you need up-to-the-minute news then you should know better than to read my blog. I just got around to playing Max Payne 3 this week, for crying out loud.
Continue reading 〉〉 “Sim Sickly”
T w e n t y S i d e d


