As card carrying members of the greater society of internet reactionaries, we here at Loaded Dice wanted to hold off for a bit on the whole SimCity thing. Last night on the cast, it was about to be discussed, but we thought it was best left for some bloggery. Here it goes:
I want to start with an apology, because I have very clearly done something wrong, which likely affects you. I pre-ordered this pile of sewage. The Deluxe Version. The $80 version. Like a true, recividist idiot. I even crowed about it on the podcast when we talked about how this is a different case than Aliens:Colonial Marines. I ignored the warnings about always online DRM, I bought into the carefully tailored marketing message. I hungered for videos on the game, thinking they were a gift to me, rather than a carefully designed illusion to part a fool and his money. So now, EA gets to stuff my $80 in their pocket and can say to themselves "Welp, we got that going for us, which is nice." I'm sorry for encouraging them. You have my word, I won't do it again.
I'm pretty sure the internet at large is by now aware of the initial wave of problems with this game. The launch week (month?) issues associated with the forced always online nature of the game led to a debacle that made Blizzard's incredibly blunderous launch of Diablo 3 look like a well executed professional production of Swan Lake in comparison. As of this writing they are still trying to strip out all the glorious functionality that made online play so "key" to this installment in the series, (regional trading! Worldwide Marketplace! Online Leaderboards!) so their servers can handle the basic tasks of scanning your retinas, probing you through the orifice of your choice and whatever else they can do to ensure their game is not falling victim to the wanton tender attentions of internet pirates.
The irony, of course, is that as of this writing, their ingenious DRM equivalent of trapping Batman and Robin in a giant clam has somehow failed. SimCity, despite EA and Maxis' most sincerely delivered protestations that due to the ultra complex nature of the simulation (more on that juicy one later) could not possibly be contained purely on your puny several thousand dollar gaming PC, and simply must be simultaneously run on whatever duct tape constructed weevil infested pizza box farm that they call servers, has been hacked to run in offline mode successfully, as well as any number of other basic pieces of functionality that we were told were clearly impossible. See HERE for some evidence, and see this Blue's News rundown for further info. It should be noted that Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been all over this story from the beginning.
Are you ready for the fun part? Because here comes the fun part (After the break):
