Zero Punctuation: SimCity

GoddyofAus

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Can't wait for him to review Bioshock Infinite. He's going to struggle to find something to be negative about.
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

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When I saw this pop up I thought "its going to be full of bile."

Well was I wrong! there were no liver excretions to be seen!

Seriously there wasn't much Yahtzee could say that hasn't been said by nearly everyone whose had the pleasure of watching this magnificent train wreck. (And by those poor sods who were on the train as well).
 

Erttheking

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I must be really immature, because "Sim city is supposed to be played online," make me choke with laughter.
 

inkheart_artist

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Good call making the review more about how shitty EA has become rather then how awful the game is. Every other reviewer, pundit and forum poster who played it got that out of the way.

I don't even know if EA was reacting to what extroverts were saying rather then looking at spreadsheets and seeing games with social features were doing well when they began work on the SimCity but completely disregarded the fact that social features in the game they were working on were completely inappropriate.
 

Erttheking

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Daystar Clarion said:
I haven't played a SimCity game in years...

Maybe I should get 4, since that's widely considered as one of the best?
What the other guy said. From what I heard it's basically Sim City except you play as Fidel Castro. So basically the developers say. "You know, the people who play Sim City seem to enjoy torturing their people, how about we make a game where that's the focus?"...come to think of it, how come I haven't gotten this game yet.
 

Atmos Duality

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Yeah....the controversy exploded about three weeks ago.
And every single problem discovered only made things worse; the traffic AI, the DLC buildings and Terraforming tool found in the game client, the fact that EA and Maxis flat out lied to everyone about the difficulty of including an offline mode patch...

Kind of stole Yahtzee's thunder.
 

Soviet Steve

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dharmaBum0 said:
You'll hear from a lot of old-school SimCity players that say 2/3000 was the pinnacle of the series, but I don't quite understand why. SC4 did everything those games did better and did it's own things well too.

SC4 still has an active modding community, and still manages to look pretty good (minus the silly portraits of the advisers). A big complaint is that it's pretty hard, which it is at first.
I remember playing SimCity 3000 and at one stage having a city so greviously underserviced that I could fund it off a 0.1% residential tax. My most frequent complaint was the high residential tax rate. Then I tried making it a January only tax. It didn't help.
 

Sansha

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Shit. Even for Yahtzee, this video was fuckin' merciless. This is exactly the kind of brutal "Fuck you." EA and the rest of us need to be hearing. This kind of dickishness and sub-par quality products cannot be acceptable any longer.

Daystar Clarion said:
I haven't played a SimCity game in years...

Maybe I should get 4, since that's widely considered as one of the best?
It's actually brutally difficult. It's not a game to play casually; you actually have to plan your moves before shunking down houses and shit. There's a massive amount to SimCity4 which is why it genuinely wins, but you best have your Mayor Hat on before you dive in.
 

WouldYouKindly

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I won't advocate piracy, but I will advocate using the crack that was found about a week after the game launched. So yeah, the always online component can fuck off. Then all they need to fix is the AI pathfinding, the city sizes, and the fact that it's almost impossible to have a balanced city if you don't want to play with other people.
 

MetalMonkey74

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I'm just glad i got Mass Effect for free out of this. And that Bioshock infinite just launched and is bloody brilliant. Screw you EA. After SWTOR and SimCity, you insulted me enough.
 

dochmbi

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The game hasn't been cracked yet (you can't get a working version from TPB) and it's already been 3 weeks since release, so the DRM is actually working quite well. Oh and Assassins Creed 2 took 6 weeks to crack because it also had a completely new kind of DRM.
 

Atmos Duality

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WouldYouKindly said:
I won't advocate piracy, but I will advocate using the crack that was found about a week after the game launched. So yeah, the always online component can fuck off. Then all they need to fix is the AI pathfinding, the city sizes, and the fact that it's almost impossible to have a balanced city if you don't want to play with other people.
Why waste the effort? Just play SimCity 4 instead.
SimCity 2013 is fundamentally broken where it needed to shine, and backwards everywhere else, save graphics.
And graphics alone cannot carry a game.

"But I'm having fun with it!"
Yeah, and you would be having even more fun with SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4, unless you get your jollies watching the shoddy programming...In which case, just jump onto Youtube.
 

Blade_125

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It's funny, I watched a lets play of sim city because it popped up on a yourtube channel I watched, and within a couple hours I bought the game, and I so rarely buy games at release.

Still every problem mentioned is correct and thre needs to be some improvements. The conga lines of fire trucks is so very annoying.
 

geldonyetich

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That video was so much fun I watched it twice.

It could have used a mention that the reason why SimCity's "connection issues" were such a problem was because EA's servers weren't up to the task, meaning that they dropped the ball so hard that it's apparently still burrowing its way through the Earth to Australia because Yahtzee apparently had not heard of that yet. Or perhaps he just figured they'd have it sorted out by now, which is why he mentioned waiting a week... but I'm pretty sure the issues are still ongoing even a few weeks into release.

Granted, a poo map does make up for a great deal of shortcoming in any game.
 

Rhys95

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Yahtzee, you should have gone the Dylan Thomas route for offensive place names. Just write it backwards like Llareggub in "Under Milkwood". (Though pronouncing whatever Dog's Bollocks is backwards would be difficult)
 

Muspelheim

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Good thing I still got my Simcity 3000-disk around.

The lewd naming possibilities were possibly the main charm of the SimCity games, it was just fun to imagine the daily lives in the city of Buttocksburg under the inept leadership of Mayor Molestsson. And while buying and selling services with the neighbouring cities was a feature in SimCity 3000, it was at least optional. All I ever did was to buy all their rubbish, so I could pile it high in my city to give it the proper dystopian atmosphere.

Speaking of, that was another fun thing to do in old SimCity, burn down half the city, detonate a few nuclear power plants and let everything still standing go into abandonment and disrepair, and then pretend it was the aftermath of an atomic war, "Threads"-style.

...Huh. I should reinstall it, sometime. I really should try playing the game properly.
 

IndomitableSam

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I watched development eagerly, but never pre-ordered... and I'm thankful I didn't. I did defend the game - before it came out, because I believed that it would work. I'm very glad I didn't buy it. I may buy it down the line when (if) it's been fixed, and if the sale is very good. I really wanted the game to work the way they said it would. I'll hold out slim hope that they'll fix it, but I won't give EA my money until I'm very convinced otherwise.

Besides, I just got the Rune Factory Tides thingy game (sunk a lot of time into Frontier, and this one doesn't have Runeys. Yay.) to kill some time until State of Decay comes out, and until I get into either the FFXIV or ESO beta. Then there's those Steam Greenlight games I've been keeping my eye on, too. ... I'm sure I'm missing some other game being released soon, too.

There's also always Minecraft. I still have to find out why the villagers keep disappearing in the town near my house. It's quite sinister, actually. I went over there for food a few days after starting and the vilage was empty, so I cheated and spawned some more villagers, then went back to mining. A few days later, I went back to town and it was empty again. And I'm not playing on Hard, so zombies don't break down doors. Nor is there a ravine or anything near the town. It's just full of pigs... and it's creepy. It's just... pigs, everywhere.

Anyway... yay, Yahtzee?
 

LadyMint

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That poo map is mesmerizing, isn't it? I have lost minutes staring at that and the pee map (the electricity grid).

Honestly, I have not felt this "multiplayer" effect that we are supposed to feel by being forced to play online. I can't really chat with my friends in-game unless I want to keep going to the Origin overlay. The wall post feature in your region is hardly a substitute for a simple chat function. My city feels like it's doing just fine without borrowing or trading utilities with my neighbors. I've also run into the hilarious issue where if someone who bought the Deluxe Edition moves out of a city space and I try to claim it, even though the game has wiped that space clean, it refuses to let me move into it because I refuse to shell out the extra dollars for buildings I will more than likely never use. What an amazing waste of space.