It’s been a long time, or “Finally, an update!”

Sorry for the radio silence over the past few months, been working on some exciting things that are almost ready to be shown off. Look for a big update on a new project in the next few weeks, that being said I want to take the time to talk about a game that I was really excited about and enjoyed at first until the flaws started to surface and come through the cracks and well at this point I won’t even touch SimCity even when I have the urge to.

There is a lot about the 2013 release of SimCity that is fun and engaging, the street level view allowing you to zoom in and follow individual sims is fantastic. Using multiple cities in a region to work on a collective project adds a sense of purpose to the play, and being able to manage resources, utilities, and services across the region adds a deeper layer of play to the game.

That being said the game is utterly and completely broken. Traffic will only take the shortest route to and from a point no matter what sort of side-streets are offered, multiple emergency vehicles will travel to one spot and leave the rest of the city to burn to ashes. The city’s population numbers show an inflated amount on the games UI causing players to make more jobs than people in the town and it has come out recently that the always on server connection that was needed to perform the game’s calculations is a complete boldfaced lie. The only reason that SimCity needs to be always on is to feed the archaic DRM.

Which brings us to what a complete and utter cluster-fuck the launch was, without enough servers available people were unable to connect and even play a single-player game. The “Cloud saves” are a complete misnomer, the only thing that happens to your save files, if they actually get saved and not eaten by the server, is they are saved on one particular EA server, should you chose to change servers then you have to start all over, from scratch, so much so that you have to play through the tutorial again. This also means that one of the most enjoyable SimCity past time of building a city, saving it on your local harddrive, unleashing all kinds of destruction and doom on it, and then reloading up to do it again or just make more progress on your city is now a thing of the past.

Honestly the biggest slap in the face from EA through this whole ordeal has been the boldfaced lies they’ve spewed every time they have opened their mouth.  Oh, and the “apology games” that EA has offered for their server debacle are games that have been out for YEARS. These are not new games, these aren’t even recent games these are games that people at this point have consciously not purchased because they didn’t want them.

Mandatory ESRB or How to kill Indie Games

H. R. 287

The video game industry years ago in response to violent video game claims founded the ESRB itself to regulate itself and has done a damned good job of it. While not mandatory any AAA title will have an ESRB rating on it. However this law being passed would require EVERY game to have a rating. This means if I make a game in my spare time and decide to sell it, this game now has to have an ESRB rating which I have to pay for before I can sell my game. The only thing this law would accomplish would be to kill the indie game market, that's it.

Everything else in this bill is already being done, it is already illegal for stores to sell M rated titles to minors, there are already fines in place for those that do. Retailers are already required to display the ratings of games, which is why that nice little ESRB sticker is there. This bill would make it impossible for indie developers to sell their game.

Loved "Minecraft", "Super Meat Boy", "FTL", "Binding of Issac"? Yup all of those would have been affected by this bill and possibly would have never seen the light of day. Have a game that you backed on kickstarter that isn't a AAA title, well that kickstarter would have to include the cost of an ESRB rating now and because of that may not make its goal.

This bill would have a terrible impact on the gaming industry and those struggling to both get in and those trying to make a living by making games.