Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!
]]>Welcome back to another RPS Time Capsule. I will age a thousand years by writing this next sentence, but today we're casting our minds back to twenty years ago, excavating our personal favourite games from the actually quite good year of 2003. Yep, instant wrinkles like I've just been caught in a Death Stranding rain shower. I better finish this introduction quickly before I disintegrate to a pile of dust - much like all the other games from this year that didn't make it into this year's Time Capsule. Come and find out which ones we've decided to save below.
]]>Chances are, you'd never even heard of SimRefinery unless you were one of a handful of chemical engineers at Chevron during the early 1990s. That's if you knew about SimCity developers Maxis' brief foray into the world of business management tools at all, mind. But thanks to some good old online word-of-mouth and a retired engineer refusing to throw away old floppies, Maxis' obscure oil refinery simulation has been immortalised for free on the Internet Archive.
]]>Videogames were a presence throughout my childhood, thanks to my dad having a PC for work. When he didn’t need to use it, I was allowed to tinker and explore. The games built into the computer like Solitaire, SkiFree and Fuji Golf, as well as the CD-ROM games we got from stores like Office Max and Borders, quickly became second nature to me.
Now, looking back at publications and exhibitions intended to showcase gaming history I realize that some of my own experiences are often missing. While many influential PC games are well known and we can trace their influence on videogames today, there are more blind spots when it comes to the CD-ROM boom of the mid-90s. These games were built for an audience that was familiar with PC software but perhaps not with games, and even in their own time they ignored the conventions of game design. This led to types of experimentation videogames of today can still learn from.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Not the best SimCity has ever been - that's SimCity 4 - but for all its pigheadedness I still enjoyed SimCity.
]]>You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs - without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man's Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
]]>Oh man, this is a sad day. Former staff today reported - later confirmed by EA - that the heart of Maxis, the studio behind The Sims & Sim City, is to be ripped out. While satellite studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne remain, the Emeryville headquarters was Maxis as we knew it. It's had a chequered recent history, particularly with regard to the most recent SimCity, but without a doubt this was a legendary developer.
]]>I dream of a city: dense, apartment blocks and tight terraces, lots of parks, even more trees, great public transport, by a river or lake with forest nearby. I skipped last year's SimCity for obvious reasons but would like to build this dream in it, coo and aah as it bursts into an unconvincing simulation of life, then probably stop after, say, four hours.
Well gosh golly, as luck would have it that's exactly how long the newly-released demo offers.
]]>In a final [humiliating capitulation]/[act of goodwill and community empowerment] Maxis will today release SimCity's offline mode, freeing city builders everywhere from the terrifying fear that a cleaner at the Origin data center will accidentally unplug the servers as he hoovers up the hopes and dreams of the developers. At the time of writing (lunchtime on Tuesday the 18th), the servers are down as the game prepares for the update that will mean the next time the servers are down, you'll be able to play.
]]>Beneath a mess of half-baked systems and massively detrimental online requirements, SimCity actually had some pretty cool ideas. Simulation of individual people and entities? Community options for those who want them? Curved roads? All interesting stuff on paper. Unfortunately, the reality of Maxis' latest city builder failed (rather miserably) to live up to those promises, and Maxis has been struggling to build something workable from the pieces ever since. Enter Citybound. Its goal? To construct a city sim from the ground-up with a focus on single-player, out-of-the-not-a-box moddability, and simulating a truly sizable geographical region - not an itsy bitsy ant hill town. Also curved roads. Always curved roads.
]]>I recently attended the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas (which is not related to game developer DICE, actually), and there I interviewed the entire gaming industry. OK, that's not entirely true, largely because many D.I.C.E. attendees spontaneously break out into hives if anybody so much as mentions the word "indie." But still, I talked to a whole mess of people. I encountered EA chief creative officer Rich Hilleman on an award show red carpet, so time for chit-chat was brief. Given recent events, however, I had to ask: what's the deal with EA and hideously botched launches on games like Battlefield 4 and SimCity? And while Hilleman (very vaguely) promised change, I found his response more than a little upsetting. Read on and see what you think.
]]>After months upon months of sidestepping the issue, EA and Maxis have finally seen fit to give SimCity an offline option. Victory! At least, for folks still soldiering on with the beleaguered and - to be perfectly honest - not terribly interesting city builder. But while we wait for modders to laugh off Maxis' suffocatingly stringent guidelines and finally make the game great, some questions still need answering. Foremost among them, why the not-so-sudden about-face when the company once claimed that separating SimCity from its precious servers would be nearly impossible? According to the developer, it's because rewriting the simulation to function offline took nearly six-and-a-half months of hard work.
]]>Good news! In a post on the official SimCity blog, Maxis have confirmed that an offline mode is on its way. The new mode is currently in closed beta testing, with promises that it'll roll out to everyone in Update 10. Maxis first mentioned they were working on the mode last October, although RPS threw sand on the initial claims that offline mode was prohibitively difficult just days after the game was out.
]]>This might be the wrong crowd for this, but I thought the recent SimCity was a good game. I'm looking forward to playing the Cities of Tomorrow expansion. I'm glad it's out today, and I like this intro trailer.
Come on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Want to fight me? Let's take this below.
]]>In case you hadn't heard/forgot/suffered from such a severe case of apathy that you did the human brain equivalent of a driver rollback, SimCity is going to the future. Yeah, it's still gonna be tethered to the Internet's infinite, un-flinching tangle of roots, but at least now you'll have hover tech, environmentally friendly mega-towers, and curvy utopia buildings to compliment all your curved roads. Also, choking sink holes of pollution and corporate control, if a new video walkthrough of a potential city setup is any indication. Omega is a new resource that everyone and their ant-sized, Simlish-barking dog wants, and OmegaCo's job is to build factories and franchises while also making sure we know its iron-fisted execs really, really liked Blade Runner.
]]>Believe it or not - despite EA and Maxis' insistence on constant connection - SimCity has mods. Due to a lack of official tools, they're not particularly elaborate, but people have managed to tinker around under the simplified simulation's hunkered down hood. Before now, however, Maxis didn't really acknowledge, well, any of it. But now, it appears that the developer has had a change of heart. It's hoping to open up a dialogue with modders on its official forums, which is good news! Er, kinda. Problem is, there are still no plans for mod tools, and Maxis has no intention of letting modders change whatever they want.
]]>NEWSFLASH: SimCity still isn't very good. It mostly functions now, but that doesn't mean it's particularly deep or enjoyable. But time has healed part of a wound, so maybe more of it will stitch up the rest? That, I suppose, is the idea behind upcoming expansion SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow, which takes your buzzing metropolis 50 years into the fuuuuuuuuuture. Will this bring it forward (or, I suppose, back) into the Good Ages? Time - as ever - will tell.
]]>Once bitten, and bitten, and bitten, twice shy, it seems at Maxis. After their utterly stupid and inherently selfish decision to artificially force SimCity to be always online, and then lie about why, it seems this time out they've decided not to push their luck. Sims 4, the PC and Mac-only release (I can't see that lasting - surely 3DS, Vita and next-gen ports will eventually appear?) will play one hundred percent offline, according to a report from VG247.
]]>Hello, and welcome to an irregular update on The Silence. The technique publishers use when they want a story to go away. Rather than responding to press enquiries, they instead pretend they haven't happened, or send prevaricating nonsense which ultimately goes nowhere. So, RPS figures, let's not let that work. Let's keep bringing stuff back up, reminding people about it, and letting their silence be a thorn in the publishers' sides. Today it's EA, Ubisoft and Deep Silver.
]]>I was going to begin this post with a lament of "Oh, SimCity," but then I discovered that Adam had already done that in our most recent piece on the fallen city-building empire. Describes the dismal set of circumstances surrounding the game rather perfectly, though, doesn't it? Nearly everyone's agreed that EA's overly simplified, always-on catastrophe - which is said to be the subject of Syfy's next disaster flick, SimCitynadovolcanoavodcado - botched its landing, and now it seems that a trio of its own developers agree. Fortunately, instead of leaving games altogether and becoming doctors/lawyers/mathletes like their mothers wanted, former creative director Ocean Quigley, lead architect Andrew Willmott, and lead gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz have formed an indie studio called Jellygrade. Their first project is - what else? - a simulation.
]]>Oh, SimCity. Its launch was far from smooth and yet the powers that be now believe it would be wise to unmoor a series of airships, allowing them to drift into the skies above the game's colourful sort-of-simulated neighbourhoods. The blimps and balloons cost $8.99, which seems expensive, but at least they don't have giant adverts printed on the side. I must admit, I was concerned that SimCity might receive a series of pricey add-ons that actually improved the game, making its meager municipal offering rather more sinister, an intentionally hobbled creation awaiting a costly cure-all. In a way, this gust of hot air is preferable. Video below!
]]>Why has the SimCity story gone away? It's a good question. And the answer for it reveals much about how both the games industry, and the games journalism industry, work.
]]>Good news! SimCity's gotten a potentially substantial piece of DLC, and it's totally free. Bad news! It's a gigantic ad for car company Nissan. Worse news! Its in-game functionality seems to make your city planning decisions even less consequential than before, which is quite a feat. Worst news! SimCity isn't a very good game at all, even with its online issues mostly cleared up. Contrary opinion! This is one seemingly asinine move I think we should only partially leap down EA's throat for. So maybe, like, just put in one leg. And do it kind of gently. Avoid the teeth, if you can.
]]>We've had quite a lot to say about SimCity but I haven't told you wot I think yet. I posted my initial impressions two weeks ago, feeling like I'd only just scratched the surface. I've been scratching away since then, off and on, and now I'm ready to tell you what lies beneath.
]]>EA wants to say "sooorweeeee". For pretending the game had to be online for server computations, and then ignoring us when we pointed out this wasn't the case? No, not because of that! But for launching SimCity in the most extraordinarily inept fashion, with barely functioning servers, massive queues, frequent crashes, and the rest of the mess everyone in the whole world except EA and that one reviews editor predicted would happen. To make this up to everyone who's activated a copy of the game, and rather madly to people who buy one any time up to the 25th March, there is a free game available. And they're proper good ones, too. One of them is a rather fine city building game, called SimCity 4.
]]>A key moment in the week's SimCity shenanigans was unquestionably the appearance of a video from a modder, Azzer, announcing he'd found a way to remove the game's offline timer. The final nail in the ridiculous-claims coffin, this mod demonstrated that everything but the asynchronous multiplayer was running on your home machine. We got in touch with the man behind the mod, one Azzer, and he had a lot more to say. In his opinion, the information coming from the servers is so rudimentary that despite Maxis's claims, there shouldn't be any problem at all in simulating the regional play offline.
]]>What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It's since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code featuring "simcity.GetFudgedPopulation" as a function. We've learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer's absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.
So it's all the more odd to see Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw acting as if none of this is happening, and instead just carefully rewording her mantra of how SimCity is only supposed to be played online, but this time leaving out the bit about server-side computations for local play.
]]>In this, our ELEVENTH DAY of the equivalent of PC gaming's Leveson Inquiry, Senior Director of worldwide communications at EA Maxis Erik Reynolds has written a series of 'transparent tweets'. These tweets indicate that a post on the Simcity forum about a hack for offline mode violated their Terms of Service, and the discussion would have to be moved elsewhere.
]]>Two days ago, RPS published an article in which a Maxis insider revealed to us that SimCity does not, in fact, require the servers to run its non-regional game. Maxis reps had repeatedly insisted to the press that the game had to be online as it ran local computations on their own servers - a feature our source told us doesn't exist at all. Extraordinarily, we've still yet to receive a statement from Maxis on the matter. Nor indeed have any of the rest of the games media who contacted EA for comments at the time of our story.
And now, if any further proof were needed, a modder has hacked the game to run entirely offline, and even play outside of the game's ridiculously small borders.
]]>Alongside the peculiarities of the server matters with SimCity, many are reporting that the game itself doesn't perform as had previously been claimed. This is especially the case when it comes to the AI and pathfinding.
Disappointingly, the Glassbox Engine doesn't appear to offer quite the independent nature of individual Sims as many had believed, and it really seems to be struggling with seemingly simple pathfinding and congestion issues.
]]>In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn't possible. Maxis' studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they "offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers", and that it would take "a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game" for single player.
A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.
]]>EA reports that SimCity is slowly getting into a state where it's playable. Many of the launch issues are getting sorted, and soon it may well be in such a place that it becomes functional. So we should forgive and forget, right? Wrong.
]]>I hadn’t played SimCity until the UK version unlocked at midnight and I’ve barely slept since then. Intravenous coffee, fresh from the bean, and a sumo wrestler’s weight of dry roasted peanuts have seen me through the night and now I shall convert the experiences of the last twelve hours into words. This is not ‘Wot I Think’, it’s just a step toward a closer study of the slickness of the systems as well as their shortcomings, and it’s also a minor chronicle of the European launch.
]]>Here's an unpopular opinion: I think EA's done a decent job with SimCity's launch.
Aha! It's also a misleading opinion, because I'm definitely not referring to the part where servers gasped and puked and died under the immense strain of North America's unquenchable entertainment lust, recently leading to halting of sales on Amazon, among other things. It's what happened afterward that sort of impressed me. EA responded fairly quickly (especially by its usual standards), communicated clearly what was happening, apologized profusely, went through the five stages of grief, and offered refunds to some people (not all, perplexingly) who felt like the early meteor bombardment of issues wasn't worth waiting out. As far as disaster control goes, I'm more than willing to concede that EA's mostly Doing It Right. But that does not - even in the slightest - change the fact that there shouldn't have ever been a disaster in the first place.
]]>In the words of RPS' totally unneeded, never sighted on a semi-regular basis error screen, SimCity's having a bit of a wobbly. Some people, however, haven't even been lucky enough to get into its now-infamous queues - let alone experience the majesty of realizing they might eventually get to play the videogame they purchased. So then, is this a preview of the hoops Europe gets to squeeze its oh-so-sensual landmasses through on Thursday? EA's claiming it's mobilized its force of spline reticulating drones to make sure everything's shipshape, but obviously, there's still plenty of reason for skepticism.
]]>Hey, want to play the freshly US-released SimCity? Well, stand in line. As Total Biscuit reveals (video below), there are already 30 minute queues. And this is just for those who've stayed up past midnight to be able to play. In just one country.
]]>Well, OK, maybe fear a little. The news that SimCity's massive metropolises have gone down a couple belt sizes didn't exactly sit well with longtime fans, but Maxis does have plans to do something about it. Eventually. At this point, it's all in the cold, soon-to-be-cybernetic hands of technology, because ultimately, SimCity's casting its net wide. You and I might have the hardware to handle a sprawling, nicely detailed building forest, but others aren't so fortunate.
]]>As SimCity nears release (March 8th in the UK), we sent natural born mayor Cara Ellison to sit down with the game for a day. She recreated inner-Scotland.
I dreamed of marching into EA HQ in a black pencil dress and high heels and Malcolm Tuckering all my consonants: “ALL RIGHT EA. RUIN MY CHILDHOOD. COME ON. RUIN IT.”
As it is, I stumbled into EA covered in doughnut crumbs wearing a bedraggled jumper dress and giant wooly socks and then squeaked “Hi I’m Cara hi can I see Simcity please.”
]]>Ah, deluxe editions. I do not, by any means, think they're inherently bad, but they can certainly enter murky territory with a quickness. Maybe even two quicknesses. Three might be pushing it, though. Sometimes, that means we end up getting lost in a snowblind forest of different versions, ala Assassin's Creed III, but others are a bit more cut-and-dry. Or at least, it seems that way on paper. And yet, even so, there's always reason to approach these things with caution. Case in point: SimCity's digital deluxe edition. It's got a small country's worth of bonuses themed after a few particularly large countries, but is it worth all the extra simoleons? Perhaps answers lie after the break.
]]>Left hand, meet right hand. Yesterday, EA armed SimCity with a ticking time bomb of a perma-ban EULA, but today, it decided to vehemently disagree with, er, itself. In short, the not-so-fine print would've seen players agreeing to report any and all bugs they encountered in SimCity's closed beta or risk being locked out of all EA products. Yes, all. That's what it said. But oh, what a difference a day - and probably a few additional pairs of eyes - makes.
]]>SimCity's upcoming three-day-long closed beta may have all the trappings of a glorified demo, but EA's pumping at least one aspect of it with unnecessarily aggressive test-osterone. In short, if you stumble across a swarm of bugs (Sim Ants hopefully excluded) and fail to report it, you could be facing a ban. From all of your EA games. Yes, that's what it says in the SimCity beta's EULA. Nearly verbatim. I just changed the word "product" to "game," because "product" sounds, well, about as out-of-touch as this incredibly iron-fisted move on EA's part.
]]>Recently, I think we've seen a fairly wide shift back to treating beta tests like, well, tests. Admittedly, things still get a little dicey when games like MechWarrior Online or, most notoriously, The War Z charge for early admittance, sometimes barely disguising toothy bear traps of vague terminology. In short, "foundation release." But I digress. Apparently, SimCity didn't get the memo, because its closed beta will be three days long. Is it a glorified demo? Probably. But oh well. You still (maybe) get to strap into your snazzy mayoral suspenders for a weekend, and Maxis will come away with some form of valuable data, at least. Details on registration and content after the break.
]]>There isn't a lot to this SimCity trailer, which EA are bafflingly calling in an "Introduction", as if we hadn't already been talking about the game for a year already. Or did I just imagine all that? I could check, but I like to live life on the edge. For example: I'm writing this article directly into the CMS. This is internet without a safety net. All I have are my wits, the inbuilt spellchecker in Firefox (Chrome and WordPress do not get along), and a desire to crank things up a notch. Who's with me? Let's gooooo...
]]>How had it escaped my attention that best-named-developer Ocean Quigley is working on SimCity alongside challenging-for-the-title Stone Librande? You can hear the latter in the latest SimCity video, as he demonstrates multi-city play. I don't think the feature was designed for the likes of me, who would rather operate a sort of mayoral dictatorship in a Dark City isolated from the rest of the world, but will you be convinced of the possibilities offered by this online mode?
]]>Would you want to see SimCity's creative director showing you some of what the latest city-tinkering sandbox can do? No? Oh. Well, for you I've posted an alternative viewing material beneath the click. For me, though, with my keen interest in the ways of the simulated metropolis, there's a video of best-named-developer, Ocean Quigley, doing his thing in the "ultimate construction set" of options that SimCity provides.
Clearly the ultimatest thing about it is the "clumph" noise on placing a building. Everything else in the game rests on that effect.
]]>I lived with John for four years, which makes me an expert on sexy. So when I say that there's something damn sexy about SimCity's data layers, then you have to believe me. Maxis's reworking of their city simulation is getting a lot of attention for the way they're attempting to display the graphs and percentages of the working of a city as part of the living, breathing world. You want to see if there's a traffic problem? Follow a car and see where it gets stuck, then build bypass routes to clear the clog. It's an idea that creates a startling looking game, but it can't do everything. At a recent EA event I was demonstrated that to really peek at the population or divine the water, you'll need to switch on the data.
]]>Electrical grids? Meh. Highways? Fleh. Civic infrastructure? Poo. If you're a real SimCity fan, you know it's all about the disasters that the apathetic world throws your way. You know that something will come, and that you'll need to deal with it. It's inevitable. If it's a worry you've had to relate to your psychiatrist, then you need worry no more. This is what you've been waiting for: a faux 'olde' style trailer showing off the various ways that your Simulated City (5) could be destroyed, and the various avenues open to you to protect it.
]]>Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw (senior VP and GM) invites you into her living room to watch some Sim City on her enormous telly. Originally broadcast live at some point during last night, it's an hour and seventeen minutes of all things Sims and SimCity. It's below, and I've highlighted the parts you'll want to watch.
]]>This is a treat. Ten minutes of SimCity, showing a city being simulated all the way from its humble beginnings as a field to its brash middle period as a nascent tourist trap. I'm unable to remove the frown that the social and online aspects of the game have stitched into my forehead, but I'm also unable to banish the smile that the multitude of systems at work brings to my face. Rather than being about plonking down zones and buildings, this SimCity tracks and models individual elements in great detail. That level of simulation fascinates me.
]]>You may not have heard, but SimCity's making a big, connection-required-on-start-up play for online, er, play. That said, I doubt the decision was made entirely by a roundtable of cackling men in suits who meet in dark rooms and refer to themselves as "The Council." There is, in other words, a method to the madness - almost as though it's being guided by some omniscient presence that has a disturbing amount of trouble preventing tornadoes and wildfires from ravaging entire metroplexes. But what exactly are we getting for our trouble? Well, it's called SimCity World, and EA's dropped a video of the basics in action. Build a (curved!) road past the break to see for yourself.
]]>The mind of Maxis is brimming over with simulated city, and they're sharing slightly more of that than we've seen already in a new trailer, which I've conveniently erected beneath this introductory text. I've also posted the "gameplay" trailer so that you can compare that with the slightly silly CGI version of their cheery urban world that they've bookended their blatherings with.
]]>The pre-E3 news volcano keeps on spewing molten infobits, as is its over-exuberant wont. EA, for whatever reason (perhaps, you know, E3) is saving its trailers until next week, but it's seen fit to toss a rather important morsel in hungry fans' direction to tide them over. Namely, via an email touting the publishing kingpin's trade show lineup, it pegged SimCity's grand opening for February 2013. Previously, all we had to go on was a vague "2013." Now then, here's hoping that actually goes according to plan - given the precedent set by a certain other recently launched "always online" game.
]]>Fire! It's nice to look at, pleasant to sit around during the harsh winter months, and - because Mother Nature likes a good laugh just as much as the rest of us - one of the most insanely destructive forces on this planet. And now, it's coming to a SimCity near you. Well, OK, it's only doing so if you're a really miserable/sadistic city planner. Wondering how to avoid reducing all your hard work to ash? Hey, me too. We have so much in common. Near as I can tell, step one is to watch the following trailer and then do the exact opposite.
]]>Shortly after seeing the new SimCity in its full bendy-road glory, I had a quick chat with one of its architects, EA Maxis' producer Jason Haber. Tackled - its lengthy development, why we've waited so long for a sequel, why it's a 'real' Sim City, difficulty, whether important content is being sectioned off for pre-order bonuses and DLC, and how a traffic jam could make your whole city burn down.
]]>After all that back and forth about the DRM, let's see what this new SimCity really is. There's no number because it's not a sequel as such, or so the word goes. I can't help but see it as a statement of intent - the series first turned fallow and then was perverted, but now it's back, back, back on track. Pure and faithful. In the same way Dexys Midnight Runners are, in their new incarnation, simply 'Dexys' there's a consciousness that a long history can be as much an albatross as a boon.
And so what might have been Sim City 6 is simply 'SimCity', and it is indeed a city management game. A proper one, with zoning and utilities and emergencies and traffic jams and crime and all that metropolitan jazz. My sense was that it's more accessible than Sim City 4 was, but not in the way that Sim City Societies or - heaven forfend - a Cityville-type is. Yes, the 'a' word. Wait, calm down. While I can only speak from a quick, eyes-on impression of a very early build, the trick seemed be in the presentation of information, not sacrifice of the information itself. A surprisingly lavish and high-detail 3D world was backed up by a slick-looking interface, heavily customisable to show what you do and don't personally want to see at any one time.
]]>You've probably heard that SimCity will come tethered to a pesky always online requirement. You might have heard that we don't like it very much. But then - like an absentee father - it's really only an absolute necessity on start up, so things could be worse. Still, though, I like playing games when I'm thousands of feet in the air, in the middle of nowhere, or punching my incredibly spotty router for yet another hour of downtime. "Why," I'm instead forced to bellow at SimCity, slumping to my knees in defeat. "Why can't I play you in a car, on a tree, in a box, or with a fox?" "Piracy!" replies the roving Internet peanut gallery. Maxis, however, claims it's prepared to prove everyone wrong.
]]>SimCity wants to you show you its fluids, pumping around the place, most of them good for your thirst but some of them riddled with germs. Since my first trip to the beach as a nipper, fashioning a cathedral of sand and shell, I've always enjoyed building things, but now that I'm a withered husk of a man who is more likely to be found propping up a bar than lazing on a beach, it takes more than the promise of a construction set to grab my attention. I was surprised and delighted when I saw that today's SimCity is a simulation driven from the ground up, tracking tiny people to their jobs, creating traffic jams and the spread of illness through the movement of simulated agents rather than some laws of certain averages. This video shows how that will impact on water distribution.
]]>Seems like I managed to miss the first one of these, but not to worry, we can watch both of them today! These videos are Maxis' first look at how the GlassBox tech they've built for the new SimCity will work. It's relatively light on details, but they aim to show off the actual underlying simulation and behaviour mechanics, rather than the visuals that the game will finally display. I love these sort of glimpses into the innards of a game, and SimCity is the kind of game that likes to display its workings on the surface - it shows that Maxis believes its fans will appreciate a more involved approach to revealing how the game will work, too, so that's promising. Go take a look.
]]>EA have issued a clarification to Gamespy that while you will have to have an internet connection to launch SimCity, it will not boot you off if your connection goes down. Which is to say, it's not as egregious as others' "always-on" DRM, but we maintain is still an unnecessary and game-crippling mistake, which we really hope they will reverse before release. That the game won't stop working if your connection goes down sounds great, but it makes no useful difference to those who wish to play the ostensibly single-player game without an internet connection, whatever the cause. As we've said before, the online features sound like they'll superbly enhance your single-player experience, but enforcing them is cruel and stupid, and renders the game broken for enormous numbers of players. We desperately hope to see EA backing down from this position before release. Just as we expect to see Blizzard come to their senses and not release a self-sabotaged version of Diablo 3. The reality is, unofficial versions of the games will appear very soon after release, offering useful features that the publishers' versions of the games will not. That's simply crazy. We've contacted EA to ask if we can talk to them about this all.
]]>Some good news and some bad news about the forthcoming SimCity reboot. Good news: you won't have to buy it through Origin, meaning there can be pricing competition. Bad news: you will have to play it through Origin, with a permanent online connection all the time. That's some fairly bloody enormous bad news. But there is time to convince EA that while there are many merits to having your game online, there are also some vastly more dreadful downsides, and failing to recognise that would be a terrible shame.
]]>Pity the simulated citizens who will live in SimCity, the reboot of the franchise of the same name, due from the god-game guys at Maxis sometime in 2013. No easy life for them, no appearing as if by magic on the streets of your town and scurrying back and forth between the busy districts of the day. No - instead, life will be a precarious crap-shoot of existential uncertainty, in which no satisfaction, however small, may be taken for granted, and no need may ever be filled in more than momentary fashion. And, as if it need be said, in the game.
]]>If the devil is in the details then EA's city-running sim, cunningly called Sim City, is writhing on a bed, doing naughty things with a religious symbol and being doused in holy water. Ugh! It just turned its head 360 degrees! It is wickedly detailed, thanks to an engine that shows off exactly what the simulation is up to. A building like a power plant is not just a stack of boxes, but it contains the resources like coal and workers to create electricity. The effects and animations you'll see on the unit are tied into how the unit simulates what's going in and what's coming out, so the pollution spouting from the chimney is represented accurately according to the game's logic. Clicking in garages into a fire station will make it a more efficient station: a station with a few more garages in the model will actually run according to how you've built it. Everything you see is a one-to-one representation of what the simulation is doing. The video is below.
]]>Did you hear? Maxis are doing the Sim City thing again. As Sim City 2000 was one of the games that made me, I've been cautiously vibrating with excitement ever since the news of the new Sim City first started spreading, but now I'm left with questions like "Is the new Sim City going to do anything clever with the internet", "Will it have any modding support?" and "just how do those curvy roads work?". But no longer, as Maxis took to the stage at GDC to spill at least some of the beans regarding the tech that's powering Sim City: The New One, the brand new Glass Box engine, and here's the grisly details:
]]>So while we all already knew, SimCity is back, and it's being spelt like that. No number, no space. It's going to be in 3D, resources are going to be finite, and technology pays a significant part. And it's being made by Maxis, and it's only on PC. More details, and a trailer below.
]]>One of the many problems with games publishers continuing to give exclusive early game reveals to magazines is that the vast majority of the world's gaming populace ends up basing its initial opinions of the game on hurried summaries and blurry scanned screenshots on forums. The lure of the free advertising in newsagents that a game magazine cover constitutes, even in this day of catastrophically low print sales, is too hard to resist, I guess.
So here we are hearing, via forumy types sharing info from the latest edition of German mag Gamestar, that Sim City 5 is happening at long last, and is presumably the Maxis game set to be revealed at GDC next week.
]]>A mere 19 years after its release, the original Sim City source code is now completely free. And not just money-free, but proper free, the code released under the GNU General Product License.
]]>Heard of the One Laptop Per Child initiative? Probably, but just in case here's a summary. It's a charitable endeavour to provide computers to children in developing and impoverished nations. The XO Latop is a bespoke and dirt-cheap machine (a donation of just $200 sees one sent out to a child in need on the other side of the world) designed first and foremost for learning, but with the added benefit of being a compelling piece of technology in its own right. Oh, and it plays games.
]]>Just spotted this on the ever-lovely Gamershell. Sim City Societies is a fascinating endeavour, as it's a Sim game without any Maxis/Will Wright involvement, and it's looking to make a clean break with the series' chequered but always entertaining past.
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