I have received the email referenced in the blog-post linked above.
It indicates that anyone having registered their copy of SimCity before March 25, may claim a free game from EA before March 30th.
Those of you with SimCity 5, check your email.....
Here is a second link with additional information:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9378384.page
Eight popular games. Just pick'n'choose.
Which one did you chose btw?
Dead Space 3
There are only 2 games on that list that I don't already own (DS3 and ME3). So unless EA want to expand the options (apparently there are some on their forums complaining about the selection......go figure) it'll have to be one of those two for me.
I'm leaning towards ME3 but I'll take a few extra days to think about it.....
monk- get ME3 You will get way more hours out of ME3.
I always wanted to get ME3 but I never saw a box with Fem Shep on the front so I said meh.
Not that... hey! It's just that I saw the poster and thought, damnit that's what needs to be on the front of the box, she looks so badass.
Install another DDRM game for free when the DDRM was what caused the problem. Good idea. *rollseyes*
No wonder that a*hole Riccitello had to leave...
I don't think that one guy leaving is going to change much. Not if they're giving out a freebie as some kind of peace offering to players. That problems of this magnitude made it into release just illustrates how deep-rooted the culture of break it now, fix it later really is.
Don't get me wrong, there are good reason to adopt that strategy pre-release. If you spend too much time polishing the chrome, you have no idea if the final product is going to be any good. There comes a time when you just have to push on and bring it all together and see what you have.
I remember working late one night, pulling together all the modules in Director with my work partner and thinking hooray, we're done. Come back in on Monday and nope, not even close to done, got an armful of issues that need sorting. One of which was assigning particular sounds to particular channels, because back then you could only mix four at a time, so it was necessary to close those channels when moving to a new section so that new sounds would actually get a chance to play.
Anyway my point is, quality is not something you can rush, but EA has the manpower to get a lot more done between working prototype and actual release than two guys do. They're either stopping the polishing and bugfixing far too soon, or they're taking too long to come up with a working prototype. Either way, it results in an inferior product that gets shafted and ridiculed by anyone who can see the glaring flaws.
At least for the PS3 case, the insert reverses and there is a FemShep on the other side.
I'm not even kidding, they should give full refunds for how bad Sim City is.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of the game in my opinion. Obviously the game has issues, some of which have been patched and some of which still need to be patched. RCI definitely needs some rebalancing/fixing and the way regional traffic/trade/influence is handled could use some attention as well (with regional influences being so obvious). Some of the complaints I just don't agree with. Traffic in general (while still not the smartest at times) has been manageable for me as long as I plan ahead far enough.
The posts I take issue with are the ones that sound like this to me:
"see, see this or that game mechanic can be abused so the game must suck!"
Just because a game mechanic can be made to break the game, doesn't mean the entire game is bad. I've seen the videos of people with only residential and parks whose cities still manage to grow and be profitable etc. etc. Those are the same guys who get yelled at in chat to zone some bloody commercial/industrial because their 'experiment' is screwing with the entire region.
Sure some 'experimentation' will be necessary in order to achieve at least some of the achievements in SimCity but do the resulting 'bad games' really trace back to a bad overall game at that point?
My experience with SimCity so far:
I have been playing a 2-city region with a buddy since the start and it has been tough at times (I had thought starting in a 2-city region might be easier than the larger regions, however it appears it might actually be the opposite). Both of our cities are currently at about the 150K population mark, and are both fairly profitable cities with a somewhat 'balanced' RCI. My buddy appears to be having some slightly worse traffic issues (he has a casino pretty much at the entrance to his city...hehe). I don't appear to be having any traffic issues unless you count one particular road off to the side of the town that seems to have moving vans on it daily. I read the forum posts regarding 'moving van circles' but I honestly think the problem for me on that street is the fact that the residential on that street keeps going up and down in land value which causes people to move in/out on a daily basis (I'll be looking into that 'theory' further). My buddy also created quite the trash problem in my city when without telling me he decided to remove his garbage dump and just add a recycling plant. Of course he was now reaping the benefit of recycled material sales and I had to deal with the trash from both cities. I also suddenly had a large drop in population happiness due to a 'recycling problem' at many businesses and residential so I had to plop a recycling plant of my own before I was really ready to do so (this is why I said above the 'regional influences' might need to be looked at further as well). All in all we are having a good time with the latest SimCity.
I'm with Heavenfall on this one, the game is absurdly broken. I'm sticking with calling it a gilded travesty. It's not a simulation at all, I think my favorite example I have seen was a guy who made a city that produced millions of income that had no population at all.
Since when is how someone can manipulate a game the example of how a game will or must be played?
My friend and I have spent quite a few hours with SimCity already and have not experienced any of those 'game-breaking' examples I've seen posted around the internet. I guess we're just too dumb to use the game engine in a 'game-breaking' way.....
It's just one example of many ways the game does not simulate the development and growth of a city, the point of the game. The things you build in your city do not work as part of a simulation, and in many ways act counterintuitively to that simulation. They only serve to facilitate the shallow facade of a simulation, when in reality, it doesn't really matter.
The legitimate 'bugs' aside (the ones they are addressing via patches) I don't see the game as 'broken'.....sorry. Thanks to the new 'regional' approach cities are no longer in a vacuum which poses all sorts of new issues some of which I concede will present themselves as 'balancing' problems or situations that may manifest as 'unrealistic'. Maybe if the game had been named SimRegion it would have been deemed more appropriate. In any case, I remain convinced that unless one finds themselves playing this game with a bunch of exploitative people, there are both fun and challenges to be had.
Well, if you are having fun, that's great. I'm not and a number of others are not. But all the problems with the game have been documented other places, if you are curious, take a look. And the problems are not "bugs", they are poor design choices.
Sims do not commute enough to find work, even when there are heaps of jobs available in the region.
It takes quite a concerted effort and a heap of money to lay the infrastructure to get them out of the city and down the highway to the next city where there are heaps of jobs. Or maybe there isn't the right kind of jobs. It's impossible to tell apart from the RCI gauges.
The size of the cities is proof enough. I dont see why people can enjoy such a limited "City"
They don't even actually need jobs really. I made a city that was growing over 20,000 without a single industry or commerce zone in the region. I doubt all 20,000 worked at the power plant or the parks around town. But they were happy and paid their taxes just fine.
EA can't give refunds. They are a public company and analysts were expecting a revenue bump the quarter SimCity was released. They can give away old games to mitigate damage to their brand since doing so won't harm current quarter projections. The stock market does not take kindly to missing earning projections.
This is what separates the Stardocks and Valves from EA, Ubisoft, etc.
To read these stories about how someone else in the region can totally screw your city over...I just can't fathom how this is fun. I want to build *my* city the way *I* want it and if it gets screwed it's my fault, not because some doofball wants to be funny and mess my city up. It's the new "griefing". Cements for me even more why I swore off this game (and EA completely) and didn't buy it as a good idea. Tropico 4 and Cities XL Plat will more then fill the void for city building for me.
Last night, my friend and I started brand new 'cities' in a larger region (our original region only had 1 city space for each of us). We gave the *mostly* residential strategy a try and while you can grow your city-pop really fast that way, we found it is also the single best way to bone your traffic situation really hard since without local commerce and industry they will all try to leave and re-enter your city at the same time.
We have also found that 'regional-trade' doesn't appear to be working properly or I should say consistently (I suspect server issues etc. here). This is pure speculation on my part, but I believe it possible that the regional RCI may be having the same issues the regional trade/gifting etc. is suffering from which is why it sometimes appears like residentials are commuting to 'vapor-jobs', commerce is getting 'magical-freight', and while RCI states there is never enough localindustry there is massive regional job-sharing going on (at least for industry it seems).
Another thing we found curious is the fact that global trade take precedent over regional trade. This does seem odd and counterintuitive at best. Say my town has a massive surplus of something, my friend cannot 'purchase' all of it. Seems like while the 'regional interaction' is supposed to be the focus of the game, in some cases the game engine still makes global choices for you, which isn't desirable in all situations.
I agree with bonscott that the new heavy focus on regional everything opens the door to intentional greifing and actually makes this game much more difficult and frustrating to play by oneself than it needs to be. Even with a friend such as I have been playing with, when we're not on comms he or I can easily make decisions in our city that have far-reaching and sometimes costly consequences for our neighbor.
Like I've said before, perhaps this new game should have been called SimRegion afterall.....
Having said all of this, I do believe the devs will continue to improve on the game. It does seem unfortunate that these days we the customers are more often than not being used as the 'final beta' phase. Oh well.......all large projects (and SimCity 5 is definitely a large project) run the risk of doing that, and I don't think we're going to be getting away from that any time soon!
In any case, my friend and I are still having a ton of fun.......even if that 'fun' sometimes comes with a few expletives hurled at each other for 'hey man.....you just screwed my city......what the %^&%^ did you just do?! " hehe
....so I logged into my city yesterday to find my sewage treatment system overwhelmed. I'm usually pretty good about staying ahead of these things so I'm looking everywhere for culprit until I notice that every few seconds this gigantic blob of poo comes zooming up the regional highway and into my city! I follow the highway right to the second city my buddy had built while I wasn't online. It turns out he wanted to save the expense of having to deal with the sewage of his second city so he just opted to send it all my way! Needless to say that issue has since been rectified.......hehe
Got Dead Space 3 for free, made me happy so I bought the Digital Deluxe upgrade for ME3 and Crysis 3 and a map for Sims 3 in the sale.
I understand the general complaints about the game as it was released way too early IMO (even barring the server issues, the traffic problems should not have made it past launch IMO.) But the game is good. It could certainly use a few more upgrades (bigger cities would still be nice) but I can't complain about anything else anymore.
I'm mostly done playing but I still load it up here and there.
Achievement get: Insert witty crap here.
That sounds extremely fun If I knew were certain people were (like you) I would team up with funny people and focus on wrecking your cities Trolling people like that is one of the funniest things I know
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