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Cities of Tomorrow is something of a "more of the same" add-on. SimCity gameplay has been preserved for the most part, but accentuated with futuristic touches and technology that allow you to take your towns into the future. Granted, this is a future that still features ridiculously small city borders, an unhealthy emphasis on multiplayer, and the same old always-on Internet connection that alienated so many fans last spring, but hey, it's got all that plus mag-lev trains and robot drones now, so take the good future with the bad future. You're left with a game that hides the same dissatisfying experience under a more attractive surface. All of the tweaks in this add-on collectively let you evolve past the current era into a shimmery future that represents the later 21st century and beyond. The biggest symbol of this leap forward is the MegaTower, a cloud-touching superstructure that lets you fit almost all city accommodations and services under one roof. Forget about the crippled zoning mechanics in the original SimCity; you can place residential, mall, office, park, security, waste collection, and other specialized levels into single buildings. You can even top everything off with something eye-catching, like big neon signs, parks, or tourist-drawing lookouts. Granted, this is a future that still features ridiculously small city borders, an unhealthy emphasis on multiplayer, and the same old always-on Internet connection that alienated so many fans last spring. But even though building up, not out, would seem to be a good way to handle the tiny municipal footprints that are still imposed on city-builders, I had serious problems with how to use MegaTowers in my personal cities of tomorrow. Their sheer size remains an issue. Each tower occupies a tremendous amount of space, which means that you have to cram them into cities by demolishing huge sections of your original layout. Figure on getting rid of a good four square blocks of residential development to plop down just one tower, which really exacerbates the demolition-happy design of the original game. Don't go all future on an existing city if you have any emotional attachment to it, because the old place will be gone in no time... The Good New "Blade Runner by way of Coruscant" graphics take the game into the future Multipurpose MegaTowers are innovative, if also wildly expensive and huge The Bad Does very little to address core problems with the SimCity design Cities are far too small for the new structures, most of which have massive footprints High-tech nature of new buildings can strain your budget to the breaking point Full Review: http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-review/1900-6415573/

So glad this is coming but I just can't help but imagine... instead of spending 6.5 months to re-engineer something to be offline when it arguably "should" have been offline in the first place, and instead putting 6.5 extra development months making the engine and game more kick-ass... we'd have a kick-ass game today? Still, good move Maxis... I hope this doesn't imply an EA exit strategy that once we get offline, and mod support, that's it for future development...

SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow moves the city-builder forward with an interesting new layer of interdependent systems. The thing about OmegaCo and the Academy, however, is that although they are supposed to be futuristic, they don’t feel all that different from existing specializations. OmegaCo uses oil and ore to manufacture the addictive mystery substance Omega, so the city I built around it was basically a hybrid mining-drilling city except with more neon lights. The Academy, on the other hand, works similarly to the university in that it converts nearby industry to high tech, and the Academy city I built looked a lot like a typical “green” education-focused city. (Side note: the Academy requires high-wealth workers instead of educated ones, which I found to be a bit weird.) My cities didn’t start to feel new until I incorporated the third but by far most interesting specialization, MegaTowers. They’re enormous skyscrapers that you build one level at a time, and because levels can be dedicated to anything from apartments to offices to parks to new technologies, you can customize them to fit your cities’ needs. They don’t make cities physically larger (the small lot size remains woefully unaddressed), but they do let you build up instead of out and can hold large populations, leaving you more space for other things. Plus, if you plan them right, they can even be completely self-sustaining. That way, the Sims living there never have to leave (insert evil mayoral laughter here) and therefore won’t clog up already congested roads. Staying inside forever is the way of the future! ... After being stuck behind menu screens, unmanageable traffic, and general bugginess for quite some time, SimCity is finally moving forward. Cities of Tomorrow provides plenty to remind returning ones what SimCity is capable of, and it’s certainly something to behold. Some parts of the future are stuck in the past, but it’s strikingly well-balanced, providing solutions for existing problems and new toys to tinker with that counteract each other nicely. 7.5 Good. Full review: http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/11/20/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow

Relevant quote here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-10-04-looks-like-simcity-is-finally-getting-an-offline-mode

Talking about why he quit EA, former SimCity creative director Ocean Quigley told Polygon he had been "dismayed" at the botched launch of SimCity, in which EA insisted gamers play always-online, while failing to provide enough server capacity. The botched launch closed many players out of the game and led to severe criticism of EA's processes. But Quigley added that he has been thinking of setting up a new project for some time anyway. "I was dismayed at the blundered launch of something that I had poured so much love and attention into, which made the leaving easier but it would have probably happened anyway," he said. "Honestly I think I would have left regardless of whether EA's launch of SimCity was smooth or rough. It was basically my third SimCity. I did SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 and this new SimCity." Quigley announced on Twitter today that he, SimCity lead architect Andrew Willmott and lead gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz are setting up a new developer called Jellygrade. They are working on an iPad simulation game that seeks to recreate the early formation of the Earth. Full article: http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/16/4529260/quigleys-dismay-at-simcitys-blundered-launch-and-why-he-quit-ea

It's becoming increasingly clear who the target audience is for this game as these DLCs are released.

GameHorizon Live: The Sims creator discusses the evolving relationship between player and designer, and the impact of new technology on the games business "I'm very interested in how we build a game around a player's life….I want to figure out how to bring games back into everyday reality, games that intersect with players' lives," he said. Not only did Wright speak about his personal ambitions, but he also said the time is right for the industry to blossom, thanks to a proliferation of talented designers. "We have a much bigger crop of skilled designers than we ever have," he said. "Some of the greatest designers out there are just getting their start right now." Full story with video: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-08-will-wright-the-future-game-design-and-its-impact-on-the-player

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. In March, shortly after SimCity’s disastrous launch (servers couldn’t cope, the game barely ran, features had to be removed, and the always-on DRM was seriously crippling the game), EA and Maxis’ PR went into damage protection mode. And one refrain we saw over and over was a line from Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, that the ‘single-player’ game had to “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers.” On 12th March, RPS revealed that this statement simply wasn’t true. Via a source from inside Maxis, we learned that the server was doing no such thing, and that the calculations were running on the player’s PC. Two days later these claims were confirmed by a modder who had the game running indefinitely offline. It was clear that the message coming from Maxis simply wasn’t true. (There’s no better round-up of the events than the one put together by Kotaku.) (One thing that’s important to note here: That the claims weren’t true does not provide room to conclude that Bradshaw was “lying”. Not knowing the circumstances within Maxis at all, there’s no way to know that Bradshaw did not believe what she was saying to be entirely accurate. Miscommunication, deliberate misinformation, we just don’t know, and as such accusations don’t help this discussion.) So what to do next? Via RPS, and much of the gaming press, the reality that the servers were not running offline calculations became widely understood. So how did EA or Maxis handle this situation? With silence. And if simply telling the truth isn’t considered an available option, silence is by far the most effective response in this industry. Full story: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/

Screw the game, SimCity has become a cynically brilliant advertising platform So the good news is that Cheetah Speed has returned to SimCity, and some new content in the form of the “Attractions Set” has been released. Who doesn't love new buildings to add into their cities? So this is something that's free right? Or will we have to pay? Son of a $%&^!. So there's no way to buy the content, and it certainly isn't free. It's just a way to get people who like SimCity to buy toothpaste. This isn't a cosmetic addition to the game, as these additions - and I think a giant ball of twine is seriously an awesome addition - will give you an advantage during play. “The Attractions Set adds happiness to low wealth Sims,” the official post stated. “They will also bring in all three wealth classes of tourists into your city.” This is why I have such a deep loathing for EA at the moment. It's not that you get neat stuff for buying a certain brand of toothpaste, it's that the game seems designed around these sponsorship deals and monetization strategies. It doesn't feel like EA and Maxis sat down and tried to create the very best version of SimCity possible, it feels like they designed the game that would be the easiest to control, monetize, and sell to advertisers. Source: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/simcity-as-advertising-platform-how-ea-rewards-you-for-buying-real-world-pr

Following last year’s surprise Worst Company In America victory by Electronic Arts, there was hope that the video game giant would get the message: Stop treating your customers like human piggy banks, and don’t put out so many incomplete and/or broken games with the intent of getting your customers to pay extra for what they should have received in the first place. And yet, here we are again, with EA becoming the first company to ever win a second Golden Poo from Consumerist readers. After an astounding number of votes, Consumerist readers once again chose EA over Bank of America, with the video game company taking nearly 78% of the vote. Full story: http://consumerist.com/2013/04/09/ea-makes-worst-company-in-america-history-wins-title-for-second-year-in-a-row/

From Paradox Interactive, Cities in Motion 2 is a mass transit simulation game where you build transportation networks for cities. CIM2 brings new choices to building transportation networks. If you want to focus less on city-building, and more on transportation networks for cities, CIM2 might be worth your time to check out... Here's the marketing blurb: Cities in Motion 2 (CIM2) is the sequel to the popular mass transit simulation game Cities in Motion. Build, manage and lead your transportation network to provide cities with their ever changing needs. Cities in Motion 2 introduces new features including multiplayer game modes, day and night cycles, timetables and dynamic cities. Building the transportation network will directly affect how the city grows. Affordable transportation brings middle class housing and work places, while more expensive and exotic choices bring high end businesses. Take advantage of many different types of vehicles including buses, trams, ferries and more. Build alone or play cooperatively with a friend. Use the newly implemented bus lanes to build efficient traffic free roadways. Tackle rush hour by managing transportation timetables and meeting the needs of the citizens. Dynamic cities Player’s choices affect city growth Day and night cycle Manage the timetables Multiplayer, both co-operative and competitive modes Campaign and sandbox mode

Google Translation: We've got news for you one, dear mayors. The novelty of one big novelty, you're going to SimCity - update labeled 2.0! This update, which will be published soon (more on April 9 at 18:00), to include several critical fixes for which you have asked us most, and also some other improvements. For an idea of ​​providing you with a complete overview of upcoming changes: Tourism: Repairs unexplained fluctuations tourists - passenger numbers of tourists are now collected in a better way. Casinos: Casinos adjusted so that it is more profitable gambling - to activate this enhancement is needed to demolish the old casino and replace them with new ones. More casinos: Number of modules Sci-fi casino casino and neat rose to six. Game in the region: bankrupt city may receive financial assistance from the city. Education: Addressed an issue with buses that are stuck in secondary schools; existing schools are already corrected themselves. Education: Fixed a bug where school buses picking up students in neighboring towns as well as the absence of bus stops. Education: Better student population census. Education: Fixed a bug where the children after leaving the school bus stop teleported to the nearest walking route instead to go to school. Education: The University building extensions now a player gets the correct bonus. Recycling: Recycling center cleared errors due to which ceased to operate; recycling services now also serve other cities. Air pollution: Fixed a problem that caused the contamination occurred suddenly without any apparent cause; fixed the problem for which it is manifested regional air pollution double penalty. The mayor's villa: The Mayor will now go to work with their catching cars. Helicopter will fly or ride in a limo and sports cars, if the built-ins. Fire Services: Fire cars are now getting to fires faster. Water: Water pump now pumping water from rivers with a much larger area, so that better use of water resources. Trade: Fixed ports that stopped working for no reason. Public transport: Tram first stops to come with a higher frequency of movement of passengers. Public transport: Cities with population and public transport region now transmit the correct number of employees and customers. Public transport: Circular vehicle now will not attempt to load other Sims, but leaves the garage. Public transport: Buses neighbors do not often visit the surrounding cities and will focus more on serving passengers "home". Processing center: Fix problems that caused that some cities do not process correctly. Data maps: Maps are now displayed in a standard color, even if the player uses any of image filters (except for color blind mode). HUD: The user interface now supports mode for colorblind correct color settings. Tuning: Pure City resident now support "state failure". Budget: Fixed bugs in monthly transactions that permit circumvention of the system. The above changes certainly do not represent a complete list of new version 2.0. Expect further details on the day of the release, that is next week on Tuesday. Meanwhile, although the 2.0 update does not fix the loss of the gaming process and the "rollback", but very hard to solve these problems we work. Because it is the first major update so we would like to warn you in advance that all game servers will be updated at the time of 2.0 to two hours off. Issuing updates for such a large number of players is not a simple task, so it's a necessary step. Neither was it easy to choose the right time for the release, according to statistics gaming servers but we worked out that at least players just damage the outage at 18:00. We believe that, given the list of repairs you will understand that you two hours waiting worthwhile. For now, try the Cheetah speed by going back to the game again! Thanks for your patience, mayors!

You hate us because we're so good at what we do EA COO Peter Moore wrote a reaction to the poll, and his defense of the mighty publisher is both tone deaf and insulting. He blames homophobes who dislike EA’s push for allowing LGBT characters in games. He says that many dislike microtransactions, but you can’t argue with results! He once again says that the always-on require on SimCity isn’t DRM, as if the only thing keeping us from loving that game is a matter of semantics. His message is simple: EA doesn’t really care what you think about it, because it’s successful. Which is an argument that doesn’t hold up to the faintest of scrutiny. Your CEO doesn’t deploy his golden parachute due to lower than expected revenue because your games are doing well. EA is losing both the battle for gamers’ wallets as well as the battle for our hearts. They can say that they don’t mind being hated as long as we give them money, but fewer of us are giving them money. This is not the time for a victory lap. The Consumerist has a rather damning response to Moore’s arguments about why so many people hate the publisher, and the post dismantles Moore’s arguments one by one. “EA received hundreds of nominations from Consumerist readers this year, by far the most of any contender in the bracket, but not a single one mentioned anything about sexual orientation,” the post stated. “Consumerist does not condone homophobia or hate speech of any kind, and our readers understand the Worst Company contest and nominate businesses based on their merits.” ... EA has given us ample reasons to hate them SimCity not only requires an Internet connection, a decision that has led to no end of technical problems, but we can no longer create huge cities. We can’t save our game, experiment with the design, and then reload. It’s not a sandbox anymore, and the playful nature of past games in the series has been replaced by a game that forces us to play a certain way. ... “The tallest trees catch the most wind,” Moore wrote. “At EA we remain proud and unbowed.” I have bad news for Peter Moore: Activision is the tallest tree, and people are actually buying their games. EA is fast becoming kindling, and the company ignores its customers throwing matches at its peril. ... Full story: http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/ea-earned-hatred-with-poor-games-lack-of-vision-and-contempt-for-the-audien

Polygon.com: EA chief operating officer Peter Moore is, unsurprisingly, not thrilled at the prospect of "winning" the contest. But in a post on EA's official blog, it appears Moore's taking the poll's outcome to heart, writing, "We are committed to fixing our mistakes." "Are we really the 'Worst Company in America?'" Moore wrote. "I'll be the first to admit that we've made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn't meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this." ... Moore writes that some consumer complaints against EA's business practices are "100 percent legitimate," but outlines other grievances against the publisher which he says "just don't hold water." Those include claims that SimCity's always-online requirement is part of a DRM scheme ("It's not. People still want to argue about it. We can't be any clearer — it's not.") and that "free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming." ... Full statement: http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better

Hi everyone I wanted to give you a quick update about the state of SimCity and what the development team here at Maxis has been focused on in the last week. The good news is that we are seeing so many of you playing the game. Mayors have spent more than 33 centuries worth of time playing the game and enough road has been laid to circumnavigate the earth over 5000 times. Each day, we have more than three quarters of a million active cities being played. We've been heads down addressing the key issues we’re seeing reported from our community. This includes city rollbacks, lost progress, and the return of features like Cheetah Speed and Leaderboards. Like you, we want all of these resolved ASAP, which is why they are the top priorities in our studio. Matter of fact, we have all of these in a QA environment, giving them a thorough test before we release them back to you, the fans. On top of this, we’re also working on a number of bug fixes and other overall improvements that we’re planning to include in future Updates. Just last week we released two Updates 1.7 and 1.8, which included traffic fixes and other general improvements. For the future, in Update 2.0, we’ll be addressing the Recycling Center bug, fixing the fire engine clumping, improving the efficiency of Street Cars, and increasing the radius of river water. We’re also fixing the tuning on Casinos and are making them more profitable. These are just a handful of the substantial changes coming in Update 2.0. Keep in mind, if you don’t see a particular fix present in an Update, this doesn't mean we’re not working on it, or we’re not aware of it. Our team is constantly getting reports about the top issues being raised and this is helping us prioritize what we need to address. There are some issues that are more challenging and will take more time. If you have feedback, please visit our forums. In the meantime, we’ll continue to address the top issues in our updates. We’ll keep working while you’re playing. Thanks for sticking with us. We hope this gives you a better idea of what we've been working on. Now back to work! Source: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-from-kip

EA Labels president Frank Gibeau responds to "conspiracy theories" about SimCity and puts his foot down when it comes to DRM. The recent launch of SimCity was a troubled one for Electronic Arts, as the company struggled to get its servers fully functional. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be good for any game's launch, but when a title is designed to be always online, and countless players therefore can't even play the game they just purchased, the situation quickly escalates. EA moved as fast as it could to rectify the situation, but some players felt EA's real intent was to force DRM on its customers. Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw's blog post seemed to only stir the pot, but EA Labels president Frank Gibeau now insists that DRM had absolutely nothing to do with the game's design whatsoever. Speaking to GamesIndustry International at GDC this week, Gibeau commented, "That's not the reality; I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once. You don't build an MMO because you're thinking of DRM - you're building a massively multiplayer experience, that's what you're building." Not only was DRM not a topic of internal discussion at EA, Gibeau said, but the executive also made it very clear that DRM is simply not an option for publishers anymore. "DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve. For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that's not the case at all," he said with a laugh. For EA and Maxis, Gibeau said it really was a case of building a completely connected world with an MMO-like infrastructure. Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-27-ea-drm-is-a-failed-dead-end-strategy

RPS: As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, while not offering an offline version of SimCity is entirely Maxis’s call, our issue this week has been with their claiming it would be near impossible, rather than their simply believing it undesirable. (Obviously we have enormous issues with any game being crippled by such DRM, too.) So how simple does Azzer think getting an offline version going might be? “They could make an entire region single player offline with absolute ease. It would be as simple as coding in a switch saying, ‘Is this person playing single player? Take the power values of each city from local memory instead of ask for it from the server instead.’ The only thing missing is saving to local hard drive – but let’s be real, the code for saving your city already exists, I can’t imagine even that would take more than an hour to put into the client (and it probably already exists in the client for development builds), plus a little bit of time for the UI elements for Save/Load.” “For an offline mode,” he continues, “instead of asking EA servers how much power is available from a fellow city in the region, it will simply have it in memory, as a small handful of values from another city. No live calculations done on them. Just raw values, all the EA servers send anyway. And as you’ll only be playing/simulating one city at a time in offline mode (cities you don’t play are “frozen in time”) – those values of how much spare power, resources, etc. other cities have won’t even need updating, until you change cities.” But how exactly would that work? If those cities are frozen, resources won’t be renewed, nor depleted? “Let’s say you and I play in a region together,” says Azzer, talking about the regular online game. “You build a town that has lots of power and water (water is a consumable just like coal) and spare fire trucks. I build a big casino city with lots of criminals. You go offline and don’t play for a whole week, but I keep playing for an entire week.” Okay, with you. “During that week, my client will keep telling me stories about fire trucks coming to help me from your city, I’ll keep getting water from you, I’ll keep getting power from you – of a ‘set amount’ dictated by how much you had spare when you last logged off. This is all processed by my client, not by the server. All the server did was tell me ‘X fire trucks available, Y water available, Z power available, from city with the name ABC,’ as a raw list of values. When you log back on, your water levels will be exactly as they were when you last logged off, because EA’s servers were NOT doing any processing, and my client only affects the city I am simulating.” Crikey. So an offline version of the game could act in exactly the same way. You could play multiple cities in your private region, each freezing when not played just as the current game operates. “No processing is done on the cities you aren’t currently playing on – they simply freeze in time and provide a fixed set of values of ‘resources’ that the currently played city simulates. The client does all the processing, which is why any city not being played (online or not) has nothing done to it by EA’s servers if the owner of that city is not playing their city at the time.” Source: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-modder-tells-us-offline-regional-play-easily-done/

Banished is a city-building strategy game that charges you with the task of starting a small town, growing population, managing crops. Place buildings to harvest resources and convert them into goods. There is no mass transit, or any kind of transportation network, but the small rural town simulator might appeal to some looking for a change of pace. The game is very near release with a 2013 ship date. More details at the site, and support the developer if you like it. More videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/ShiningRockSoftware?feature=watch Welcome to the world of Banished! In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The objective of the game is to keep the population alive and grow it into a successful culture. Options for feeding the people include hunting and gathering, agriculture, trade, and fishing. However, sustainable practices must be considered to survive in the long term.

"Basically, as the video shows below, you can enter into another person's online town and wreck havoc. It's awesome because this hack is only as destructive as it is because of EA's decision to make the game always-on. If the game hadn't had always-on DRM then this hack wouldn't be half as devastating as it is. Having EA delete these kind of topics from their forums is great damage control but don't be surprised if there's another furor when people start raging on the forums when some hacker decides to go through and Godzilla everyone's town. Enjoy." Source: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/SimCity-Hack-Lets-Users-Destroy-Anyone-Online-City-Thanks-Always-DRM-53685.html

Over the past couple of days, “SimCity” has eclipsed “Pope” in global search volume. Electronic Arts has finally created something that has captivated the world with an intoxicating melange of drama, tragedy and sick humor. Too bad all of these elements emerge from EA’s project management, not the game itself. The first stage of the SimCity fiasco stemmed from how EA’s servers spectacularly failed to cope with the entirely predictable launch week traffic. But the next stage is potentially even more damaging. On EA’s Answer HQ website, one of the most heated discussion threads is now about whether the entire pathfinding and traffic management systems of the game are badly broken. Several players have noted that the characters in the game don’t actually have any permanent jobs or homes. They simply walk to the nearest available open job or a suitable home at certain times, a simplification that creates major headaches in city planning. Sims that start walking don’t switch to mass transit if they don’t find a job nearby; kids don’t get to schools easily; all cops go to a single crime scene even if police stations are carefully spread in different parts of the city. School buses, fire trucks and tourist hordes all seem to have trouble finding obvious routes to their goals. As a result, designing a functional city may mean planning a street grid and placement of different facilities in a deeply counterintuitive way. Players have to design their cities to suit bad algorithms, not realistic goals. One popular emerging strategy is to construct a city with a single street winding back and forth like a snake. This enables players to reduce the problems of having school buses that cannot find students and fire trucks that refuse to go where they are supposed to. A popular way to avoid suffocating traffic jams is to fill the city with wide avenues, resulting in weird maps where normal streets are used as sparsely as possible. ... Source: http://bgr.com/2013/03/13/simcity-pr-nightmare-analysis-372284/

SimCity is a good game hobbled by its insistence on putting as many obstacles as it can between it and you. You can point to the ridiculous online connection problems that have bogged down the game's launch as the most obvious examples of this, but they aren't the only ones. From its online infrastructure to the simulation that powers each city, SimCity has numerous flaws that can turn a few hours of delight into a few hours of seething frustration. Many, or even most, of these flaws can be fixed, but it's the here and now that's important--and in the here and now, SimCity is a fun, engaging, and broken game. Just how broken the always-online SimCity is depends on when you're playing, what server you choose, and the sheer luck of the draw. Did it need to be this way? Probably not: the game offers the option to have a fully single-player experience in a closed region of your own creation. Alas, you must sign into SimCity (the service)--as well as Electronic Arts' Origin service--in order to play SimCity (the game). Since the game's release, connecting has been a crapshoot. You may not be able to log in at all, or the server might be full. In that case, you don't enter a standard queue as you might in a massively multiplayer online game (though to be clear, SimCity is not an MMOG). Instead, you initiate a 20-minute countdown. Should the server be full when the countdown is finished, the countdown and the wait begin again. So what is the benefit to the always-online aspect of SimCity? It's in the regional structure: you share an entire region with other players or, if you prefer, with other cities you yourself manage. This means up to 16 people are performing their mayoral duties in one geographical expanse, though you work with only a single city at a time. SimCity is a shared experience, though not just from a social perspective, but also from a mechanical perspective. No city is meant to be all things at once, as the relatively minor plot of land you get to work with indicates from the get-go. You can focus on tourism by placing--er, plopping, as the game calls it--landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and reaping the financial benefits. But in doing so, you may not have room to plop structures that allow you to mine ore, or export resources. You must choose: your city is not going to be a sprawling, self-contained urban center no matter how clever you think you can be. Rest at source.

From director Frank Miller and video-game visionary Will Wright- "Sim City: A Game to Kill For." In the the dark and miserable town of Sim City, politics and popularity polls mean everything. So when a down-and-out Marv gets caught up in the Mayor's violent corruption of power plants, power lines and prostitution there's only one thing he won't do. Play Along.

The developers of the latest SimCity learned a valuable lesson Friday during a Reddit AMA, one that will hopefully be passed on to other developers: people -- you know, the downstream consumers you're hoping will purchase your software? They hatehatehatehatehatehatehateHATE DRM. The first answer back, from Kip Katsarelis (Senior Producer) was far from comforting: Sorry, I replied to it below. Not avoiding. Here was the reply... "I actually just ran over to our online engineering team to get the latest info. We do handle "short" internet outages gracefully. Meaning, if your internet goes out while you're logged in and playing the game, we can can recover gracefully. You shouldn't notice a thing. "Short" is still being defined." At least Katsarelis somewhat acknowledges that the term "short" is woefully undefined. And whether or not players "notice a thing" isn't really the sort of issue that should be getting sorted during an informal Q&A. While that answer was less than satisfactory, Kip's followup was downright laughable. We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes. The response to that bit of "online imagineering" was full of win, however. My computer happens to have a hard drive that's suitable for preserving game state. Should I consider buying your game, or is it crippled to online-only?