jmk00001

Great point, macvirt, about it not being isolated to the gaming industry. I guess my disappointment is just like that feeling I get while flipping through the channels wondering what kind of people actually watch some of that garbage. Another symptom of the dumbing down of society. No reason to think any industry can be immune to that. Hope you're right about the DLC possibly "fixing" some of what will no doubt be lacking. At least civ 5 allows mods, where I've been able to add some good stuff. Seems this new SimCity will not allow the same kind of mods, since even when you play alone you are still interacting with the rest of the world through leaderboards and resources. Seems any significant mods would make things unfair and/or unstable unless everyone had them.

Maybe I'm not the typical gamer, hardcore or casual or whatever, but there are a couple games series I have loved for many years, decades even: SimCity, Age of Empires, and Civilization. I loved SimCity 4, but ran into it's limits....even it's map size was too small, and I was anxiously waiting for this new version to come out. In SC4, I was already thinking to myself I wanted the whole region unlocked so I could build a "real" city. I was already thinking, what city of 25,000 citizens has skyscrapers?? Unrealistic. So, after hearing about this new SimCity, it appears that rather than fixing these things, they've actually take a couple steps backwards. Hugely disappointing. Now, the maps are even smaller, and from the promotional videos, you can have a city of 18,000 that has as many skyscrapers as a city of millions in real life. Instead of going deeper, higher, better, more advanced, they're dumbing it down. It seems they're target audience is 9 year-olds...when, as far as I've been able to tell, the gamer demographics show average purchasers are closer to 30 years old. One promo video shows clicking on a Sim and it says he's "going to buy a new suit." I don't know about any of you, but if you're 30 years old, and you actually want to click on a little citizen in your city and give two flying @()#%s about your sims personal life, you're an imbecile. They are simply trying to make this game less like SimCity and more like the other Sim games. AOE did this same crap too...they took a good game, dumbed it down, and made it into a cartoonish children's online game. Seems they simply don't make games for intelligent adults anymore. Personally, I don't care if a game is online or not, as long as it has the CONTENT I want. Deliver that content anyway you want, but deliver it. Online, disc, wireless cell signal, whatever....just don't make all the games for 10 year olds. I'm not interested in where my little f-ing sim citizens go in there cars, I want to build and run a CITY, not some dinky little 2k x 2k TOWN. Anyone knows of any good games geared for the above-10 crowd, let me know, because I won't be playing this piece of @!&#.