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A SimCity-sized slice of schadenfreude [Columbia Daily Tribune (MO)](Columbia Daily Tribune (MO) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) It is hard not to mention the game "SimCity" nowadays without eliciting a string of unprintable swears or, at the bare minimum, a knowing chortle from gamers. To be honest, I can't say that I blame them for that reaction, either. After all, the latest itineration of the venerable city-building simulator became the greatest example of how poor planning, always-connected software and copyright protection can come together to ruin the public perception of a game and the company that released it. In the case of the 2013 remake of SimCity, the damage to the company's image was softened by the fact that it was Electronic Arts. The video game publishing behemoth already had alienated and angered vast legions of gamers through the years, and experienced more than its fair share of egg-on-the-face moments, with marquee games blowing deadlines, or in the case if the NBA Live! franchise being downright canceled amid a flurry of bugs and glitches. After all, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you don't get voted America's most-hated company two years in a row without trying extremely hard - at something. Despite a fairly well known history of alienating gamers, the problems that spawned with the launch of SimCity was impressive, even for EA. The game, the sixth major version of the game, hit shelves on March 5, with a great deal of hype and excitement. It says something about the success of the game's predecessors when a game that lets you live the exciting life of a City Manager or Mayor can be such a big deal, and with the new version, being heralded as a reboot, media outlets and PC gamers a buzz with anticipation. Then it launched. And crashed. And burned. In SimCity's terms, what unfolded was something along the lines of having a massive earthquake strike whileChernobylmelted down with an attack by a gigantic fire-breathing lizard thrown in for good measure. It was a debacle. The gist of the outrage stemmed from the game's need to be connected to EA's servers in order to run. The company claimed that this was necessary because of the extensive computations required for the simulator. "GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game - the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers and some on the player's local computer," claimed Lucy Bradshaw, a senior vice president at Maxis, an EA subsidiary. The 'computation' ruse was quickly exposed by a few intrepid gamers who managed to create a workaround for the online-only component, despite to protesting of Maxis, who continued to claim there was no way around the always-online requirement without significant reprogramming of the code. Unfortunately for EA and Maxis, a short time later a gamer examining the program found that by changing one little line of code the game could be played offline. D'oh! By the end of the firestorm, the game -- which had won 8 awards and was named "Best PC game" by Games.com before even being released - had been pulled from Amazon.com and was getting eviscerated by the reviewers (Metacritic gave it a woeful score of 64/100). In the end, it was online game reviewer Nathan Grayson who wrote the most-fitting epilogue for the fiasco that was SimCity's launch: "This just keeps on happening. ... Servers have gone toe-to-toe with day-one stampedes in much the same fashion as a turtle against an 18-wheeler: ... Then nature runs its course, and developers and publishers alike scramble to glue one billion bits of finely pulped turtle back together again." If you are getting this message, it's because your browser is blocking cookies. For free access to this full story, please enable cookies in your web browser. [bold] How do I enable cookies [/bold] On your computer: * Chrome * Firefox * Internet Explorer * Safari On your mobile devices or tablets * Android devices * iPhone/ iPad * Windows Phone [copyright] 2013 Columbia Daily Tribune . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (c) 2013 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |