And then it turned out it has always-online DRM.

I live in an area with inconsistent internet. So great. I can’t play Sim City.

Maybe companies will someday wise up and realize not all of their customers live in major US cities like they seem to think we do.

I want to make a pretty city, and I want it to be fun. I don’t want to be a simulated mayor and I don’t want to have to calculate taxes and file paperwork. And that’s kind of what you have to do with these games. It’s made for the hardcore guys, who post saves which took 5 years to evolve on youtube and make the cities the game was made to build. Mind you, I say build because all these amazingly impressive games are just compilers for the recipe the designers envisioned, which usually strips you of most of your freedom.

What if I want to build a smallish town with just a few shops and no industry? Tough luck, it’s unbalanced. Well yeah, but I want to a) have fun and b) simulate real cities, which are like that. I don’t want the burden of games like this, I just want the claimed freedom.

Case in point: Traffic Giant; I fell in love with the demo a long time ago, when it came on one of those magazine CDs because pirating cost money back then! And the demo was great, I had to develop the transport infrastructure of a town, and it felt fun, with no arbitrary punishments and a rather low difficulty. But when I got the chance to actually play the game I was profoundly disappointed. All the fun simplicity of the demo was stripped away, making me face this huge world where I didn’t just have to focus on large areas in order to stay in business but had AI opponents who effectively just made it frustrating to play the game at my pace.

Ramble over, point is I think Sim City will be an awesome game, with great graphics, an ok interface, some game-breaking bugs, but it probably won’t be fun for anyone who isn’t planning on spending months on building the “perfect” city.

I like these games for figuring out the mechanics. After that’s done, I don’t have nearly enough of an artistic streak to build beautiful fancy cities or what have you, and the typical challenge-based scenarios have never appealed to me.

I do wonder if the restricted area is part of what made me feel less inspired, though. Not because I have some grand plan, but because I feel it’s saying, “What’s the best thing you can make in this limited space?”

And the answer is, “Eh, I dunno, something worse than most people I guess. Sorry.”

When it’s a huge canvas, it’s more like “Draw whatever you like here”.