Castle Magus

As you can see from the tags, I'm posting the link to this not because I care about this "Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare" game at all, but because of the rant that sets in at around the 3:44 mark and lasts until around 6:09, a rant that I fully agree with. Along with some of the other, smaller rants before and after, such as the "I hate how you have to say that now" bit after the whole "you're not purchasing with real money, it's money you earn in the game when you play" thing, and the "boring, repetitive games" thing later on. Shit like that is a big part of the reason I'm mostly done with modern video games.

For those very few who might still care about this game at all (which doesn't really include me, except to bitch about it), EA/Maxis is apparently finally going to implement offline mode for the game. This comes several months after they first started to explore that possibility, and almost a full year after they admitted the game should have been offline from the very start, which, to me at least, was a no-brainer. But then, this is EA we're talking about here, of course. You know, the geniuses who initially claimed offline mode was not possible, after all.

Oh well, better late than never? Well, maybe for some, but for me it's still more a case of too little too late, mainly because I've heard from too many people that the game still sucks ass even if you could ignore the online requirement (which I couldn't ignore).

Yep.

Good to see that he, at least, is not stooping down to suck EA's dick.

How can people make a game this bad without actively trying to do so? It is a mystery. Oh, wait, no it's not. EA just sucks that much.

"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."

Let's look at a few choice quotes from this article:

"Silence is a powerful weapon in the industry. The mad truth is, if you ignore it, it will go away, when it comes to gaming controversies."

"The principle is if you keep saying the same thing over and over, people will start to accept it. And heck, that couldn’t be more true."

"The credulous press is then flooded with 'positive' stories, which they dutifully report, and the questions and controversy slide off the bottom of everyone’s news feeds."

Hey, owsf2000, aren't those things that RPS is saying about the game industry/game journalism there pretty much the same things that you have been saying for, like, a decade or more now? *nods sagely*

As if the new SimCity game weren't already completely broken, let's just go ahead and break it even more with blatantly overpowered product placement.

Seriously, this game is such a disgrace. -_-

(EDIT)

To be slightly fair to the new SimCity game, this isn't the first time that EA has shitted up their games with blatant product placement items. The Sims games have had shit like this available as freebie DLC items for years now, at least as far back as The Sims 2. However, to be fair to those games, those things were merely cosmetic, useless things, or were at least comparable to other similar non-advertisement items, and didn't flagrantly break the game balance by being overpowered.

(/EDIT)

So, I guess this, according to Ben Kuchera, means that EA is going to, somehow, get even more shitty now? I'm not doubting that will happen, mind you, aside from just having to bend my mind a bit to comprehend how it's even physically possible for EA to get much shittier than they already are. They're already spiraling down the toilet as it is.

On the other hand, by some miracle, if they get a new guy who is actually smart and realizes the true reasons for exactly why they have "shortcomings in [their] financial results this year", and comes in guns blazing, saying that all the shitty stuff they are doing now needs to die and that they need to try to return to some semblance of non-shittiness (assuming EA ever was in such a state to begin with, which I don't personally believe to have ever been the case), that would be awesome. I'm not going to bet any money on that actually happening, though, because it's far more likely that Mr. Kuchera is correct and this just means EA is going to go down the crapper even more.

The only potentially good thing about some new, even worse asshole coming in and defecating more horrid fecal matter all over everything in the name of profits is that hopefully maybe, just maybe, consumers will finally get a clue and realize that the sort of things that EA does is simply not in their best interests, and then buy (or, rather, not buy) accordingly. (Yeah, right, as if that will ever happen. *eyeroll*)

(EDIT)

Wow, this is like the Big Thing™ clogging up my "games" RSS folder right now.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/18/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-steps-down/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/18/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-has-stepped-down/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/18/as-simcity-fires-burn-john-riccitello-steps-down-as-ea-ceo/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2013/03/18/ea-ceo-steps-down-citing-financial-results-but-is-simcity-the-real-issue/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/03/18/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ea-ceo/

I mean, wow, three frickin' Forbes articles about it in the span of about two hours or so. And that doesn't even count the sites I don't follow anymore like Kotaku and Joystiq and Desucktoid and the like. I'm sure they've all got articles about this as well.

Anyway, on other, related news, it's kind of funny that one of the free games they're giving away to people who were unfortunate enough to have bought the new SimCity game is, of all things, SimCity 4. Seriously, even if I didn't already have SimCity 4, I certainly wouldn't want to have bought the new piece of shit to get access to it. It's just amusing to me that they're giving away a far superior version of the same game in order to placate people who bought the newer, but vastly inferior and broken version. The thing is, though, I figure the people who were still willing to buy the new SimCity game (despite having plenty of warning ahead of time that it was going to be crap, and even if that crap had only been in the form of the DRM and not the game itself) would already own SimCity 4.

In any case, it's sad and frustrating, because this sort of bribery is indeed probably going to work wonders for them, actually, and will likely get a lot of people, perhaps even most people, who bought the broken new game to forget about the issue almost entirely. It worked for Sony, after all, for the most part.

(/EDIT)

I'm still not buying the game until and unless EA wises up and removes the worse-than-useless DRM of their own volition (and most likely still won't buy it even then, unless I can find it somewhere [other than Origin] at a severe discount), but I guess that it's nice for people who already own it to potentially be able to play it in an unbroken state. Well, up until EA intentionally breaks the game again by patching it so that this sort of thing no longer works, anyway. At any rate, it's just looking worse and worse for EA at this point. I mean, really, if most of the game actually is client-side, as this guy claims, then just what the hell was it that was chugging their servers at the game's launch and preventing people from being able to play at all? Are EA's servers really that terrible? Well, yes, I imagine they are, if the game itself is any indication.

This is funny, because it's so close to being literal reality that it's not funny. The associated blog is pretty good too.

Ah, the good old days of SimCity, back before EA shitted everything up.