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1 year ago
Feature: Sims, Petz, Journals and Dreams
Videogames were a presence throughout my childhood, thanks to my dad having a PC for work. When he didn’t need to use it, I was allowed to tinker and explore. The games built into the computer like Solitaire, SkiFree and Fuji Golf, as well as the CD-ROM games we got from stores like Office Max and Borders, quickly became second nature to me. Now, looking…
3 years ago
Feature: Still fun
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Not the best SimCity has ever been - that's SimCity 4 - but for all its pigheadedness I still enjoyed SimCity.
Feature: Pretty pictures
You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a…
5 years ago
Feature: Not Exactly What We Wanted To Hear
I recently attended the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas (which is not related to game developer DICE, actually), and there I interviewed the entire gaming industry. OK, that's not entirely true, largely because many D.I.C.E. attendees spontaneously break out into hives if anybody so much as mentions the word "indie." But still, I talked to a whole mess of people. I encountered EA chief creative…
6 years ago
Feature: Silence Will Fall
Hello, and welcome to an irregular update on The Silence. The technique publishers use when they want a story to go away. Rather than responding to press enquiries, they instead pretend they haven't happened, or send prevaricating nonsense which ultimately goes nowhere. So, RPS figures, let's not let that work. Let's keep bringing stuff back up, reminding people about it, and letting their silence be…
Two days ago, RPS published an article in which a Maxis insider revealed to us that SimCity does not, in fact, require the servers to run its non-regional game. Maxis reps had repeatedly insisted to the press that the game had to be online as it ran local computations on their own servers - a feature our source told us doesn't exist at all. Extraordinarily,…
Feature: Duplocity
I hadn’t played SimCity until the UK version unlocked at midnight and I’ve barely slept since then. Intravenous coffee, fresh from the bean, and a sumo wrestler’s weight of dry roasted peanuts have seen me through the night and now I shall convert the experiences of the last twelve hours into words. This is not ‘Wot I Think’, it’s just a step toward a closer…
Feature: Serve Us, Service
Here's an unpopular opinion: I think EA's done a decent job with SimCity's launch. Aha! It's also a misleading opinion, because I'm definitely not referring to the part where servers gasped and puked and died under the immense strain of North America's unquenchable entertainment lust, recently leading to halting of sales on Amazon, among other things. It's what happened afterward that sort of impressed me.…
Well, OK, maybe fear a little. The news that SimCity's massive metropolises have gone down a couple belt sizes didn't exactly sit well with longtime fans, but Maxis does have plans to do something about it. Eventually. At this point, it's all in the cold, soon-to-be-cybernetic hands of technology, because ultimately, SimCity's casting its net wide. You and I might have the hardware to handle a…
7 years ago
Feature: Infographical
I lived with John for four years, which makes me an expert on sexy. So when I say that there's something damn sexy about SimCity's data layers, then you have to believe me. Maxis's reworking of their city simulation is getting a lot of attention for the way they're attempting to display the graphs and percentages of the working of a city as part of…
Electrical grids? Meh. Highways? Fleh. Civic infrastructure? Poo. If you're a real SimCity fan, you know it's all about the disasters that the apathetic world throws your way. You know that something will come, and that you'll need to deal with it. It's inevitable. If it's a worry you've had to relate to your psychiatrist, then you need worry no more. This is what you've…
The mind of Maxis is brimming over with simulated city, and they're sharing slightly more of that than we've seen already in a new trailer, which I've conveniently erected beneath this introductory text. I've also posted the "gameplay" trailer so that you can compare that with the slightly silly CGI version of their cheery urban world that they've bookended their blatherings with.
The pre-E3 news volcano keeps on spewing molten infobits, as is its over-exuberant wont. EA, for whatever reason (perhaps, you know, E3) is saving its trailers until next week, but it's seen fit to toss a rather important morsel in hungry fans' direction to tide them over. Namely, via an email touting the publishing kingpin's trade show lineup, it pegged SimCity's grand opening for February…
Fire! It's nice to look at, pleasant to sit around during the harsh winter months, and - because Mother Nature likes a good laugh just as much as the rest of us - one of the most insanely destructive forces on this planet. And now, it's coming to a SimCity near you. Well, OK, it's only doing so if you're a really miserable/sadistic city planner.…
Feature: The city of tomorrow!
Shortly after seeing the new SimCity in its full bendy-road glory, I had a quick chat with one of its architects, EA Maxis' producer Jason Haber. Tackled - its lengthy development, why we've waited so long for a sequel, why it's a 'real' Sim City, difficulty, whether important content is being sectioned off for pre-order bonuses and DLC, and how a traffic jam could make…
Feature: The fall of Societies
After all that back and forth about the DRM, let's see what this new SimCity really is. There's no number because it's not a sequel as such, or so the word goes. I can't help but see it as a statement of intent - the series first turned fallow and then was perverted, but now it's back, back, back on track. Pure and faithful. In…
You've probably heard that SimCity will come tethered to a pesky always online requirement. You might have heard that we don't like it very much. But then - like an absentee father - it's really only an absolute necessity on start up, so things could be worse. Still, though, I like playing games when I'm thousands of feet in the air, in the middle of…
SimCity wants to you show you its fluids, pumping around the place, most of them good for your thirst but some of them riddled with germs. Since my first trip to the beach as a nipper, fashioning a cathedral of sand and shell, I've always enjoyed building things, but now that I'm a withered husk of a man who is more likely to be found…
Seems like I managed to miss the first one of these, but not to worry, we can watch both of them today! These videos are Maxis' first look at how the GlassBox tech they've built for the new SimCity will work. It's relatively light on details, but they aim to show off the actual underlying simulation and behaviour mechanics, rather than the visuals that the…
EA have issued a clarification to Gamespy that while you will have to have an internet connection to launch SimCity, it will not boot you off if your connection goes down. Which is to say, it's not as egregious as others' "always-on" DRM, but we maintain is still an unnecessary and game-crippling mistake, which we really hope they will reverse before release. That the game…
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