Gamers Line Up To Play SimCity...
Hey, want to play the freshly US-released SimCity? Well, stand in line. As Total Biscuit reveals (video below), there are already 30 minute queues. And this is just for those who've stayed up past midnight to be able to play. In just one country.
I note with some pride that my "oceans" notion for criticising release dates seems to have entered the vernacular. So it is that EA have astonishingly released this DRM-riddled, online-only, server-based game with a three day delay for Europe. Yet keeping the numbers lower doesn't seem to have helped with some of the servers. So why is that a problem? Because despite the game being saved on that oh-so ethereal cloud, your cities are still server-specific. Want to play that city? Sit in the queue for that server.
Remember how SimCity 2000 was this game you could play on your laptop, or PC, anywhere, any time? Remember how you could just enjoy huge amounts of time with what is surely one of the best games ever made whenever and however you wanted? Not any more! And at this point we're only just beginning to see the issues arising from this online entangling. Softpedia say that it's taking up to three hours for the game to unlock due to server struggles. Kotaku are reporting that neighbouring cities can ruin your game. And Ars Technica discussing how many ways the game has let them down.
Reviews are scarce, since thankfully most sites recognised that reviewing either in EA's offices, or via EA's very quiet test server, wouldn't have been at all useful for readers, as the version they'd play wouldn't represent the released version. In the UK we've not even been offered a way to review ahead of launch, nor - impressively - offered access to the US released version. So a review from us will come some time next week, we're afraid.
Here's Total Biscuit getting pretty fed up of waiting in line:
