Isn't 2K on Steam?I too am a bit upset with Sim City being forced multi-player. I've bought every version so far. But I probably will not get this one.
I need to see if I can get, Sim City 2k, Sim Copter, and Streets of Sim City to work again... That was the best bit of marketing that they ever did with this game series. I'd like to see them do it again.
To be fair, the ban was threatened if the customer disputed the credit card purchase through his bank - effectively if he cancelled payment for the game with it still on his account. That much of it is justified.I won't, the game requires neighbors who give a shit about their cities in order for yours to thrive and is nearly unplayable without them. Fuck forced multiplayer.
Oh, and because of shit like this where EA put out a press release saying they will refund your money if you are unhappy with your purchase, and then do this:
http://www.gamechup.com/ea-refuses-to-refund-user-for-simcity-threatens-account-ban/
Thread title is still apt.
My bad. My clipboard was still full from another paste. Here's the corrected link (and it is fixed in my previous post).Access Denied? Damn... that's some meta review.
No, but I don't trust user reviews either. The Dead Space 3 user reviews are all over the place. It's literally a ton of people liking it and a ton of people hating it.Has EA released anything lately that has gotten good ratings from both users and paid schills?
Oh, the GiantBomb guys as a whole are great. Not only are they super in-depth, but they really went out of their way a while back to shepherd their community into not being a bunch of assholes.I trust the Giant Bomb crew because I listen to their podcast and they are really upfront about their tastes. Jeff Gerstman is kind of a curmudgeon for most genres, so he actually has people who are fans of a given genre do reviews for those types of games. He realizes that his tastes may not align with the general public. Knowing the personality of the reviewers, I can get a good idea of how their tastes will align with mine. For example, I tend to agree with Brad Shoemacher and Patrick Klepeck, so I'm able to judge their opinions on a game as close to mine.
I think that basic transparency is what makes them come off as way more genuine than reviewer x who you don't know anything about.
Yep, screw you EA. I was interested in this game but for the bullshit no local saves, always online and needing other people who care about their cities near you makes it a train wreck.
Good job EA. Keep destroying your franchises. The sooner you blow up the sooner some competent people can buy up your IP's. (a man can dream right?)
Should these games be reviewed separately from their service elements or should they be reviewed in combination?
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Comparing this to the restaurant industry, the game is the food and the internet-required connection is the table service.
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Any restaurant review would treat the meal and service as one singular expression of the experience.
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I believe we treat developers (the chefs) and the service experience we receive from publishers as two different concepts. We'd never do that for a restaurant, but we do it for the games industry, an industry that will – make no mistake about this – become more and more about service.
Studies say up to 30% of "consumer" critics are paid for as well, and about 10% of critics will give bomb reviews to even great games 4theLULz or however they're writing it today, though both off those numbers can vary wildly by genre etc. Having extreme criticisms can be realistic - there are those "love it or hate it" types of games. I'm honestly not sure which one's at play here, but generally speaking, a game with 10 9/10 reviews and 10 1/10 reviews is probably more fun to try out than a game with 20 5/10 reviews. The latter's utterly meh, while the first one could be great, could be an awesome game with crippling bugs, could be beatiful but unintuitive,... I'm not tempted to pick up a meh game, even on sale, but a game with a huge difference in opinions? Mught be worth checking out in a sale.It's literally a ton of people liking it and a ton of people hating it.
I'm actually of the opinion that pubs/devs should read and then ignore metacritic, internet boards, and most amazon reviews. Squeaky wheels should not necessarily be listened to, and people who post "10/10 AWESOME!" are even more useless.Also, professional critics and game designers are still saying gthat multiplayer functionality and further integration of Facebook and Twitter and whatnot, all the socializing, blahblah blah is the new future of gaming. It's the wave of the future! Vocal minority or not, gamers on message boards all over the internet, and MetaCritic, strongly disagree.
Fair point, but notice that the service is rated. The current trend in video games is for reviewers to, by and large, disregard any publisher doings as irrelevant to the gaming experience, which is completely not true.We review food and service separately all the time. The largest, most used restaurant review guide in the country has done it for years. Yelp reviews everything together, but that's why you can't trust yelp reviews without reading dozens of them, because no one gives food/service/decor/etc. the same weight as anyone else.
News flash: No analogy is perfect. Analogies compare specific points of similarity, there will always be differences between one thing and another that are not analogous; if those differences didn't exist then the analogy wouldn't either, because you'd be comparing something to itself.Furthermore, the analogy wouldn't even work if everyone did it the same way. The game is not a restaurant, it's a meal. This is important because the chef's (the devs, to torture the analogy further) can have completely different styles working in the same restaurant (publisher).
No, the point is that large vast majorities of people can't play. When they CAN, they've admitted it's a great game. They just don't like forced Multiplayer.I guess I am one of the few having a blast with the game? Playing with my friends from work, and we are loving it.
Correct. There's nothing wrong with the multiplayer, but not giving people an option is going to rub alot of people the wrong way, which is what's happening here. As for the off hours benefit, that's a given. However, if there was an exploit discovered at some point, and the servers were rolled back, imagine losing a day, a week or more (see Sony's DC Online issues) of gameplay. There's just too much wrong with always online DRM. This is the outcry of the community against EA.Eh, I actually like the multiplayer on this one, and I guess working nights and playing at off hours has made the not being able to play a non issue for me so far.