Sim City Societies

[FlightSimBoy]

Ok, I just went and got this game. It is a pretty amazing game, looks great, easy to play, of course has that open ended play like the rest of the Sim City series.

But, I'm going to have to rip on it and EA. Why did EA have to take over Maxis games? That was a stupid move on their part. Sim City 4 was a great game, ran on my system with maxed out settings on 1280 by 1024 (highest resolution in game my monitor would support) perfectly. Now comes Societies. It barely runs on medium settings at 1024 by 768! What the hell is this s**t! EA screwed up big time with the graphics engine on this game.

The game looks pretty and charming, depicting crisp, colorful structures. If you build a zoo, you can zoom in to see swaying giraffes and a lounging tiger (and impressively, these models cast their own shadows). Or if you construct a soccer field, you can watch the players kick the ball around. Watching your Sims walk around is also fun because of their cute exaggerated walks. But be prepared: Though the frame rate isn't that stable to begin with, building a large city can slow it to a crawl, so prepare to turn down your settings, even on a higher-end machine. We also experienced crashes to our desktop on two separate machines, though a recent patch seems to have helped clear up these issues for some players. The game sounds charming, thanks to the endearing Simlish exclamations from your citizens and some quirky sound effects.

I don't know about this, I love this game, but it runs like s**t! At least others feel my pain. Right now, version 1.1 is out, which I have updated to. No luck. They will hopefully release version 1.2 before this week ends, so people will be able to enjoy this game like they should. I should be able to run it maxed out or at least some things on ultra, some on high, and a few thing on medium at my native resolution of 1440 by 900.

Electronic Arts, you have really gone to hell with your gaming. I love what you did with the Command and Conquer series, and your sports titles like Madden '08, but you really messed up the Sim City series. I am no longer impressed by your company.

GameSpot review: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy...html?page=1&sid=6183059&part=rss&subj=6183059
IGN review: http://pc.ign.com/articles/834/834720p1.html
GameSpy review: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/simcity-societies/834994p1.html?r=2

 

[Thrasher]

I can't wait to see The Sims 3, hopefully that won't be as disappointing as your experience but it'll be a total bitch seeing we'll have to start over creating new custom content where as there's now hundreds of thousands of custom content files to download for The Sims 2 so I think it'll have a really slow start when it comes out but should be good. I haven't played Sim City for years though...

 

[joe pic]

Hey, I cannot agree with you any more. Take The Sims for example. It was my FAVORITE game, ...ever. My favorite thing to do was to play The Sims. When TS2 came out, it was extraordinary. I played it for countless hours through the night and could just simply not stop. After OFB, it seems like a lot of the aspects, and familiarity with the title was lost. I just didn't get the same feeling when I played it.

Of course, that's when EA took over Maxis, or whatever happened there. It really pisses me off because Maxis is such a strong, strong name. Everything behind it seems lost, and now Maxis acts as a slave to EA. EA wants everything the way they want it.

I no longer play The Sims much anymore, and I'm extremely disappointed. EA is a great company with fantastic titles, but it was just not the right decision with Sims titles.

 

[Thrasher]

^ I got 7000 custom files installed, I love it haha

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Heres the Wiki on Maxis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxis

Supposedly some of the games they released weren't up to par with the consumers. I find that hard to believe.