Badfinger

The ME3 multiplayer DLC is all free, and is awesome. It is the weirdest dichotomy where Bioware/EA 100% deserve a ton of criticism about how they've handled the single player DLC for the game (some of the content is basically mandatory to the game as far as the story goes and should be contained in the main game) and just as much or more praise for the multiplayer DLC (completely free, almost doubled the amount of content since first release). My "problem" with the free game is that I own BF3 and expansions, I own ME3 but would have happily accepted the expansions, and DS3 is not interesting to me, to the point where I bought Dead Space 2 on a steam sale for $5 and I don't think I even installed it. It is incredibly surprising to me that they're actually offering a game that was released less than 6 weeks ago. If I just wanted to claim as much monetary value as possible, I could be getting $120 MSRP in games for $40. Chances are I'll grab Need for Speed or SC4, though. That's kind of funny, too. It's sad, I was so excited and I put at least 6-8 good hours into various cities in the first 2 days after release. Then it actually got MORE difficult to play, and it has become slowly realized that my nightmare scenario where I had massive traffic problems bankrupting my city wasn't (totally) because of my inept city planning, but because the traffic algorithm was so dumb that taking out bonds to add avenues wouldn't fix it. I'm not sure I'll go back until they release the traffic patch. I am ok with gaming the game to some extent, but to others I just want to Build Stuff. If EA really wanted to win my heart, they'd offer me a copy of Heart of the Swarm and the new Dishonored DLC.

It could be Coolton. Welcome to Scenic Coolton, the Coolest Town Around. County seat, Hon. Judge Jakeville 2K presiding.

I was going to say a similar thing with regard to Metroid, because I did not play the original Metroid until long after I'd beaten Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion and moving left is just as natural as moving right. In Super Metroid, the first motion on Zebes (?) is left. It's the only way you can get to the tunnel network. For the more open-world Castlevania games this is mostly true as well, although you do generally start with the castle to your right.

That is an excellent fantasy football team name. Ndamukong is absolutely a name completely ensconced in majesty, you are correct.

I am an Eagles fan (as seen in forum avatar), and I do love me that video of young Andrew Ried. Ah, those were better times.

According to Internet Football Documenting website Kissing Suzy Kolber, it was sadly not Ndamukong Suh who was on Wild and Crazy Kids, it was D'Brickashaw Ferguson. http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2013/02/dbrickashaw-ferguson-once-appeared-on-wild-crazy-kids.html Maybe that's not sad, as his name is even more fun to say than Suh's. It is sad that there doesn't appear to be video on the internet.

So if you have the fancy police and fire stations, you can buy fire marshal cars, faster response dispatches, and helicopters. So you can have police/fire helicopters. They will chase criminals, catch them before crimes have been committed, the fire marshals will actively PREVENT fires, etc. You actually CAN get around the traffic rules, I'm just stuck in a horrible spiral where I can't get the money to do it. And just to be clear, I know how to fix it. And when I say know how to fix it, I mean I have a plan that may or may not fix it but seems feasible - more than one train station. I can run the train station infrastructure to both sides of my city and split it. I just wish I'd thought about this 90 minutes prior when I had a chance in hell of fixing the debt.

From that perspective, Chick is 100% correct that you can't review a game with a heavy online component day one and call it complete. I have been telling everyone I can who's on the fence to just BE PATIENT. However a person who is having lots of fun with the game and did NOT experience "launch issues" (we were playing on EU West rather than a US server, which meant basically nothing because oh no my ~latency~), I do disagree with his claim that there are things fundamentally broken. My experience so far is that sans online-style issues, it's a well built game. It's definitely not perfect. There are bugs. Hopefully a few really weird things are patched soon. But there are also things that I'm just bad at and the simulation doesn't like. For example, making the highway right through town also be a major artery to get to places IN town is horribly dicking me over. Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so fucking bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me. And that's my problem, not the problem of the City Simulator. That's what I get for making the Residential zone in the region "pretty" arches instead of goddamn squares like urban planners of the 1950s intended. Is it frustrating to see all the homeless people and abandoned buildings, but it's also extremely gratifying to be able to see a momentary breakthrough where I get to put in an avenue and streetcars where there was just a 4-lane highway and the ripple where things DO get better.

So I got home at just before 6pm EST last night. Opened up the box that had arrived from Amazon, installed lightning fast no problem, was ready to go by like 6:15. Played until almost 2:30AM. I have work at 8am, I never do this. I am an old person (for video games). It is pretty addicting, even though I have almost ruined my bedroom community city. We were on mumble, just buildin' cities, helping each other out, ruining everything. Some people are going to hate this, but I love that this shows how deep the simulation truly is: I know why your gift took so long to get to where it was going. It's because when you give someone money, SimCity creates an armored truck full of money and it has to drive to the city it was gifted to. Your armored car was probably stuck in traffic somewhere.

I take no credit for finding these, I have stolen this post from another forum. http://imgur.com/a/gUFqn They are incredible, and you should print them on your Virtual Mayor Wall immediately.

IS EVERYONE SIMULATING CITIES? ARE YOU LOVING IT? I am quite excited to get home to my copy of the game this evening and just SIMULATE.

The thing people are finding out, generally, is that it is REALLY easy to fill a city space. As in, instead of trying to increase density if you just pop down new roads and new zones for what has demand, it will be filled. And then they find out that's a virtually unsustainable way to grow the city and go through tremendous pains to expand up instead of out. I'm excited to find out if it truly has the depth I'm expecting from region play and how cities in the region coexist. That is because I've never been about filling a space with skyscrapers anyway.

So I was curious if I remembered correctly, and I didn't remember the crazy frog jumping off the screen. So I looked up a gameplay walkthrough on YouTube (of course there are gameplay walkthroughs) and I was please to find out we're both right. Hidden Incan people do shout ZUMA and the frog does jump wackily from one board to the next, with the added bonus of apparently an earthquake ripping apart each level to reveal the next one. Since you are now Zuma-indoctrinated you know this, but everyone must see and know for themselves. That frog really does have the wackiest face.

Jake I had the same amused reaction and chortle to "Iron Frog" mode. I have played a number (a much smaller number than 125) of hours of Zuma on YAHOO GAMES PORTAL or whatever, and I think the noise you're referring to at the level complete is just them yelling "ZUMA!!!"

Oh my lord I cannot WAIT to simulate a city. Maxis Devs running a week-long live stream where they build (and/or destroy) a city based on votes from YOU, THE READER. http://letsallbemayor.com

Funny enough I had 100% the opposite interpretation. On the Bombcast, he sounded like 3 Star Brad, he was being positive overall but was making a lot of reservations. On Idle Thumbs he sounded like 4 Star Brad and specifically said as he got through the middle chunk of the game it grew on him well. As I was listening yesterday I said to myself "You can tell the secret connecting timeline when the Bombcast and Idle Thumbs were recorded, because Brad is closer to the end of Tomb Raider and likes it a lot more now!"

Just destroy the road connecting to the highway and brute-force babywall it.

Yes, it totally can! Just click the speech bubble in the tutorial to continue... Yes, in the tutorial they have a brief thing where you go to region view and you check what services and people are moving in between cities. So it showed that you're getting garbage truck service from CasinoVille, and residents from your city are going there to work. Aaaaaahhhh so excited for this game.

To clarify, I was thinking along the lines of XBox Live Gold where a pay subscription is necessary to play online games AT ALL. I know that's a core tenant of the Microsoft system that "won" the console wars, but I still think hiding online multiplayer behind a paywall is a terrible idea that only caught on because the 360 came first and the service was functional so people felt compelled. I am fine with added features like PS+, especially since they've transformed that service into one that has value actually worth paying for. If the PS4 comes out at roughly the same time as the new XBoxen and has online social/multiplayer features that work out of the box without a yearly fee, I think Microsoft is going to be in a hell of a rough spot charging for basic service a second time around. The internet is even more ubiquitous than it was 7 years ago. Smart phones exist, y'all. On the other hand, if there's a Netflix-esque subscription to access streaming of the PS1, 2, and 3 back catalogs, that's a great idea. Imagine a new Tekken game coming out. You and a friend reminisce about how much Tekken 3 you played way back when, wouldn't it be fun to play it again? With PlayStream © (Intercapped), now you can! So you go into the library and then stare-face at the TV for how atrociously badly Tekken 3 has aged and laugh at it. That's worth $10-15 a month to me, absolutely.

So on this week's Thumbs they heard rumor of charging for PlayStation network. If that was only a rumor and not announced (I haven't had time to sift through the whole Meeting), then count me pleasantly surprised by all their announcements. I came in with at least a 50% expectation to say "Sony you haven't learned ANYTHING since 2006, have you?", and I genuinely can't say that. They hit a lot of points that I think bode well for the future. They said a lot of the right things. You can be critical of the games Sony chose to display, but the games themselves don't reflect the PSQuad. People are going to continue to make games where you shoot mans and drive cars fast. It's what we can do with them that's important. I'm not going to be purchasing any sort of console Day 1, but as the first salvo to open up discussion about new ways to make/play/experience games I am pleased. I feel they have set a very good bar for Microsoft to match or exceed.

That sounds crazy! I honestly can't imagine how fantastically complex that would be. For all the griping from long time fans of the series about the small city size and the "dumbing down", it honestly seems fantastically complex to me. There are about 35 data layers you can look at. It's just nuts. I kind of can't imaging adding an obsolescence on top of what's already there. https://www.box.com/simcity Some insane person captured all the tooltip data they could get their hands on from the beta and posted it up on Box. This insane person is going to root through it.

What is it that you want out of the game? I've had the pleasure of playing both betas so far (when they were working), so I feel like I have a decent handle on what they're doing with a single city tile. The ~mystery~ is how much you and friends can do in a region with 5 tiles, or 10. A lot of fans of 3K and 4 have bemoaned the lack of subways and the small size of the footprint. I can feel the squeeze, but at the same time I only "filled up" a city once, and that was just mashing down new tiles every time there was demand for them instead of attempting to increase density. In old Sim City games they used to let you start in 1900, 1950, or 2000 which gave you different technology options (no nuclear power, no airports, etc). Is that what you're thinking of perhaps?

It occurred to me that I should post this also. It had just been linked to me recently. I am currently living in a place that has very good (and very expensive) internet access. I am lucky, and I know it and try not to take that sort of stuff for granted. I fervently hope that some day fairly soon the US government understands that the internet is now a Utility and not a Luxury. In places that have internet, the US should be right up at the top and instead it's kind of shitty and abusive.

It was down or extremely intermittent for a period of more than 6 hours on that Saturday. Important to remember that it was a closed beta/stress test, and also the game wasn't gold yet.

TALK radio is gross, with very few exceptions.