Okay, so Sim City was... sort-of a disaster. it was not a bad game, in my opinion, but one that did not meet any reasonable expectation, did not live up to any of it's advertised feature sets, was not moddable, was unplayable without cowing to some extremely intrusive and unstable DRM and - really the worst thing - was built on a quicksand foundation called 'Glass Box'. There is no way to honest way describe this hyped piece of technology aside from, "It's a piece of shit that does not work as intended,"

Cities just choked to death on their own traffic congestion, and you had to essentially use certain tricks / exploits to prevent a catastrophic traffic deadlock after certain population thresholds were reached. This kneecapped a lot of creative play in what is supposed to be a digital toy / sand castle builder. You couldn't fix this through modding, like what happened with Sim City 4, because of the DRM component of the game (and I'd kind of assume that Glass Box would be a pain in the ass to try and mod anyway).

It was also way too easy to rake in literally billions of Simoleans and give no fucks about anything like a budget.


There's an expansion pack out on the 12th of this month:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbtQdilLcNE


...I'm torn on this. on one hand, the towers and monorails look superb. I want theeeeeeeeem. I can finally build the equivalent of slum Mega Blocks while pretending to operate from a seat in the Halls of Justice.

On the other hand, they are basically selling stuff that ought to have been patched-in for free alongside the new content. That's not cool with me. They also lied about giving us bigger city plots, they won't do anything to address the compaints about the Region mechanics / view (it just looks stupid to have a bunch of cities with perfectly square edges sitting so far apart) and are adding even more agents to an already overburdened system.

But... those towerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs.


What do we get?

1) A new research hub, where you unlock all of the new technological marvels like Fusion Power (because we really need another power source at the moment)

2) Poop-to-water converter, a corporation that actually spreads itself around without your consent (which sounds legit cool)

3) 'Robots' (honestly they look fucking terrible in the video) that fly over your streets performing essential services. So even if your firetrucks are caught in a jam, the robot firemen will presumably be able to get to and extinguish your fire problems. But yeah, this shit shouldn't even be necessary.

4) A few new disasters, like a giant robot attack.

5) Raised traffic routes that look like they might actually fucking work, unlike the temporary 'solution' currently foisted on us.


That's not very good value, but I'm thinking I might buy it just because those towers, and I like to naively pretend that expansion packs can magically solve all of Cit City's problems.