1881

2-3 hours, after he fills up the first city map and says where do I zone now. :p

1882

Really hoping it’ll dip below $20 for Black Friday so I can finally give it a try as well. I plan to go into it with very low expectations so I can have a little fun from it.

1883

Nah, I have 4 ‘cities’ connected and on the go now, I’m over it. I still would prefer one single megacity, but the truth is, the load times between cities is pretty small, and it’s really not that big a deal once you get used to it.

1884

I still would prefer one single megacity, but the truth is, the load times between cities is pretty small, and it’s really not that big a deal once you get used to it

Does that mean they’ve fixed the inter-city transportation issues? Because last time I played they were completely broken. People would leave to go to work in another city and never arrive at the next because of a huge traffic jam on the freeway. And there were all sorts of issues with service vehicles, tourists and so on.

1885

Nope I agree with Cliffski. Its taken the better part of a year and there will always be the OMG cities are too small!! sentiments. But I’ve enjoyed building my cities especially with my four year old daughter directing where the parks, schools, and bridges are placed.

1886

So this SimCity is like a Barbie designer game for placing buildings, limited to a very small area?

1887

Now this sounds like something my kids would like. My daughter loves the Sims 3, do they work together by chance?

1888

Nope, no interconnectivity.

-Tom

1889

No she places them for what she thinks works and looks good. Then I clean up and set the roads and infrastructure to make it work.

There’s a game there. Not as intricate as SimCity Societies but getting the right mix of RCI and low, med, and high wealth is a challenge. Starting a self sufficient plot and then interconnecting the plots in a region (now that it works) can be fun. The resource and supply chains are pretty cool as well.

1890

I’d be willing to give this a go now that it might be fixed up, if only they would sell it to me at a reasonable price…

It’s on sale at various places but none of them will let me buy it. $40 at Greenman, $30 at Gamestop, as low as $26 at Gamersgate - all blocked for me. Origin Au is the one place that I am allowed to buy it, and they still want $80. No thanks.

I can buy it from Amazon for $35 thanks to slightly devious Borderlinxing (and that price is still $5 more than buying a physical copy!) but this requires linking to my Origin account - which sounds like a bit of a gamble as to whether it would work with Orign Au or not. And it looks like I have to buy something to test than functionality out. What a mess! :D

1891

SimCity is now $19.99 and the expansion $26.99 on Origin. I bit.

1892

Should I just bite with the base game? Is it workable or do I need the expansion + dlc?

1893

The base game is workable. DLC is not needed. Neither is the expansion.

1894

What is it’s current state? Greenman gaming has it for $27.99. Worth it?

1895

Are they giving you the $27.99 or are you giving it to them?

1896

My wife is looking at me funny after I just cackled at my computer.

1897

If you like and play sim games, dislike exploitative DLC practices and the modern era of “paid beta” AAA releases, hate always-online-for-no-reason DRM, or like having fun, I’d avoid the title.

If you’d like to give some very bad people $30 for the privilege of watching rather pretty-looking miniature cities-in-a-bottle rise and fall without any regard toward the input you give them, then go for it!

1898

Agreed. My less cheeky response would be “wait until you can grab it for less than $20, preferably somewhere around $10”. It’s worth that, I think. You can wring ten bucks of fun from what they’ve managed to patch together since release but it is really limited due to the city sizes and the fact things frequently don’t work like they should.

I had some fun until I ran out of space, didn’t want to bulldoze the stuff I liked perfectly fine (or I wouldn’t have built it) and saw that this would be a recurring theme that I didn’t particularly enjoy. Of course that was about the time it dawned on me half my city services weren’t working correctly, traffic was wonky and disasters kept adding insult to injury.

OTOH, if building mini-cities is your thing then by all means pick it up. Folks who enjoy the inter-connected cities thing do seem to have more fun with the game. Me, I like to build and build and build until my city is sprawling and impractical.

1899

I’d be happy to start and participate a new QT3 game. But we’d want to wait until Patch 9 hits (which should be out before Christmas). There are some pretty bad bugs that can really mess things up right now where agents get “lost” and will never be retrieved which can mess up trash, education, tourism, etc and will remain even if you bulldoze the effected building or the entire city. Great Works and Towers were especially buggy and partially broken pre-patch 9.

1900

Thanks all. Money successfully not pissed away.