I just realized I haven't really played a space sim since the days of X-Wing and Wing Commander, might be time to remedy that. My first gen USB Saitek X36 flightstick and throttle have been in mothballs for so long I wonder if they'll still work.

I would argue that the design part is feasible, though I would not put it in "blocks". there has to be a casing or a cover, similar to today's phones. In case the phone drops or something like, you don't want to chase after all the blocks flying in every direction. The insides though could be arranged to be replaced, in a "blockly" kind of way, similarly to SD cards or Sim Cards.

Regarding profitability. There could be some serious business here. Think about the billion dollar phone cover industry we have today. you have so many colors and designs, which are made specifically per phone. There could be a possibility to manufacture hardware that could aim for the "taste" of the target market, within a set measurements and requirements.

Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, X Rebirth - it is a good age for Space Sim fans.

So, the sims 5?

Adenauer Forst is one of the slowest corners on that track.It caughts you by surprise as it looks faster. The trick is to slow down a lot more than what you think, i see people going off in sims all the time there, you hang on to your dear life just a corner before that chicane and then think "that looks easy, i'll just carry over the speed and break for the second part.. oops, too late.." It comes off at at hill top too so your momentum is going to destroy any grip you have..

You wouldn't want to go off at Flugplatz or Kesselchen thou.. Not to mention at Tiergarten, that place scares me even on a sim..

Don't hold your breath waiting for TIE Fighter. As far as the rest of the industry is concerned, the space sim genre is dead. Doubt Lucasarts would ever give up the IP to let it be crowdfunded.

Say it ain't so! The uplifting Californian couple that performed what was thought to be a spontaneous karaoke duet as part of Jay Leno's Tonight Show "Pumpcast News" segment may have actually been hired actors, according to The Smoking Gun. According to the hoax killers, Will Sims and his wife Monifa have been pursuing careers in show business for sometime with Mrs. Sims having appeared on the same "Pumpcast News" segment before more than two years ago. Monifa has since responded to the allegations, claiming it was just a coincidence that she ended up on the show for a second time.

@aimpoint @FlowersInHisHair Ok, it's hard for me to argue against faulty gameplay. Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but after what I saw in the beta I was pretty sure they would fuck this game up (from the perspective of a fan of the series). It's just how modern industry works, EA was trying to get a huge new user base, so they made the game more appealing to casual users. By doing that, it was almost inevitable to fuck up for the old fans of sim city. When I heard that you only need about an hour to fill the city space, I was goddamn sure they fucked up. It's now this game for the typical call of duty player, who doesn't want to put to much thought in his projects, all that matters is that his city looks good. If I remember correctly, I had to start Sim City 4 over and over again before I learned how to build a city.

I'm not saying EA couldn't do otherwise. For example this is the same thing I thought modern game industry would do to X-Com, but Firaxis did a wonderful Job reinventing the series and they brought a new simpler aspect into turn-based strategy. It also had some really frustrating bugs (especially if you played with only one save game) they fixed up later... But since this is EA (I don't say maxis for a reason, because they are part of EA) I wouldn't bet a penny that they fix all these issues, at least not for free. I would predict that in about halve a year you'll see the "Bigger Cities" DLC for 5-20 $.

I just wanted to point out that the whole sim city launch is not worse than for example the diablo launch, what made it look much worse was the way EA handled the situation.

Also, nobody forced you to buy the game. Problems like the restricted city size or the pathfinding were pointed out by many players who had access to the beta. And you can find these issues in almost every serious review to sim city, so it's not like you didn't have the chance to know that before you bought the game.

HOLY SHIT! What IS that??? Is.. is that a bug?? A computer game... with a real BUG?! OMFG... this has got to be a FIRST! I mean, I've been gaming for nearly 30 years and I've owned thousands of titles, but I don't know if I've EVER seen one with a REAL bug before!!!!!!!

This is monumental! This is... EPIC! This is....

...stupid.

So, you found a bug in SimCity. Whoop-de-freakin-do. Just because of all the media sensation surrounding the failed launch, this otherwise simple (yet amusing) bug is being hailed as some kind of incredible evidence that the Glassbox engine is somehow complete crap, right? Oh, okay, I get it now.

Yes, no OTHER developer has ever released bugs in their games. Yes, ooooh, let's all marvel at the bug that makes Sims walk around in circles under some special circumstances that are not even revealed to the rest of us. I play SimCity, and I play it a lot. I've never seen this happen. Not saying it's rigged, or that it doesn't happen to other players or anything, but after nearly 100 hours of playing and a dozen or so cities built, I've never seen this bug myself. Just sayin'.

@FlowersInHisHair @aimpoint. In my opinion there are two major issues that caused the game/launch to be such a disaster. I am not speaking of technical reasons or gameplay, which are solvable through patches and more game servers. I'm speaking of the one thing you can't change and thats the first impression.

First of all, they advertised the game wrong. They focused on the glass box engine, the general look and in the early stages made it look just like a very good reboot of the series. But old fans of franchise don't get you that many new customers. So they jumped on the social game train, in hopes of acquiring a new set of potential customers. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that. Players who just wanted to play the game on their own could do just so, just like players who want to build a huge city together with their Facebook friends. At least this was what the marketing made us believe. In hindsight they should have marketed the whole game as some kind of sim city online. Which would have set the right expectations into customers and prevented a part of the huge shitstorm that followed.

Secondly, and this rule should be written in caps, DON'T LIE! Or at least DON'T GET CAUGHT LYING! If you say it needs always on DRM, you better make sure your game only works online.

Saying that DRM is the reason of the Sim City debacle would be very far from the truth. Sure there is a love-hate relationship between players and publishers, especially regarding DRM. But in the end of the day the urge to play the game is bigger than the personal objections against the "evil" publisher.

Because to be honest, this is neither the first game to have an always-online DRM, nor is it the first to have server issues after the launch, nor is it the first game that wasn't as bug free as the user might wish. After that being said, in my opinion firing EA's CEO (which happened this monday) was damage control at the wrong end, they should have sacked the whole PR department.

Yeah, the whole simcity saga has really taken a downturn. A lot of the negative press has been on the always on DRM and the conflicting reports of how "hard" it would be to turn it off when its already been disabled by a few users.

The focus should move towards this and actual gameplay problems. The traffic issues are really bad as well with sims making really retarded driving decisions. Not to mention that the population count isnt accurate, as well as the problems with "not enough workers" even after people have built entire cities with nothing but residential zoning. There are still endless bugs, like streetcars disappearing or casino towns not being viable thanks to tourist problems.

The whole DRM issue seems strange to me because its like arguing that a poorly designed game has DRM and not the other way around. The game does work well at times but it seems that the whole "agent" system they use that starts to make the game fun at the same time seems to cause problems and take away from the fun.

If you gave EA money for this abortion, you are part of the reason why some publishers (EA, Ubisoft, Activision...) want to treat PC games as $60 rentals, and you are most definitely part of the problem. There are an ABUNDANCE of better, cheaper PC games developed by companies who want your business and won't treat you as just an open wallet. Sim City was a great franchise once, but just like Diablo, Crysis, and anything from Bioware nowadays, it's been consolized, socialized, and/or monetized into crap that most PC gamers want nothing to do with.

This "real cities do not exist in a bubble" is just corporate blathering to justify the always-on DRM, as if fans of the series have forgotten it has always been, first and foremost, a single player game, and a very enjoyable one at that. It is ABSOLUTELY IDIOTIC to force such a drastic change in gameplay/genre into a game that has been so defined by it's gameplay/genre over the years. Same thing when EA remade Syndicate as a FPS. A FPS Syndicate ISN'T SYNDICATE! I don't want to play with anyone else. I don't want my fucking savegames on your shitty server, even if it was an awesome server. If I give you $60 for your game, it's now MY game, and you leave me the fuck alone!

AAARRG! It's like PC game developers are all being run by fucking console kiddies and greedy shitstain corporate types who never played NetQuake or DWANGO, or Heretic, or System Shock, or X-Com, or any of the Black Isle or pre-Dragon Age 2 Bioware stuff, or any Diablo without a "III" behind it, or Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, or the Ultimas, or the Roberta Williams adventure games, or Wing Commander, or Tie Fighter, or MechWarrior. Deus Ex! A full fucking Deus EX play-through would be required before I'd even THINK about hiring your ass to develop a new PC game! On second thought, play it three times, once for each ending!

uuuuugh... so... anyway... yeah, fuck EA.

Ok, fine. Rage.

Can you imagine the nerd rage if you needed a top of the line PC to run Sim City? Or if the cities were even smaller? The servers run some of the simulation so that the game could run on most machines. This is why Maxis is taking responsibility. Polygon.com had answers from Maxis very quickly where they explain all this stuff. Something about each user needing 80% more processing than during the Beta because of some problem with databases and the crazy load from selling way more copies than the pre-orders had indicated. Whatever code runs on the servers now I am sure they could eventually run locally but they probably weren't planning on doing that work for years. If something doesn't work you will be able to get a refund if you push hard enough. That is what I would have done if I had bought the game and it didn't work.