I brought home the new SimCity today and was excited to put on my mayor’s cap and get started. Unfortunately, SimCity was not on board with my plans and effectively employed every possible obstruction available to ensure that I would not in fact play a single-player game that I blew $65 on.
For the record, the following dialogue is a part of the actual conversation that I had with SimCity on March 6th, 2013:
Me: Yay, I just unpacked SimCity, inserted the disk, and I want to play!
SimCity: No, you have to install Origin first
Me: OK, I installed Origin, agreed to forfeit all of my rights in the user agreement and installed the game, I’m ready to play!
SimCity: Updating…………. waiting to download update. Please wait, servers are busy.
Me: Huh?
SimCity: Update complete, restart to apply.
Me: Fine, restart.
SimCity: *frozen*
Me: Abort, and restart. There, lets play!
SimCity: Nope, I’m checking for updates again even though I literally just did that a moment ago, please wait, servers are busy, please retry connection.
Me: I WANT TO PLAY!!!
SimCity: Welcome to SimCity. Our servers are experiencing very high volume. You are now in queue. Next attempt to join in 30 minutes.
Me: AAAAaarrggghhh!
SimCity: Unable to connect with servers, please try again.
SimCity: Welcome to SimCity. Server busy, waiting to log-in.
Me: Please, can I just play the private single-player mode?
SimCity: Not on your life.
Me: Let me in!
SimCity: OK fine, why don’t you just switch to the Europe East 1 server, and maybe then I’ll let you in.
Me: OK done, now what?
SimCity: Welcome to SimCity. Server busy… just kidding, come on in!
Me: Yes, finally.
Me: Alright lets see… select private region, select city… Oh this one has resources! OK, Claim City!
SimCity: ……………………………………..
SimCity: Alert, cannot start city at this time, please try again.
Me: What?! Retry! Retry! RETRY!!!!!
SimCity: Alert, cannot start city at this time, please try again.
SimCity: Alert, cannot start city at this time, please try again.
SimCity: Alert, cannot start city at this time, please try again.
SimCity: Ha ha ha, do you know how big of a sucker you are right now? By the way, no refunds.
Me: AAAAAAAAARARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
SimCity: Hey why not listen to this cheerful title music while I suck out your soul, which according to the user agreement now belongs to EA.
Me: KILL ME NOW! RETRY, RETRY, RETRY!!!!!
SimCity: Forget it, I’m just not going to let you play today. I don’t really care how much you paid for me, if EA uses crap servers and doesn’t think you should play today, then you’re not gonna. Period.
SimCity: Oops, I believe the SimCity servers just went down. Attempting to reconnect, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re screwed and you know it. Why don’t you just forget about it and go do something else.
Me: I hate you.
I did manage to play today, but the servers are still unstable. What a great way to design a single-player game.