simcity beta

So this weekend I played quite a few games on the simcity open beta.

Well, they called it a beta - I think actually it was a bit of a half-way house between a beta and a demo.  I've no idea if all those who applied got to have a go - you had to register and they sent you a code so you could get the demo.  I guess if everyone who registered got a code, it was more like a demo, but I got one so I don't really care either way.

I'd actually wondered if I would - I've been tracking the simcity site, reading the news and blogs and stuff, and registered for the beta ages ago.  However, when they made an announcement as to when the beta would happen, it gave the impression that only those who registered after that would get to play, and I missed that window.  But it seems I still got "on the list".

Anyway, the point of a beta is to bug fix and so much of the game was disabled you were really only testing out the basics - basic roads and zoning and a few amenities, that sort of thing.

However, worrying the game did crash twice.  the first was right at the beginning, after I'd installed original and tried to launch the beta.  That was the most worrying crash as I was worried it meant the game just wasn't going to work, but I immediately fired it up again and it loaded/installed fine.

The game requires an always on connection.  They've said this is because your game actually runs on their servers and effectively you're controlling it remotely.  I've no real idea if this is true.  I'm sure the whole "defeating piracy" thing is a part of it too.  I have to say my experiences with always on games hasn't been great - Anno 1404 had an always on side to it and it was horribly frustrating to find their server was down so I couldn't continue my game.  and recently they somehow managed to delete my online account so I had to create a new one.

Anyway - simcity.  The "update" took ages - well, it took ages to download what it called "updates" but I've no idea if these updates were actually the content proper.  Certainly the other installation seemed remarkably short.

The second crash was during the tutorial.  Basically once you had the game running you played a little tutorial that showed you how to do stuff and then you got to play in a small (well, it seemed small - I understand this new simcity is somewhat scaled down compared to previous iterations, so it may actually have been medium or large for all I know) town.  The tutorial crashed right after a bit where I had to buy water from a neighbouring city and it dropped me right out of the game, rather than back to the menu or something.

However, I fired it up again and played right through the tutorial and had three goes at the city without it crashing again.  There was some graphical weirdness, though.  The most distracting of these was around the edge of the city, where the graphics flickered.  I've had a similar annoying affect in a couple of games and suspect it is some feature of how my graphics card works.

The other graphical weirdness's mainly revolved around the roads - you would lay down a road and it would appear broken, even though cars were travelling along it just fine.  Or, in particular, some of the bolt-on bits you added to building seem to interact weirdly with the roads.  It was like they were meant to cast a light and instead it just caused the road to look broken.

I'll continue tomorrow with some thoughts about the game.