We conclude our journey back into the depths of David Bowie’s musical career with his work that brought him the most popularity and commercial success and his increasing difficulty staying both relevant and artistically interesting.
Last year, we still had some hope. We did an entire episode dedicated to how the 2012 Mariners season was a thing we were capable of looking forward to… We were so naive. Not this year, no sir. We know the score now, we’re pretty used to being disappointed by the M’s. So we’re taking a different approach, a darker approach, a meaner approach. Cause hey, what have the Mariners done for us lately? Well, they gave King Felix a big contract for one. But let’s not think about the good stuff. Let’s think of the bad. The reasons NOT to be excited about the Mariners season.
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David Bowie was a thing now. With Ziggy Stardust he had created a new kind of theatrical, character-based music that would pave the way for Chris Gaines, Sasha Fierce and Hannah Montana. But by the mid-1970s, the Spiders from Mars had started to go away, and Bowie himself retired Ziggy and moved to the United States. The times, they were a-changing, but, of course, David Bowie wrote the song on changes.
The new version of SimCity makes a lot of really interesting design decisions, including one that has basically ruined the game. That is the developer Maxis’ choice to make the game require an Internet connection at all times. According to them, this choice was made so that they could offload a lot of the heavy calculations to their servers, and because this SimCity has a multiplayer focus, the first game in the series to do so. This choice has turned out to be devastating, as we go into the second weekend of the game’s lifecycle the servers still have not completely recovered from what has been the most disastrous launch probably in the history of the industry.
When SimCity launched at midnight, there had been no preload offered to those who preordered the game. So immediately people experienced server issues connecting to Origin and downloading the game, with some people being told straight up they couldn’t download yet. It turned out that didn’t even matter, really, because the SimCity servers were also getting hit so hard you couldn’t really play anyway. Unlike many online games, SimCity didn’t have queues for servers, instead you got a 20 minute timer, followed by a brief shot at connecting, before you were returned to the timer. It was terrible. And it went on for days.
Eventually more servers were opened and the waits disappeared… With a price. Several key features of the game, including the ability to speed up time, which is critical for making later stages of the game less tedious, were disabled. An unprecedented move, I believe. Since this has all happened, we’ve gotten apologies from EA and Maxis, and the promise of a free game next week to show just how sorry they are. Sure, the issues will be ironed out soon enough and SimCity will probably go on to live a happy life, but is the game under all this mess worth it?
I think so. You have to understand the design ideology here, because it’s a bit different from other SimCity games. Don’t go into this expecting to just make one all-encompassing city. That’s not what this game is about. Instead, it’s about regions, in which multiple cities, either all run by you or by you and your friends, work together. Groups of cities can pile all their resources into the local great work, a massive undertaking like an international airport, that benefits the entire region. City plots are overall pretty small, and many of them do not have the resources to support everything even if you did have the space. Some people really hate this, but I’m kind of about it. I think building a new city is a lot more fun than maintaining on, and I like that when I move onto my next project, my old city doesn’t go to waste, as I can rely on it to import supplies, services, or people.
It’s fun to lay roads, edit buildings, and just watch sims live and work in your city. SimCity has a lot going on in it, but it does a pretty great job letting you access all the information you need with various data overlays. Really, the biggest problem I’ve noticed right now is that traffic flow is a bit annoying. Sims always choose the most direct route to their destination, even if that means taking a dirt road instead of a high density street. Buses, cop cars, and firetrucks all seem to convoy up and go to the same place, instead of spreading out and covering the entire city – which I admit is pretty funny to watch. Hopefully this is just a bug and will be fixed soon enough.
It’s really easy to lose a lot of time to SimCity, you know, assuming you can actually play it. I believe it to be a really fun game, and certainly extremely accessible for people like myself, who haven’t spent any time with the franchise since the Super NES days. But that’s not the story of this game, not anymore. No, the story of SimCity is the clusterfuck that was its launch. And it was bad.
The ol’ switcheroo. We came into this, much like our boardgames episode, planning on talking about the absolute worst ideas for adapting fairy tales into movies. But after a little while, our ideas were either so obscure or so literal that they became rather appealing. Our proposed movies would never actually get made, but if they did, chances are we would want to see them.
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Starting today and continuing for the next few weeks, I’ll be looking back at the entire recorded catalog of one of my favorite recording artists, David Bowie. Why? Well, because his new album comes out tomorrow and I hear it’s quite good. This project is going to take a while, so let’s get started. First up, the early years: from pop to psychedelic folk to glam rock.
This is a weird, self-indulgent episode (like that’s a change of pace for us). Three weeks ago, this blog turned five years old. We’ve come a long way, from a copyright-infringing mess to something that’s kinda, sorta actually cool. This podcast has been on a similar journey, having been a labor of love for over a year and fifty episodes. So allow us to reflect on that first year of the blog, as we reminisce about the subjects we wrote about and the terrible decisions we made.
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