Eight popular games. Just pick'n'choose.

Which one did you chose btw?

There are only 2 games on that list that I don't already own (DS3 and ME3).   So unless EA want to expand the options (apparently there are some on their forums complaining about the selection......go figure) it'll have to be one of those two for me.

I'm leaning towards ME3 but I'll take a few extra days to think about it.....

I always wanted to get ME3 but I never saw a box with Fem Shep on the front so I said meh.

Not that... hey!  It's just that I saw the poster and thought, damnit that's what needs to be on the front of the box, she looks so badass.

I don't think that one guy leaving is going to change much.  Not if they're giving out a freebie as some kind of peace offering to players.  That problems of this magnitude made it into release just illustrates how deep-rooted the culture of break it now, fix it later really is.

Don't get me wrong, there are good reason to adopt that strategy pre-release.  If you spend too much time polishing the chrome, you have no idea if the final product is going to be any good.  There comes a time when you just have to push on and bring it all together and see what you have.

I remember working late one night, pulling together all the modules in Director with my work partner and thinking hooray, we're done.  Come back in on Monday and nope, not even close to done, got an armful of issues that need sorting.  One of which was assigning particular sounds to particular channels, because back then you could only mix four at a time, so it was necessary to close those channels when moving to a new section so that new sounds would actually get a chance to play.

Anyway my point is, quality is not something you can rush, but EA has the manpower to get a lot more done between working prototype and actual release than two guys do.  They're either stopping the polishing and bugfixing far too soon, or they're taking too long to come up with a working prototype.  Either way, it results in an inferior product that gets shafted and ridiculed by anyone who can see the glaring flaws.

I'm not even kidding, they should give full refunds for how bad Sim City is. 

I'm with Heavenfall on this one, the game is absurdly broken.  I'm sticking with calling it a gilded travesty.  It's not a simulation at all, I think my favorite example I have seen was a guy who made a city that produced millions of income that had no population at all.

It's just one example of many ways the game does not simulate the development and growth of a city, the point of the game.  The things you build in your city do not work as part of a simulation, and in many ways act counterintuitively to that simulation.  They only serve to facilitate the shallow facade of a simulation, when in reality, it doesn't really matter.  

Well, if you are having fun, that's great.  I'm not and a number of others are not.  But all the problems with the game have been documented other places, if you are curious, take a look.  And the problems are not "bugs", they are poor design choices.

The size of the cities is proof enough. I dont see why people can enjoy such a limited "City"

EA can't give refunds.  They are a public company and analysts were expecting a revenue bump the quarter SimCity was released.  They can give away old games to mitigate damage to their brand since doing so won't harm current quarter projections.  The stock market does not take kindly to missing earning projections.

This is what separates the Stardocks and Valves from EA, Ubisoft, etc.

Last night, my friend and I started brand new 'cities' in a larger region (our original region only had 1 city space for each of us).   We gave the *mostly* residential strategy a try and while you can grow your city-pop really fast that way, we found it is also the single best way to bone your traffic situation really hard since without local commerce and industry they will all try to leave and re-enter your city at the same time.

We have also found that 'regional-trade' doesn't appear to be working properly or I should say consistently (I suspect server issues etc. here).  This is pure speculation on my part, but I believe it possible that the regional RCI may be having the same issues the regional trade/gifting etc. is suffering from which is why it sometimes appears like residentials are commuting to 'vapor-jobs', commerce is getting 'magical-freight', and while RCI states there is never enough localindustry there is massive regional job-sharing going on (at least for industry it seems).

Another thing we found curious is the fact that global trade take precedent over regional trade.  This does seem odd and counterintuitive at best.  Say my town has a massive surplus of something, my friend cannot 'purchase' all of it.  Seems like while the 'regional interaction' is supposed to be the focus of the game, in some cases the game engine still makes global choices for you, which isn't desirable in all situations.

I agree with bonscott that the new heavy focus on regional everything opens the door to intentional greifing and actually makes this game much more difficult and frustrating to play by oneself than it needs to be.  Even with a friend such as I have been playing with, when we're not on comms he or I can easily make decisions in our city that have far-reaching and sometimes costly consequences for our neighbor.

Like I've said before, perhaps this new game should have been called SimRegion afterall..... 

Having said all of this, I do believe the devs will continue to improve on the game.  It does seem unfortunate that these days we the customers are more often than not being used as the 'final beta' phase.  Oh well.......all large projects (and SimCity 5 is definitely a large project) run the risk of doing that, and I don't think we're going to be getting away from that any time soon!

In any case, my friend and I are still having a ton of fun.......even if that 'fun' sometimes comes with a few expletives hurled at each other for 'hey man.....you just screwed my city......what the %^&%^ did you just do?! "   hehe 

Got Dead Space 3 for free, made me happy so I bought the Digital Deluxe upgrade for ME3 and Crysis 3 and a map for Sims 3 in the sale.

I understand the general complaints about the game as it was released way too early IMO (even barring the server issues, the traffic problems should not have made it past launch IMO.)  But the game is good.  It could certainly use a few more upgrades (bigger cities would still be nice) but I can't complain about anything else anymore.

I'm mostly done playing but I still load it up here and there.

That sounds extremely fun         If I knew were certain people were (like you) I would team up with funny people and focus on wrecking your cities                Trolling people like that is one of the funniest things I know