Eight popular games. Just pick'n'choose.

Which one did you chose btw?

Dead Space 3

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.....

monk- get ME3 You will get way more hours out of ME3. 

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.

Install another DDRM game for free when the DDRM was what caused the problem. Good idea. *rollseyes*

No wonder that a*hole Riccitello had to leave...

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.

At least for the PS3 case, the insert reverses and there is a FemShep on the other side.

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

I don't think that's a fair assessment of the game in my opinion.  Obviously the game has issues, some of which have been patched and some of which still need to be patched.  RCI definitely needs some rebalancing/fixing and the way regional traffic/trade/influence is handled could use some attention as well (with regional influences being so obvious).  Some of the complaints I just don't agree with.  Traffic in general (while still not the smartest at times) has been manageable for me as long as I plan ahead far enough.

The posts I take issue with are the ones that sound like this to me:

"see, see this or that game mechanic can be abused so the game must suck!"

Just because a game mechanic can be made to break the game, doesn't mean the entire game is bad.  I've seen the videos of people with only residential and parks whose cities still manage to grow and be profitable etc. etc.  Those are the same guys who get yelled at in chat to zone some bloody commercial/industrial because their 'experiment' is screwing with the entire region.

Sure some 'experimentation' will be necessary in order to achieve at least some of the achievements in SimCity but do the resulting 'bad games' really trace back to a bad overall game at that point?

My experience with SimCity so far:

I have been playing a 2-city region with a buddy since the start and it has been tough at times (I had thought starting in a 2-city region might be easier than the larger regions, however it appears it might actually be the opposite).  Both of our cities are currently at about the 150K population mark, and are both fairly profitable cities with a somewhat 'balanced' RCI.  My buddy appears to be having some slightly worse traffic issues (he has a casino pretty much at the entrance to his city...hehe).  I don't appear to be having any traffic issues unless you count one particular road off to the side of the town that seems to have moving vans on it daily.  I read the forum posts regarding 'moving van circles' but I honestly think the problem for me on that street is the fact that the residential on that street keeps going up and down in land value which causes people to move in/out on a daily basis (I'll be looking into that 'theory' further).  My buddy also created quite the trash problem in my city when without telling me he decided to remove his garbage dump and just add a recycling plant.  Of course he was now reaping the benefit of recycled material sales and I had to deal with the trash from both cities.  I also suddenly had a large drop in population happiness due to a 'recycling problem' at many businesses and residential so I had to plop a recycling plant of my own before I was really ready to do so (this is why I said above the 'regional influences' might need to be looked at further as well).  All in all we are having a good time with the latest SimCity.

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.

Since when is how someone can manipulate a game the example of how a game will or must be played?

My friend and I have spent quite a few hours with SimCity already and have not experienced any of those 'game-breaking' examples I've seen posted around the internet.  I guess we're just too dumb to use the game engine in a 'game-breaking' way..... 

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.  

The legitimate 'bugs' aside (the ones they are addressing via patches) I don't see the game as 'broken'.....sorry.  Thanks to the new 'regional' approach cities are no longer in a vacuum which poses all sorts of new issues some of which I concede will present themselves as 'balancing' problems or situations that may manifest as 'unrealistic'.  Maybe if the game had been named SimRegion it would have been deemed more appropriate.  In any case, I remain convinced that unless one finds themselves playing this game with a bunch of exploitative people, there are both fun and challenges to be had.

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.