Chikyuu Boueigun 3 Portable Review

Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable never gets deeper than shooting and looting, but it succeeds because it does it so well.

The Good

• Simple and fun arcade shooter gameplay with lots of huge monsters and explosions  
• New unlockable Pale Wing character offers significantly different gameplay  
• Five difficulty modes offer plenty of replay value  
• Four-player cooperative mode makes wanton destruction even more fun.

The Bad

• Simplicity and repetition of core shooting gameplay grow tiresome in long sittings  
• Too pricey at $40.

Earth Defense Force 2017 has a lot of bugs. They rear their ugly heads just seconds after you select one of the five difficulty settings, and they hound you with increasing intensity as you progress through 60 levels. It's a good thing, then, that they're not the technical sort. Much as in Earth Defense Force 2017's original release in 2007, these are bugs of the Japanese monster movie variety, the kind that scamper up tall buildings and inspire campy lines in a nation's top generals. You spend hours and hours blasting them and the robots and spaceships that follow with bullets, missiles, and the occasional laser, and once the dust clears, you rush in to pick up increasingly beastly weapons amid the rubble of a wounded Earth. Even now, the game retains some of the problems that made it such a flawed classic in 2007, but the portability of the Vita elevates its simple, addictive thrills to new heights.

They might not look like much, but they’re sure fun to shoot.

There's a story of an interstellar invasion in 2017 buried under that rubble, but even in its best moments it makes cheesy sci-fi movies like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman sound as though they were penned by Nabokov. It's best when it's situational, spurred by the arrival of new monstrosities. Soldiers cry out, apparently astonished by the sight of a small enemy saucer even though the Rhode Island-size mothership has been hovering overhead the entire time. A newscaster shrieks as the aliens interrupt her broadcast. In the earliest moments that same newscaster announces that the government has decided to call the cranky visitors the "ravagers," even though it's not clear yet if their intentions are hostile or peaceful. Beyond that, though, the repeated yelps of unlucky non-player character comrades assume a regrettable monotony, although the cries of "Exterminate them!" deliver some amusement once you realize that many of the antagonists are giant ants and spiders.
And exterminate them you will. Earth Defense Force 2017 exists merely to celebrate the primal pleasures of looting, triggering explosions, and annihilating alien hordes, and therefore it wastes no time toying with stealth missions or similar undertakings that may have provided some variety. To its credit, it does this job well. You can take two weapons into battle, ranging from predictable assault rifles to non-rechargeable laser guns that cut through stacked colonies of alien ants like butter. Missiles and rocket launchers level entire buildings, whether high-rise offices or soaring skyscrapers reminiscent of Toronto's CN Tower. Fittingly (considering the whole bug thing), Earth Defense Force 2017 thrives on lobbing swarms of ravagers at you, easing you into the fray with scattered enemies and then making you contend with onslaughts that would look at home in a clip from Starship Troopers. It even keeps you in the thick of it, since wading in among the slaughter is often the only way to pick up the scores of health, armor, and weapon upgrades that drop from your defeated enemies.

Pale Wing and the invaders don't always see eye to eye.

All this was true of the 2007 release as well, but the Vita release of 2017 Vita brings with it some welcome surprises. For one, an online multiplayer component that supports up to four players fills the spot of the original's split-screen cooperative mode, and the resulting camaraderie captures the impression of intense battles better than the original. The morsel-size missions, regarded as a slight drawback in the original, also complement the Vita's portability by allowing quick bouts of bug slaughter while on the move. The big attraction, however, is the ability to unlock the Pale Wing soldier first seen in 2005's Global Defense Force, whose use of a jetpack in place of the standard jump lends a welcome verticality that manages to imbue the normally ground-based gameplay with an entirely different feel. It's a shame, perhaps, that you have to play through all 60 levels to unlock her, but she plays differently enough to keep the gameplay fun on a second playthrough.
That's important, because that's when the unrelenting sameness of Earth Defense Force 2017 starts to weigh heavily on the experience. It's not a pretty game, for one, and its "remastered" graphics mark only a marginal improvement over the original's visuals. Here, too, you find a lack of visual variety. Aside from minor differences like sunsets and the general layout, every level contains dull urban landscapes that many online teams level into oblivion within minutes anyway. The cast of enemies is frightfully limited, and boss-like encounters usually feature little more than recolored and resized versions of the normal variety of enemies. Other issues mar the experience, such as the way tanks and other vehicles move so ponderously that they encourage remaining on foot. The menus (which you can also use with a finicky touch interface) are cumbersome and outdated. The frame rate still drops when too many bugs crowd the screen at once, although it's nowhere near as troublesome as it was in the original release.

Advanced alien technology is no match for the indomitable human spirit!

And yet, for all that, EDF 2017 manages to remain good, stupid fun for hours as long as it's not taken in one sitting. The way that stronger weapons drop only on higher difficulties encourages multiple playthroughs of the same levels for better loot, and the basics of shooting and movement take only a few seconds to master with the intuitive control scheme. It's a pity, then, that it's so pricey. Forty dollars is a lot to spend for such simplistic and repetitive gameplay, but its position as one of the few shooters on the Vita goes a long way toward making up for this considerable shortcoming. Couple that consideration with its highly enjoyable multiplayer component and its inclusion of a fun new playable character, and Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable emerges as a clear superior to its faulty but beloved predecessor.

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Anodyne Review

Anodyne is an enjoyable top-down dungeon crawler that's weak on story but strong on ambience.

The Good

• Beautiful art style and musical score  
• Satisfying balance of combat and puzzles  
• Enjoyable combination of nostalgia and surreal settings.

The Bad

• Jumping puzzles get annoying  
• Promising storyline loses its focus  
• Hunting down collectible cards feels like filler.

Few games spend as little time hiding their inspirations as Sean Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka's Anodyne. Mere minutes in, you can see its obvious debts to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening in the design of the trees that adorn the top-down environment, though it adds contrast by way of hefty helpings of surreal encounters and disturbing imagery. Ultimately, it emerges as a memorable game in its own right, even if it struggles at times to overcome the limitations of its own ambition.

It's hard to ignore a command that imperative.

That ambition manifests itself most prominently in the seven or so hours of disjointed narrative, which hints at our reluctantly changing relationships with gaming concepts as we age. More to the point, subtle hints littered throughout the narrative suggest that the protagonist is using gaming as an anodyne (or painkiller) for his emotional suffering. Here we find no quasi-elven protagonists in the vein of Link; in their place, we're presented with a white-haired fellow with the perhaps symbolic name of Young, whose Coke-bottle glasses serve as his only possession remotely resembling a shield and who uses a prosaic broom in place of a sword. The action takes place entirely in his unconscious mind--Young is a closer relative of Braid's Tim than of Zelda's Link. Gone, too, is the simplicity of a story that focuses on saving a princess; in its place, we're left with an unfocused story about saving the world that transpires through fragments of Young's dreams.
Young's struggle to enjoy the classic dungeon-crawling role-playing game that unfolds around him is never so apparent as in the many moments when flashbacks from "real life," as it were, butt into the gameplay. Young may spend several hours swatting bats and energy-belching frogs with his broom amid fantasyscapes and postapocalyptic freeway ruins, but we find him most haunted by memories depicted in fractured vignettes that reference family struggles and the pain of leaving home. At times, such as when Young tries to converse with a fisherman only to push him to his death in a whirlpool or when he encounters a strange man muttering incoherently, Anodyne assumes an air better suited to horror than to lighthearted action adventure. This isn't the first instance of developers using retro environments normally associated with 16-bit fun to explore darker themes--the first Corpse Party, for instance, used it to greater effect--but Hogan and Kittaka effectively use the contrast to tackle lightweight philosophical questions.

A link to the past, indeed.

Indeed, these moments are the backbone of Anodyne's appeal. As it is, the promising ideas of the thin narrative's first couple of hours lose their power long before the end, and the haunting vignettes themselves devolve into a heap of broken images increasingly bereft of meaning. In its worst moments, it becomes pretentious nonsense.
The combat excels in a simplistic Zelda-circa-1991 way thanks to commendable hit detection and a wealth of simple but satisfying single-screen puzzles, but the core gameplay never advances far past Young's basic broom swatting, which you encounter within the first few minutes, despite three upgrades. Later on, a rapid succession of often frustrating jumping puzzles feels forced and ill-suited to the top-down design, and the absence of a means of playing with a gamepad is disappointing in light of Anodyne's obvious affection for early consoles.
Still, if you take the time to explore all of Anodyne's nooks and crannies, you'll find hours and hours of gameplay in store. The problem is that much of this exploration centers on the careful and necessary hunt for 50 collectible cards that serve as the keys for new content all the way up until the final boss, and the ages' worth of backtracking involved at times feels like an artificial means of extending the running time. Many cards drop from the fun but generally easy dungeon bosses, but finding other cards involves performing maddening jumping puzzles and retracing your steps throughout an entire zone in search of the single chest you missed. A system of warp portals makes this process easier than it could have been, but the whole concept ends up feeling like exploration for the sake of exploration rather than the hunt for gear upgrades that makes Zelda games so memorable.

They might look scary, but walking meatballs are actually kind of friendly.

Anodyne rarely feels like a waste of your time despite these shortcomings. It makes up for the deficiencies of its narrative through the beautiful visuals you encounter as you trudge through everything from unsettling suburban neighborhoods to crumbling temples, and the poignant musical score surges with emotional power. At the most basic gameplay level, as you swat slimes and scoop up dust for use as a raft across bodies of water, it maintains a degree of fun. Above all, Anodyne never lets you forget that it's a game more concerned with the journey than with the destination, and at 10 bucks, it's a journey worth taking.

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Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army Review

This stand-alone zombie expansion for Sniper Elite V2 can be a lot of fun in four-player co-op, but the action gets monotonous over time.

The Good

• Satisfying zombie headshots  
• Fun four-player co-op.

The Bad

• Simple gameplay gets monotonous  
• Playing alone can get both boring and frustrating  
• Repetitive level design and enemy types.

It's the most cherished of World War II stories: There was Hitler, then Hitler summoned demonic zombies, and then the Allied forces really wished to be rid of both those things. That's pretty much the extent of the plot in Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, the stand-alone, multiplayer-focused expansion to the much more serious Sniper Elite V2. And that's perfectly fine--zombies and Nazis are already two of video gaming's most hated enemies. Do you really need a good reason to shoot hundreds of zombies in the head?

Things tend to be a little more explosive when you're playing cooperatively.

The twist that supposedly sets this zombie experience apart from the many other zombie-related games available right now is that Nazi Zombie Army is built on the Sniper Elite format, except it's so far removed from the source material that it almost doesn't feel similar at all. Gone are the stealth elements and deliberate pacing of the original Sniper Elite V2. There's no sneaking up on a zombie or trying to get through an area without being detected. In fact, most areas require you to eliminate most, if not all, of the undead around you before you can move on, and there's nothing quiet about it.
There is less emphasis placed on bullet drop and wind than you may expect if you've played other games in the series; here, where you aim is usually where your bullet is going to go. This is good for the more action-heavy pace NZA sets, because you can't spend too long lining up a perfect shot when dozens of enemies shamble toward you, but it also means that one of the staples of the Sniper Elite series is missing from this game that bears its name. As a result, the game feels a lot like plenty of other third-person shooters out there.
One thing that's not missing from the franchise, though, is the kill cam, which shows off some of your better shots in brutal slow motion, cutting to an X-ray shot of your bullet smashing through a zombie's skull or into another vital organ. While this feature could make some uncomfortable when applied liberally to the human enemies of past games, it feels more over the top and even humorous when zombies and skeletons are the victims. The killcam helps make headshots immensely satisfying throughout the game, though it can grow tiresome if you it's triggered too frequently. Thankfully, the frequency of these slow-motion shots can be adjusted or they can be turned off completely.

I really hope these guys are only here to re-create the 'Thriller' video.

You find yourself on a lot of linear paths and in several small spaces while marching across undead Berlin. Tight corridors can be great for certain aspects of a typical zombie game--they can make you feel claustrophobic, as if there's nowhere to run--but they don't work as well for a game in which your primary weapon is a sniper rifle. Yes, you have a pistol and a sub-weapon (usually some sort of machine gun) at your disposal, but shooting them isn't nearly as satisfying as firing the rifles, and you aren't usually given much ammo for them. Empty your Thompson clips too fast, and you may find yourself frantically trying to snipe a skeleton from about three feet away. Items like grenades, trip wires, and land mines can help you out of sticky situations (or help prevent you from getting into them), or they can be used to gleefully blow up a dozen zombies at once just to watch their bodies fly.
There is a tendency for the gameplay to become monotonous, especially when you're playing alone. Press the right mouse button, aim at zombie head, shoot, and then do it again. The structure of the levels tends to encourage finding a spot to kneel down, unmoving, and shooting things for a while until the enemies either get too close or are all dead. This approach loses its luster sooner than you would like. Cooperative multiplayer for up to four people breathes some extra life into the formula, though, and is the preferred way to play. While your actions are mostly the same, things get more frantic when the enemy count is high and you have allies to watch out for. Get a group of four reliable partners together, bump up the difficulty level, and you have the best way to blast through the game's five missions, which will probably take you around five hours to finish.

Can zombies complain about headaches?

You do want reliable partners if at all possible. If someone disconnects on you mid-game, you have no option to invite new people without dropping back to the lobby and losing all progress. So if you lose a teammate or two near the end of a level, you can either finish alone or take a big 45-minute step back. Thankfully the game adjusts to the player count and goes easier on you when you're by yourself, giving you much more generous checkpoints when you don't have allies to bring you back from the brink of death. But it can still be disheartening when you're marching through a level with three buddies only to have to end the journey alone (though there's something to be said for being the last survivor of a zombie outbreak).
There's a good chance you will have had your fill of Nazi Zombie Army by the time its five missions end. Its five enemy types (six if you count a boss you fight twice) and linear structure don't allow for enough variety to keep things fresh with repeated playthroughs. Those desperate for an excuse to return to levels after finishing them can try to hunt down hidden Nazi gold and well-hidden bottles of blood, but this isn't a fantastic incentive to boot the game up. You may find more enjoyment in going after a high leaderboard score, earning more points for success kills at longer ranges. It's a fun game with friends, but most of the action is as brainless as the undead hordes you're slaughtering.

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March of the Eagles Review

This Napoleonic wargame redeems its flaws with tense multiplayer matches that foster alliances as fragile as L'Empereur's.

The Good

• Cutthroat multiplayer promotes backstabbing and short-lived coalitions  
• Superb soundtrack for sacking Moscow  
• Combat fit for both brash newbies and capable commanders.

The Bad

• Problematic implementation of historical events  
• Erratic AI.

The Napoleonic Wars are a great setting for strategy games. After all, the conflict between Britain and France engulfed practically all of Europe from Iberia to Russia, revolutionized warfare, and spawned numerous temporary alliances in which vanquished enemies became (unreliable) allies. Paradox Interactive, which previously released a Napoleon-themed expansion for Europa Universalis III, has delved into this period again with March of the Eagles, an accessible wargame with delightfully cutthroat multiplayer.

It's never enough.

At first glance, March of the Eagles appears to be a grand strategy game akin to the Europa Universalis series. For instance, every province has a majority nationality, there is an "idea" system that includes techs that don't directly involve killing people, and numerous improvements ranging from roads to increased "development levels" can be constructed in provinces. But these systems are extremely misleading: demographics don't matter because oppressed peoples rarely revolt, conquering territory is a more cost- and time-efficient way of raising money than introducing your people to flush toilets, and idea points are mostly earned via combat (which leads to absurd situations like Napoleon learning how to lower interest rates after killing tens of thousands of Prussians). In short, March is not Europa Universalis: Napoleon. Instead, it's a more complicated version of Risk, played in real time, on a map so large that Russia alone has more than 800 provinces. Thankfully, only the less-numerous city provinces actually matter in the grand scheme of things, but Russia still has 88 of them.
While the sheer scale of the map may be intimidating, March is actually a fairly newbie-friendly wargame, but one that grizzled veterans can also enjoy. You can use brute force to smash a path to victory or indulge in more-advanced tactics. The basics are simple: your country produces money and men, and you can spend those buying a plethora of country-specific infantry, cavalry, and artillery brigades as well as naval vessels and supply wagons. Then you merge a group of units to create an army or fleet, put a historical general or admiral in charge, give other generals control over the army's flanks, and sally forth to conquer. If you don't want to do much micromanagement, then all you really have to keep an eye on is attrition and the security of your supply lines.
Alternatively, a little micromanagement allows for a much more refined and efficient approach. You can personally arrange the order of battle for each flank in an army and give every commander instructions that he will try to carry out in future battles. For example, you can order an army's left flank to use its cavalry as a shield and rush its other units to help hold the center, while making the right flank wait for the best moment to throw its elite guard units into the fray. Armies can also be given special orders for things like forced marches and scorched earth tactics. Careful use of these options can dramatically increase your country's effectiveness on the battlefield.

Mehemet Ali's beard, while impressive, was not enough to drive Napoleon out of Egypt.

There is one truly aggravating aspect to March's combat. AI soldiers have a knack for escaping from battles before they can be annihilated. That isn't inherently bad, but they often retreat behind your lines and tend to bounce randomly around the map like Ping-Pong balls whenever you attack them. This was a problem in earlier Paradox games but seemed to have been fixed in its more recent titles. Thankfully, a large, well-managed army has a good chance of avoiding that annoying "feature" by quickly destroying enemy forces.
While the combat in March is, on the whole, quite satisfying, the flavorless single-player campaign is not. It just doesn't feel like you are fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. For example, France or Russia could win the game without ever fighting each other, because victory is achieved by occupying a set of country-specific provinces. Russia could easily win the game by preying on the Ottomans, Prussians, and Swedes while France is bogged down in a war with Great Britain. Also, there are very few historical decisions, so you can't exile Napoleon to Elba. Meanwhile, some of the game's historical events can occur without a logical reason. For instance, Tsar Alexander and Napoleon meet on a raft on the Neman River (as per their peace conference in 1807) even if they have never been at war.

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Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 preview

I love sniping in games. It can be a lot of crawling around in dirt and peering through foliage that was never meant to be viewed up close, but the payoff is worth the effort. It feels great to watch a bullet perfectly arc into a target, and intuiting that path taps into bits of instinctual spatial intelligence which always surprises me. Basing an entire FPS campaign around that feeling, however, is tough.
The first Sniper: Ghost Warrior had some problems. Players complained that the AI could magically detect you from a mile away, and that there were too many action sequences muddling things up. In Ghost Warrior 2, those problems are addressed with a rebuilt AI and a greater focus on sneaking around and silently slitting throats.


There’s still a danger, however, that too much of the game will involve a spotter bark-whispering commands like “wait for the patrol to leave” and “take the guy on the right.” It reduces the sniper experience to crawling when told to crawl, and clicking on someone’s head when told to make him die. A Ghost Warrior 2 jungle segment I saw played out just like that: go here, wait for those guys to leave, kill that guy, move forward. But that was only a brief segment. The opening scenes in Sarajevo looked much more promising: urban rubble, a bolt-action rifle, and vicious counter-sniping.
The campaign begins with a daring escape from gaunt Serbian captors. After sneaking out of captivity with a pistol and knife, the protagonist retreats to a library where he’s suppressed (you know, the screen gets all blurry) by snipers entrenched in a building across the alley. He skulks around behind bookcases searching for glints of light, picking off the enemy marksmen one at a time. It was a linear mission, but the tactics–when and where to sneak, hide, and attack–were up to the player, not the script. That’s more like it.

But don’t expect “FarCry for snipers.” I enjoy the entire sniping experience, including the long, quiet trek to the perfect vantage point, and the tense wait for the perfect shot. I’d happily play a game which made me spend an hour traversing an open environment to assassinate one guy. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 doesn’t go that far. It’s a linear stealth action game in which you’re a sniper, not a sniping simulation, and that’s understandable.
What’s really important to me is the test of spatial intelligence–factoring timing, gravity, and wind into each shot. Since Ghost Warrior 2 is meant to be accessible, you aren’t required to deal with that stuff, but the difficulty is customizable, with gravity and wind options for those of us with marksman aspirations.

It’s a tough challenge for developer City Interactive: how do you make a sniping game which appeals to both Call of Duty fans and people like me, who care if a SIG-Sauer SSG 3000 doesn’t make the right noise? The custom difficulty setting is just part of the solution. Another compromise is a move from semi-auto rifles in Ghost Warrior to primarily bolt-action rifles in Ghost Warrior 2, but with in-scope reloading. It isn’t realistic, but it strikes a balance between continuous action and methodical sniping. Other ease-of-use additions include the ability to permanently “tag” enemies by observing them through binoculars so that you can track their movement, and thermal goggles which allow you to target enemies through smoke and light cover.
Ghost Warrior 2 clearly won’t let you run around in the open shooting guys with your eye magically glued to a perfectly steady scope, but it also won’t make you wait too long to topple a dude who’s standing too close to a ledge. And you’ll be rewarded for your good aim with what has become a sniping game staple: slow-mo bullet cams. They really never get old.

What has me most excited about Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, even though I didn’t see it, is the multiplayer. It’ll mark opponents on your radar when they make noise by moving too quickly or taking a shot. With a couple other players in ghillie suits crawling around in a beautiful, overgrown CryEngine 3 jungle…I can imagine some great duels. It could be a big draw for me, and help the game stand out from the more simulation-oriented Sniper Elite V2, which currently promises cooperative, but not competitive multiplayer.

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Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter sails past $2 million, new stretch goal revealed

When Torment: Tides of Numenera, inXile’s spiritual continuation of Planescape: Torment, crushed its initial $900,000 goal and became the fastest Kickstarter campaign to hit the $1 million mark in just under six hours, you could practically hear the collective “welp” from the floored studio. Eager backers are still tossing money through their monitors and into the game’s coffers, and earlier today, funding reached $2 million. With two lore-centric stretch goals already ensured, inXile now adds a third milestone that bestows more backstory, characters, and areas.
If total donations reach $2.5 million—it’s currently sitting at nearly $2.2 million, so that’s a pretty certain “if”—inXile will cast a summoning spell upon George Ziets, the former Creative Lead for Neverwinter Nights 2′s Mask of the Betrayer expansion. Ziets spearheaded Betrayer’s character and story design, and he’d join Numenera’s already capable writing team.
Monte Cook, tabletop RPG legend and creator of the Numenera universe, will pen another novella setting up the game’s events after he was brought aboard from a previous stretch goal. At this point, it seems like the only thing missing from the project’s super-powered writing group is matching uniforms and a Headquarters of Justice.

Another companion will accompany your tormentings, bringing the total available party members to six. InXile is keeping the lid on who or what it is after the last companion’s descriptive bio of “a changing ball of goo”—though if a literal slimeball factors into the studio’s character design, the sky is the limit on what we’ll see next.
We’ll also get a new area, the Castoff’s Labyrinth, a mysterious “labyrinth of the mind” centered around Numenera’s yet-unknown death mechanics. I have a hunch it won’t be something as simple as a reload after keeling over into the dirt.
Lastly, we’ll finally get Planescape: Torment writer Colin McComb’s apology over his Complete Book of Elves for the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Why? As inXile explains it: “You AD&D players may remember how dreadful this work was, making elves so incredibly powerful and unbalanced that all of our AD&D games were henceforth ruined until 3rd Edition D&D came to save us.” Hitting the stretch goal will cause McComb to record a +2 Video of Forgiveness.
Head over to Numenera’s Kickstarter page for more info on the stretch goals and funding tiers, or if you just want to boggle at the giant funding number steadily increasing in size.

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Maxis address SimCity launch, offer free EA game to get “back in your good graces”

Following a leaked internal memo that said much the same thing, Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw has released a statement addressing the Titanic-esque launch of their latest city-building title, SimError. The blog post stops just short of apologising for the whole mess, but Bradshaw does own up to the game’s connection problems, stating that “we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.” To try and mollify the outraged, Maxis are also offering SimCity players a free game. A free, um, EA game of course – but one you’ll (probably) be able to actually play.
Bradshaw outlines what went wrong. “The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent.”
You’ll be glad to hear that “SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets”, especially if you can’t play it, but you may be more enamored of the complimentary game, unless it turns out to be Army of Two or something.
“To get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio,” Bradshaw reveals. “On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.
“I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.”
Do you think you can still be friends with Maxis or EA after this, or have you uninvited them from future birthday parties? If you’re wondering whether SimCity is any good or not, perhaps you should read our review.

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