Paying for my sins (…or should that be sims?)

A little while ago I did something I have never done before, I pre-ordered a game. Unfortunately that game was the new Sim City and I became a small part of what has to be the most botched game launch in history. In the months that have followed I have joined the frustrated thousands across the world as server connection issues, city roll-backs and crashes to menu plague my gaming experience.

The warning signs were there of course. It had been no secret that this, the most single of single player games was suddenly going "social", and would require a permanent internet connection. But I had also read that there would still be a single player experience, and wrongly assumed that it would all be ok in the end.

Thankfully in recent years I have a good and stable web collection. So my attitude to always online has softened. Like many I'd been boycotting Ubisoft games for years as they also insisted in this draconian form of DRM. But this was Sim City, the first Sim City in a decade, it couldn't be that bad!

Sim City was also of course an Origin exclusive. Now digital distribution is a wonderful thing. Back in the mid noughties I bought a game called Race, which required for verification purposes that I created an account on something called steam. I was a bit miffed about it at first, and that every time my machine loaded after that I had to wait an age for this steam thing to login on my creaky old rural connection.

It was a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon when I finally discovered that this steam thing was really about, content delivery. I was bored and wanted a new game help bide my time. I started searching the steam store and eventually bought myself two reasonably cheap games. The first was called 18 Wheels of Steel, and was about driving trucks. It tought me two very valuable lessons in life. Firstly that there should be a law preventing me from ever getting within 50ft of an HGV, and secondly that I had a terrible taste in games.

My second was called the Ship. It was a simple multiplayer game where players assumed the role of passengers on a 1920's steamer. Somewhere else was another passenger, who it was your task to murder without being noticed, the catch of course is that there was another hunter tracking you down. I became something of a ship master over the next few months as my kill tally soared. Steam had given me access to game I never would have bought in a shop, for a reasonable price, and i loved it! It was the dawn of a new gaming era!

Of course until I moved out of the country and into the town the creaky connection proved the thorn in my side, Need for Speed Shift for example took 3 entire days to plop itself onto my hard drive, I could reinstall it today in about an hour.

Steam is now part of my life, games come and go, spontaneous sales are met with spontaneous purchases and I cannot remember the last time I looked at a physical game in a shop. My steam account is my gaming history, as a 90's era US hipster might have said - Steam Rocks!

So why the hell do I want Origin? Clunky executions and ridiculously high prices with a patching system which is as diverting as steam is seamless. Why don't you just go the whole hog and tell me that we will let you play our game, but only after you have licked the toilet bowl clean?

So there we go. I pre-ordered a game I could see was clearly going to have issues, at an exorbitant price and on a platform I would't normally touch with ten-foot barge pole

I have no-one to blame to blame but myself. I guess I'll try again to log onto a server,  wait 15 minutes for the damn thing to load, and then see how long I get before my city stops processing again - getting to 30 minutes would be good...