kerikxi

Great article Alex, you make some excellent points. I definitely agree that we're coddling developers when it comes to shipping incomplete/buggy games. It's just the accepted norm that a popular online game is going to launch broken, and that's utter bullshit.

While I sympathize with the hurdles these companies face in coping with massive demand, that doesn't mean they get a free pass. If your product launches broken, you done fucked up, and you deserve the beating that you get.

There's honestly no excuse for this. A company the size of EA has the manpower and resources to nail a launch like this. Take the most optimistic pie in the sky number for server load and triple it. Have more capacity than physically possible to overload. Take a hit on the server costs and adjust downward once the numbers shake out. Seems like a sound investment.

Instead, apply EA logic and cut every corner possible, run juuuust enough servers to barely keep the game afloat. Generate a massive amount of negative feedback. Piss off the press and the customers. Invalidate your design philosophy and tarnish the name of a beloved franchise. Amazing work, guys.

There's no metric to measure how quickly my enthusiasm for this game shriveled up and died. Yeah, I anticipated server problems, although not on quite this monumental a scale. The biggest killer is the designed focus on multiplayer and cooperation, coupled with the abysmally tiny cities. I'm completely with Jeff, I want to build huge cities and that's about it. I don't give a hoot about other players, and I don't want to run multiple inferior cities by myself. Fundamentally they've designed a SimCity I don't want to play. So, meh.

Have to say Sony knocked it out of the park on this one. Features and tech sound great, and they had a lot of actual games to show.

HOWEVER, it will all break down to the price point. There's a lot of flashy, potentially expensive tech in there. $599 on the high end will leave them dead in the water.

A good place to start for speedruns is Speed Demos Archive. Find some games you're interested in and go nuts.

There are twitch archives for all the Awesome Games Done Quick 2013 runs, available here and here.

You can also check out SpeedRunsLive for active streams and races.

Finally you can check out the SDA and SRL team pages on twitch, here and here.

It's the obvious and popular answer, but there's not enough shitty game coverage on GB. Torture yourself for our amusement!

@fuzzypumpkin: Yeah, it's a little wierd how it's all coming out. The Recap video usually hits before the podcast, and that has their personal GOTY before their own Top 10 comes out. But that's kind of a minor complaint overall.

Need to rent yourself a woodchipper.

Does anyone else get a Uwe Boll vibe off this Titov guy?

Man, original DS sales really fell off a cliff huh.