I’m a devoted viewer of Shamus Young and his blog, Twenty-Sided. After reading a post on it about how people ripped him on the BioShock demo(you can read it here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1875#more-1875), I decided to talk about another of EA’s properties, namely The Sims 2.
I love that game to death. Well, I wouldn’t call it a game so much as a storytelling tool. Anyways, that software spawns millions of stories which I read on a forum. However, after recently installing the newest expansion pack, Apartment Life, I began to understand how Shamus said “the pizza is covered in insects.”
I have no problems with the lag, except when I record the cinematic videos and the music de-syncs, or whenever the game pauses to load up some data. What bothers me are the huge amount of bugs in the game.
One legacy story comments on the fact that it crashed and the story was ruined 30 times, and as the story (called the Tom Servo chronicles) went through the motions again, many bugs and glitches cropped up. I haven’t seen most of those, and thankfully I did not get the lot crashing glitch yet, but the graphics tend to glitch badly – usually giving my toddlers upper teeth hovering in their mouths like alien dentures.
And then I discovered that some of the ring menus that use interactions don’t work or have missing options – for example, in one house I got the alert that the baby was ready to age up, but when I tried to use the birthday cake to age her, it gave me “Clean Up” instead of “Bring XXXX to Cake.” I had to hack the baby’s life bar so the interaction would work properly.
After seeing all these glitches, I wonder if Maxis, when they were acquired by EA, were told not to fix these problems because they wasted money. If so, this could indeed prove that computer game developers in big-name companies have to suppress their beliefs that the customer is important, and it just “time is money.”
And while I fear for EA and Maxis’s future, I can’t stop playing and boycott The Sims 2. It is a great tool for telling stories. If you went over to Boolprop.com’s forums and posted saying “You need to boycott this game until EAxis agrees to release an end-all patch that will fix everything, you’re wasting your money with the bugs in it!”, I think they would ban him. Why should we stop using a great storytelling aid just because there are a garbage-truck load of glitches that could crash the game and wipe our hard drives? It ain’t happening.
I don’t think we’ll ever see the end of this. As long as we pay good money through the nose to play an interesting experience, despite all the bugs, we are feeding the corporate machine. The only way to make a difference is to force everyone to stop playing the game and burn their copies, which ain’t happening any time soon.
Shrine of the Sacred Eclipse 