Sim City Build It

This isn't a game I thought I'd be so quick to blog about or even play at all.  Usually when I see phone games like this my mind immediately remembers complete rip off titles such as Dungeon Keeper or basically any free to play city builder for the phone.  Usually these games demand that you pay real money in order to keep up with the demands of the game OR ELSE it will fuck you for it and make it basically unplayable.  While Sim City Build It kind of does the first one, it doesn't do the second.

The aim of the game is simple, build a city.  You do this by purchasing residential areas, factories, government buildings, public services etc. and from there you just have to watch things grow.  This is a long running series that started life in 1989 and has sort of grown into one of those franchises that everyone with even a passing interest in games knows about.

SNES Version

The games have since been become extremely streamlined and very easy to get into.  I seem to remember Sim City being pretty hard to understand and manage back in the day but I played the original when I was VERY young so there is a chance that my memory is sullied by the fact I was just a stupid kid who knew nothing of city management.

Anyway the one big problem I have with the phone game is that it takes a long time to do anything.  For example, you level up by building residential areas and upgrading them, which in turn increases population.  Increasing your level will of course, unlock new features, which isn't a bad thing since it's sort of nice to have all the games concepts trickled to you rather than just having a big info dump and then saying "OKAY GO!".  The problem is, you need money to do anything and you get money by upgrading residences so you can't help but start levelling up and just when you start to think everything is fine BAM! it hits you with fire stations or sewage and you don't have nearly enough money to deal with these problems. 

So the only course of action is to halt all expansion and just sit and wait for taxes to roll in which of course is taking a hit because of the lack of the new thing it just introduced that you can't afford.  The pain of this goes away a little as you unlock things like a trade depot and cargo missions but it still  takes a while to get anything done.  That said though, having a building on fire or every member of your town shitting their pants due to no sewage system doesn't fuck you completely.  Your happiness will take a hit but with a little bit of patience you can fix the problem and be on your merry way.

Not bad for a phone game and great to just fiddle with between short tasks.  I'm actually surprised by how fun I'm finding it and the production quality on it is top notch.  Of course you can pay if you want but it's possible to get a fairly decent looking city without spending a penny and after that it's just patience.  It's free so it's not like you have anything to lose, go try!

Doing DRM Right

While I was staring at my Facebook last night I came across an article on the PCGamer website talking about a little trick that the developer of a game called Game Dev Tycoon played on it's user base.

For those that want to read the whole thing, you can find it here http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/04/29/indie-development-sim-game-dev-tycoon-gives-pirates-a-taste-of-their-own-torrenting/

For those that just want a quick summary, the deal is that in this game you run a team of game developers.  The idea is that your supposed to make games and make money to build a decent game development company.  At least I think that's how it works, I've not actually played it.  Anyway, the developer released a cracked version of the game to torrent sites where if you had torrented the game, after reaching a certain point all your releases would be pirated, you would make no money and go out of business.

This is fucking DRM done properly, it's not fucking over any legitimate players are is giving hilarious results to those that did pirate the game.  My personal favourite quote from that article was a screen cap of a guy saying "Can I research DRM or something?"

The other awesome anti-piracy measures mentioned in that article was Serious Sam 3s immortal scorpion that will chase you for eternity if it recognises a pirated version.

Although my personal favourite subtle DRM comes from Earthbound on the SNES, where if you were playing a bootleg cartridge it would ramp up the encounter rate and then crash and delete your save if you managed to get to the end.  Hell, even Metal Gear Solids "Meryls codec number is on the back of the box" was fucking genius.

Whats NOT cool is shit like Sim City and other crap "always online" DRM that does more harm to the paying customer than good.  Just look round the internet and see all the people raging at the "always online" rumours that were going around about the next generation systems.  People aren't mad about developers protecting their games from pirates, it makes sense that they want to be paid for their work.  What people get mad about is when we do support them and get fucked over anyway.

So try using these imaginative ways to stop piracy rather than just fucking over entire user bases of people because of paranoia about pirates.  Also, even if something does go wrong and paying customers for Serious Sam 3 somehow got the scorpion, at least you have a hilarious story to tell as you get it fixed rather than just being locked out of the game you paid full price for.