Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mailrus!iuvax!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!sapg0386
From: sapg0386@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: SimCity RipOff
Message-ID: <111900102@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 89 01:56:00 GMT
References: <111900101@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Lines: 43
Nf-ID: #R:uxa.cso.uiuc.edu:111900101:uxa.cso.uiuc.edu:111900102:000:1903
Nf-From: uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!sapg0386    Dec  4 19:56:00 1989


Judging by the mail I recieved, bad disks are a big problem.
Almost all my mail says to just take the disk back
and don't gripe.  Many people were outraged and insulting.
This defensiveness makes me think that it really will take
legislation to solve the problem.

How unfortunate.  

That is just the kind of attitude that is
eroding public enthusiasm for home computers.  If that disk had
worked I probably never would have got around to reading their 
warranty--which turned out to be one of those "sold AS IS" things.
This is another practice that is chilling the public.  Their documentation
was bad too--in particular it didn't describe what was actually
happening on my screen.

I took it back and got a disk that worked.  I can only say that
the sometimes so-called simulation and sometimes so-called game
is as disappointing as the so-called warranty.  A bug surfaced
in the very first city I ran (after a tornado took out part of
an industrial square it proved impossible to bull-doze away the 
two little undestroyed sub-sectors that remained).

But it is the childish simplicity and baby-talk interface
that really turned me off.  I would never have known that this
thing was aimed at not so bright high-school age kids or lower 
from the reviews I read.  I guess those reviewers have to write
happy-talk hyperbole to keep their jobs.

Something as simple as an alarm that 
goes off whenever your popularity falls below a certain level would
have made it twice as much fun.  There must be dozens of little trivial
improvements like this that they over-looked or what is more
likely, cunningly left out in anticipation of simcity II.  Indeed
they already offer me the chance to buy a terrain editor -- and given
the really poor quality of their automatically generated terrains,
a lot of people probably do.

Well, I got a disk that worked, but I should have got my money back.


- steve pax