After harping on EA for rushing out SimCity Societies I wanted to balance that rant out with a positive post. What better way to do that then to praise a game and a company for putting out a quality game. The developer is Firaxis, which was started by Sid Meier. He's the god of game-makers in my opinion. Nearly everything that this man has been involved in has turned to gold. Some examples are Pirates, Railroad Tycoon and most notably the Civilization franchise. (To see a list of all the games he worked on see Wikipedia.)

The game I'm praising today is Civilization IV Beyond the Sword. This is the second expansion to Civ IV but this "expansion" has more new gameplay features than most full version games. In fact they could have released this as a new Civ edition but decided that it would be better for gamers as an add-on. It's nice to see that a gaming company thinks about it's customers for a change. The philosophy they have is that making the gamers happy by keeping a great franchise great equates to a better bottom line in the long run. This is branding in the best possible sense. For customers, seeing the name "Sid Meier" means without a doubt the game will be good. For Firaxis and 2k Games (the publisher) it means great sales. What's the point in putting out a half finished game to keep your deadlines for investors if you end up pissing off your best customers and ruining the franchise and good name of Sid. If they did something like that it would surely mean the end of gamers buying a game on reputation alone.

I don't imagine any game ever coming close to the quality of the Civilization franchise. If any readers of this post have never played Civ, I encourage you to dive into Civ IV with the expansions "Warlords" and "Beyond the Sword." Granted there is a pretty steep learning curve but this is one game that is worth the hours of learning how to play. The replay-ability is endless as every game you start will turn out differently based on your decisions. This is the game God would play if God is a gamer.

One thing I hate about new pc games is all the big companies forcing games out before they're done. A prime example of this is the game Sim City Societies put out by Tilted Mill and EA. Now before I go off, I have to say that EA has put out some really great games, which I think they use to their advantage when a really bad game has been put into development and they need to get out to recoup the dev money.

Ok, so after purchasing Sim City Societies (SCS for short from here on out) - I had nothing but trouble with crashes. I'm a computer tech by trade and I can tell you it was not just my computer. I contacted EA support and they had me jump through hoops to try and get this game running again - to the point of the steps being silly. A game is not supposed to be challenging to it's player in order to get it to play...... I went on the SCS website and visited the forums. There were TONS of other people having the exact issue I was having.

Wouldn't it be easier to just fix the problem - and even easier to not release it until the bugs were worked out. In the long run they are hurting - not helping - investors by releasing these terribly buggy games.