Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. With me tonight, we welcome back a couple returning guests. First, our buddy from idle thumbs and double-fine, Chris, welcome back to the show.

Thanks. Good to be back on Three Moves Ahead. And we also welcome back our friend, freelance writer, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello, thanks for having me back.

So today we're going to be talking about SimCity, which has obviously been all over the news lately for probably not the reasons anyone at Maxis really originally intended.

But there you go.

You know, we're not going to belabor the points about DRM and always online connectivity so much on

the show. We're really just going to be discussing how SimCity approaches the city building genre,

some of the choices it made. But you can't talk about that without also talking about some of the

region features that were that were sort of baked into the game.

So, you know, Chris, I thought I'd like to start with you, and you can sort of lead us into the discussion, and maybe talk a bit about, I saw you on Twitter the other day talking about your, you seemed really frustrated with the Sim City in that you could see the game it could be,

and yet you felt it like it was always sort of knocking on the door of that experience,

but never quite getting there.

Yeah, that's definitely how I feel.

It's funny having come to the full game after playing in the beta a couple times,

because I feel like at least the way that I was playing the

beta, which was in a live stream situation with Jake from idle thumbs, we, you know, we played

the game for an hour, you were hard limited to an hour in the beta. And I feel like that was just

enough time to not expose a lot of the things that I now find frustrating about the game.

Because you start from scratch and then within an hour, you've built up a city.

But you haven't really maxed it out.

You haven't, you know, we weren't doing any of the network stuff.

I don't even know if that was enabled in the beta, whether or not it was, we didn't do it.

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