Simcity free game

Hello all,

EA are offering a free game to those who have activated their copy of the latest Simcity as compensation for them messing up the servers.

This is the list of games that you can choose from:

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
MOHW (Standard Edition)
NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

Now, I already have BF3, which puts that out

I'm quite interested in Mass Effect 3, but have never played 1 or 2 and I'm wondering whether that would make a difference to my enjoyment of 3 - I understand the story in 3 can be dependant on what you did in 2.

What else from that list would be good to get for free?

-Steve.

Yea I saw the email last night from EA / Maxis. Good stuff, really happy about this considering I only bought Sim City on Sunday and most the issues are gone now! I am going to take Dead Space 3 for sure, it looks like good fun

I wasn't going to buy Simcity at all. My wife pre-ordered it last summer for my birthday and didn't mention it until it turned up and she gave it to me a few days ago.

Like you said, it seems most of the problems have been sorted, so I'm doubly liking her gift!

I'm not much into "horror" games (although that might be 'cos I've only played one of the early Resident Evil's on the WII - perhaps not the best introduction to the genre), so I'm leaning away from Dead Space 3.

-Steve.

I got Bf3 even though i already have it on console purely because i know it looks great on a half decent system!!
My only other consideration from the list was Dead Space 3 but felt that would be more suited to a console so stuck to what i know lol.

I wish Sim City 5 to be be free

I'm a bit bored of it already I can't get my city past 260,000 people, I have got a region on the go with some friends and we have a population of about 1.6 million now which is nice and we have built an Arcology great works site. I've setup a couple of other tiles to try different things like tourism and stuff but now I can't do anything else really as my city can't grow any bigger. The tiles are too small I think, I want to be able to get to 500k - 1 million.

I never really liked the game when it came out for the Amiga/ST/C64 - I just don't see any point to it, beyond looking at nice graphics...

Pretty much the same with Elite too (I did dislike that)...

It's good fun at first as you can build a city focussed on tourism or one on industry or a space program etc. and it is a challenging game as it's hard to keep everyone happy, have enough public services to go around and have no traffic issues (which is always a massive task).

Bigger cities would help, I'd agree. I got close to 300k population before things started going wrong and now it's stuck around 260k as well. But I think that's down to not enough recycling making people sick - which hopefully will get better now that recycling centres seem to have been fixed.

Building up multiple cities in a region is something of a substitute, but only being able to run one city at a time if playing as a single player makes that frustrating too.

The most annoying thing I've come across, though, is having got a second copy (yes I wish it was free too!) so I could play with my son; we can't because I created his Origin account as a child account, which prevents him sending or receiving any friend requests...

-Steve.

Yea I have built a few cities now to focus them on different things and share the services amongst the region but still wish I could make one of them huge.

Yea recycling centres help, have you also made sure that you have the hospital that you unlock for buying the Department of (I forget the name now, the one for public services) then build a couple of wellness centres off it so you get the wellness vans. Also make sure you put a lot of the trees down that reduce pollution, they really help so I tend to put them between my skyscrapers.

That's annoying about the Origin account, how silly!