A Tale in the Desert

An innovative idea that must be supported and which I will never play

Let me elaborate a little. There are two ways to look at everything. Pessimists on the left side, optimists on the right. Take your partners and swing on down...

To be pessimistic about it - this is a game with no point to it. It offers you almost everything that sim-city does, and then takes it away because it won't be YOU who invents things, or gets the monuments built. The basic game is a horrible interface onto a dull world, where you have to interact with other people to work anything out (and will they tell you?) or go out of game to cheat (and we all know how fun running things off of spoilers is) And then, when you finally think you've got things working, you go to sleep. And wake up eight hours later to find out that the big timezone has been busy, and the landscape is totally different, all the rules have changed, nothing you can possibly build is worth anything any more. Welcome to life as a drone.

You get to build, from scratch, your own world. You can change the rules, invent new buildings - and the programmers will make it happen. All taking place in a wonderfully rendered 3d multiplayer box. Negotiate with the other leaders of society to create your own paradise, in a year long adventure of pharoic proportions.

As you can see, I'm a pessimist at heart. The beta test went well, for a second beta there weren't too many client crash bugs, and the entire server only fell over a few times. But the game, well, sorry, the concept isn't something I can treasure.