runescaper

Cityville is a great game if you are not someone who loved the original SimCity and followed its logic to build a high towered city. The Cityville beta now available on Facebook actually allows someone with a large network of gaming friends to leverage an advantage. Heavy money investment in Cityville payments concretely will improve building pace. Finding people to play Cityville with you will be limiting for that reason.Thus far not one single invite of mine for staffing my city offices has been returned.

I feel the likely players of Cityville are already monetarily invested in Mafia Wars and Farmville. The reason I got excited about Cityville was that i could for once get in the ground floor of a game from launch onwards and not be catching up with everyone. But not one single person in my network of friends or family is playing Cityville. They are however experts in Bejeweled Blitz and Mafia Wars. If the introductory experience for these people to dial into the Cityville game is like mine was, they have since left for greener pastures.

But the playability of the game has several roadblocks which need to be addressed. And filtering through the background is that while the actual game play is stilted and jerkiness is almost inconceivably intolerable, the need to expose personal data on FaceBook to yet another subset of people. But is it worth making Facebook friends just to play this game? The experience just draws deeper into the online checkbook. Cheesiest of all is the opportunity to win coins and bucks (here are two currencies, stupid and confusing) participating in those same BS offers you see on ringtones sites and movie download ads. Subscriptions, offers, etc.

Cityville is such a blatant pay-to-play experience I wonder why anyone would bother, when WoW and Runescape and every other MMORPG has a free to play option. Cityville is free to play but F2P players will be left behind others who will spend money on buildings flowers and new expansions. There is no cap on expenditure in sight, paired with the roping in of other people for any elevation in city rank size or population. That's like putting a baby in a cage with poisoned milk and no diapers, frankly. Nothing is going to go in without making a bigger mess on the far side of the exercise. Bigger community allowances only lead to other limits that require more money and more people to staff the community.

The music is annoying and cloying, and turned it off almost immediately. Contrast this with the old-style jingle of SimCity 2000. It's been ten years of computer programming, and this game plays much worse than a SimCity standalone installation running on enhanced Windows underneath XP or Vista. That Cityville as a game has mechanics that suffer from comparison at any level, let alone most of them, with a ten year old EA title is pretty sad. Some of the options don't even work. I had three different types of reminder popups telling me to build structures I had already finished, the logic of the game does not inform it of actual live game data. Faulty mechanics, no player/Facebook member saturation, and dependence of progress on random other people for support render this game a real time waster.

Cityville has no way to disable pop-up menus, which disable almost every other active play and click going on. Collecting rent, for example, matures a couple of money and XP rewards after the space bar fills. Since many of these are time sensitive based on immediately previous actions, the player loses out on bonus XP and special prizes because three different versions of the "spend money" sign has to pop up. That's real downer at best, and a teeth grinder at worst. The immediacy of almost any Cityville action to revert to the "do you want to buy more game" is about 95% in the first 9 Cityville levels.

I found myself getting a sore arm stabbing my mouse at the same point in the screen past 4 popups to capture extra HP. The game simply won;t execute that fast. This is nine times more complicated than it needs to be. Unlike the social element of Runescape, there is nobody to talk to or play against. I don't believe I've ever had to work all three mouse buttons in the margins and file menus of the Facebook just to loosen the former command off the mouse. Reselection of other point and click options does not fix this.

Unlike skilling or quest games that deliver rewards for hours of leveling up or grinding away at a specific activity, the timers for the various events in Cityville occur with realtime binding. If you plant strawberries now, you better have enough energy to harvest them when they become mature plants. Or the plants will wither if you don't tend them and harvest them when grown. but you can't see them because so many taskbars overlaying menus, pop up menus and unwanted other features and reminders crowd the screen. I can't believe anybody played this game that worked at the Zynga company, because nobody would think this was cool or fun to do.

Unlike SimCity, there is no pivot axis. Entire squares of the game grid are hidden behind other structures. How on earth this will function when the game blocks start building taller I have no idea. The screen jerk is so bad on this game you have to simply close the FaceBook tab and screen and relaunch from the browser out to place elements or navigate at all. I won't be doing this much more. Any app that can't hold a mouse reliably is very suspect to my use. most of the needed things are not available at the current level, trapping the player with nothing to do but check out. And information about how to make the game work better is not forthcoming. Putting flowers next to buildings is a waste of urban space, where more shops should be. Around level 10 the player gets a hint this would have been a good idea 5-6 levels ago.

Some kind of reward bonus program keeps popping up and cannot disable it. I miss harvesting two lots of strawberries because the red exclamation mark (indicating they are grown) is hidden behind three "bonus program" bars I neither want nor need to see. Clicking to get rid of them is merely starting another three back-to-back requests, reminders, and alarming shouts to buy more energy. With my own money.

A sad face reminds me how unhappy my city dwellers are. Well, join the party. Playing Cityville feels like playing blind man's buff with your credit card running attached to a ticking bomb. If storage, new building, zoning and energy are uncontrollable without using my credit card, I am not a long term player of this game. I would wish that email alerts telling the game player that 90% of their crops were about to expire while they slept would be sent, but that would be annoying too.

Cityville the game follows a different kind of logic. Far from a cross-platform game (which would be very fun to play) this game is so dependent on incoming money payments and garnering FaceBook contacts getting beyond very basic levels in the game without tapping dozens of your friends for fake "positions" in your community is impossible.

And then we have the neighbor interactions. Plotting a franchise or harvesting a crop in a neighboring city is one of requirements of completing the pastry cook tour. You'll know this because endless popup reminders tell you so. But the other city is just as nonresponsive to controls. And it does not seem built to any city building logic. Smack in the middle of the city is a street-enclosed fountain. Talk about urban blight.

The confusion and popups are needless. Can you say interactive tutorial, anyone? Waiting for the game to load even at this primary stage is very slow, even when there is barely any gameplay data to install. And around this entire game, FaceBook is trying to run, update, provision chat windows and load ads and reminders and invitations. If you have a deathwish instead of real gaming to do, enter this game.

And email me so we can be Friends. I've got over 50 positions open.