Simcity articles

With over 200 million copies sold, The Sims is one of the most popular series in history, receiving a world-record number of expansion packs and redefining what's a game and who is a gamer.

There's just something about video games with an isometric viewpoint, isn't there? Something...cute about them. No matter how dark and brutal a game's setting and art may be, tilting a camera up and around makes everything look like an action figure.

There's a surprising amount of expectation for Colossal's attempt at fixing SimCity's mistakes. The good news first: If you play city-building games to, well, build cities, this is the best you can get. Never before have I felt like I could just walk up to an enormous tract of land, open up some tools and just... build whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Cities: Skylines is a gorgeous video game.

Although some decent games do poorly for no good reason, many titles are so headscratchingly bad that you have to wonder why the developer even bothered.

In the group of terribly bad games, there are the truly bad ones and then there are the big flops: those that have built an irredeemable amount of hype. Without further ado, here's our PC gaming hall of shame: games that weren't cancelled but should have been.

Normally when we benchmark a first person shooter, finding a good portion of the game to test with is simply a matter of playing through the game until we find a section that is rather demanding. But with SimCity things were considerably more complex and time consuming.

A city with few sims will see graphics cards such as the GeForce Titan or GTX 680 render massive frame rates because they are not being capped by the CPU (yet). As with most simulation and strategy games, SimCity is CPU dependent and overclocking should result in a healthy boost if needed. More inside.

To many fans of the original city building simulation series, the idea of an online multiplayer game that required even solo players to be connected to the internet at all times seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Maxis' latest creation is easily the most compelling SimCity I've played since the 1989 original. It's also a disaster.