During your testing tenure in the original Portal game, you discover that GladOS is not the benign entity she’d like you to believe she is. She has some rather sinister plans. By the end of the game, you succeed in destroying GladOS, but you never get any cake.

The first thing I noticed about Portal 2 is that it looks even better than Portal did, and that it’s easier to play. There aren’t as many puzzles where you have to create portals while flying through the air. For me, that’s a good thing. There are also several more characters introduced in the game. Another plus is that this game now includes a 2-player mode where you and a friend can play as two robots designed specifically to test for Aperature Science.

So far, I really enjoy the game. My wife, who has already finished the game reports that it’s not much longer than the original, which is surprising, considering how much more it costs. But perhaps the 2-player mode will make up for that.

I’ll post more after I’ve finished the game.

My first shock was when I loaded up the game and started it up. It was incredibly slow! The mouse didn’t even move at more than a snails pace. Now, I’m using an nVidia 6600 video card on a 3.0 GHz Pentium with 2G of memory. I’ll admit, it’s no quad core, but my venerable computer still has a bit of juice. But apparently, not enough juice for SimCities Societies.

I went to the options panel, to turn the graphics on low, and suddenly heard a single loop of music playing over and over again, telling me that my computer was locked up. Again, I tried all the usual stuff, including Ctrl-Alt-Delete and swearing vigorously. In the end, I had to power off and reboot my computer.

On my next attempt, I turned all the graphics down to low, but figured I could run my usual menagerie of programs. Windows XP is supposed to be a multi-tasking operating system, after all. But, fifteen minutes later, I was rebooting again.

I gave it a rest for a few days. I didn’t want to do anything drastic, like throwing a computer monitor at the wall.

Today, I tried again. This time, I turned off every program I could get to, except the browser and the anti-virus. Things looked good for about an hour. Then, once more, it crashed and my computer became completely unresponsive.
I’ve been around for a while, so I’m no stranger to games failing to work out of the box. I performed all the usual voodoo. I upgraded my drivers, I downloaded the patch, more on that later, and I shut down every program on my computer except for my browser and my virus checker. No matter what I did, my computer locked up sooner or later.

I loved Maxis. One of the reasons I loved them was that they made great games and I almost never had problems with them. The people there really seemed to want to build fun interesting software. I especially enjoyed SimCity and subsequent titles. I even enjoyed the series after Electronic Arts, EA, bought Maxis, for a little while. But it’s been clear for some time, that EA doesn’t really care about much more than profits. And on this game, apparently they didn’t believe there was any particular reason to ensure it would actually run properly, before shipping it.

Now, I’m not unaware of the difficulties facing software publishers. The PC platform is difficult. There’s all kinds of different hardware and configurations, not to mention all the different versions of Windows. But, you know, somehow, everyone else seems to be able to write programs that work on my computer. And few of the other software publishers I deal with are nearly the size of EA. Yet, with all the resources at EA’s disposal, they can’t get this software working correctly on my machine, even though they are on patch #2.

Worse, it appears they shipped the software, knowing it was incomplete. The latest patch includes 3 “new” game modes, that actually turn SimCities Societies into a game, rather than just a sandbox, which is what it was, before.

It’s too bad, because the game does look like it could be a pleasant enough experience. As in the old SimCity, you build a town and have to manage resources. Buildings generate or consume varying amounts of productivity, creativity, spirituality, authority, knowledge, etc. You can steer your society towards any of several types of civilization. It’s disappointing that I can’t tell you more about it.

I don’t know who to blame, for sure. It could be sloppy programming, poor quality assurance, inept management, or a combination of all three. It’s even possible that this program works fine for most people, and I’m the only one who has a problem, although a brief perusal of their boards indicates there are plenty of others who have a non-functional game, as well.

This reminds me of the way Detroit was building automobiles back in the 1970s, when they were absolutely sure that they had complete control of the market and didn’t have to worry about any of those pesky foreign companies. I’ll keep hoping that EA learns their lesson and starts producing software worth buying. For the moment, though, I would recommend staying away from this particular game.