As ever, I've been spending every lunch hour (and the odd evening) playing FM 2013, working to build Barcelona into the force it used to be before the previous manager let the team fill with OAPs. This goal has been partially achieved. I won the Spanish Cup and La Liga in my first season, but sadly crashed out of the Champions League after the group stage - probably not a huge surprise given that the aging players simply couldn't cope with such a busy schedule.
Still, I managed to add a few mid-20s stars in January, making it a good first season. In pre-season now I'm building the team, adding a string of high profile players (a new striker cost me £110m, but now I've got two 4.5 star forwards, one 4 star, and one 5 star-potential kid) and some solid reinforcement at the back. It's crazy that I've spent about £500m since taking over, but it was needed if the team was going to stay competitive as I've had four players retire and two see their stats plummet as they are past their best. In the crazy economy I'm playing in, no one with 3 stars can be bought for under £50m.
Time flies when you're having fun - and as I learned after calling in one of the game's disasters, Sims fly away when you've got a fire-breathing monster on the loose.
At the risk of getting in an early flip-flop, I enjoyed my time with SimCity greatly - the interface makes city-building intuitive, and Maxis' neat little touches, like police responding to robberies, or commuters waiting at bus stops, really do spring the city to life.
But I also left feeling a little nervous over its long-term appeal. My main concern lies with the size of your real estate. Each city seems far too small to allow for any real creativity, and I found that once I'd laid down my initial road layouts, I was often left with very little breathing room for future expansion. Because you can't expand outwards, you're forced to remove roads and smaller buildings to make room for larger, more impressive constructions or transport routes. And nobody likes tearing their city down, especially when it already seems to be working rather well.
EA's answer, it seems, is to encourage players to create new cities. But that's not how I, and I dare say you, would want to approach a game like SimCity. I'd much prefer to spend hours within a single city, building its districts and watching it flourish than being made to start again elsewhere.
It's terrific, then, but at this stage, SimCity's scope appears to be slightly more limited than I, and I'd wager many others expected.
My Dota 2 obsession took a turn for the nasty this week, as we gradually creep closer to the amateur tournament that I signed up for with a group of friends. The game hasn't stopped being tremendous fun, but it's only now that I'm starting to realise it's closer to being an actual sport. We've all been assigned different roles to play, and failures to perform have seen tensions running high. I'm pretty sure we're at the bit that's like the 'act 2' of a feel-good movie, and we'll eventually come together to prove ourselves stronger like that famous Jamaican bobsleigh team. Either that or our lucky egg will end up smashed, and we'll never want to talk to each other again. It's incredibly exciting, but I'm also quite stressed.
Playing Strike Suit Zero on the Tuesday Live Stream was quite a lot of fun - especially when you unlock the crazy Gundam-style suit - but I'm probably fonder of indie game 10,000,000, the first game I chose to cover as part of our new weekly video feature INDIE FACE. I flipping love a good puzzle/RPG hybrid game. Maybe it's time to revisit Puzzle Quest?
After finally managing to track down a copy for less than the 13 trillion dollars (approx) it costs on PS Store, I've been spending most of my travel time playing this. It might not have all the features of the home versions, but on the pitch it's as good if not better. And any game that enables me to put the boot into Arsenal any time, anywhere is a winner.
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