A Cajun-Asian View

Frustration defined: EA Games.

For some reason, EA Games thought that an auto-save function wasn't important. And Sim City 4 had a habit of crashing to desktop on me after one to three hours of play. Talk about frustration when after working on a city for two hours, getting so into the game that you forget to save. So after you feel like your city is taking shape, next thing you know you're staring at your desktop saying "What the Hell?". Then the pressing doom of the fact that the work you did for the past few hours just went bye bye in the blink of an eye. Just like that, what was a very fun game becomes the target of ire. I'm surprised I haven't destroyed the game disks yet (like I did with another EA game, NHL 2001...). For many years now, I'd find the disks, go and install them, play a few hours, hit the CTD, then uninstall the game and throw the discs back into storage out of frustration where they lie forgotten for some time until the next time I find them.

Well, I finally found out why the damnable game keeps crashing: it seems to have problems on multi-core or hyperthreading systems, and I'm currently running an AMD quad-core system1. The fix is to set the affinity of the game process to only the first core. This could be done each time the game is started from task manager, but I downloaded a program called WinLaunchXP which allowed me to start the game with the affinity set to only the first core.

And it worked, beatifully. I worked on a city for about two hours, saving it often, then start working on a neighboring city. And of course, I forget to save on a regular basis...

So three hours later, it's time for me to go to bed. I click on the save button...

... and nothing. No hard drive activity. I can move the mouse, but can't alt-tab out of the game or anything. I walk away, drink a glass of water, come back, and nothing changed. The computer had completely froze, requiring a hard reboot to regain control of the computer. Open up the game, and yup, it didn't save.

Yeah, this was probably not the fault of Sim City 42. But was it too hard for EA Games to at least include an auto-save option? I don't care if I have to wait 30 seconds to a minute every 15 minutes or so for it to save the current progress, it's much better than working on a city for hours just for it to disappear in an instant. And Sim City is the type of game that will suck away hours of your life and make you forget about important things like, well, saving your progress once in a while.

Sigh...

Well, time for bed. This time, I'm not completely blaming the game for losing the progress I had on the city I was working on, so I'm not going to immediately uninstall the game. Maybe, I'll set some alarm clock to remind me every so often to save the city I'm working on, so I don't lose as much work when the game or computer inevitably crashes...

1. 1. Yeah, I've upgraded my dual core to a quad core. I may put forth more details in a later blog post
2. 2. though this is the first time I've I've seen this system hard-lock like that in a year and a half

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