Downtime

This last week has been full of sever issues for nerds across the board.

First came Simagedon, in which tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of would-be game players found their copies of SimCity unplayable because of lag. They reacted as any modern-day human would, by having a shit-fit on the internet. There’s nearly 2,000 negative reviews for the new SimCity on Amazon.com. The words, “Shit,” and, “Fuck you,” are in there quite a lot. Think about how often people take the time to actually write reviews on a retailer websites. Most products only get one or two, no matter how popular the item is. SimCity has 1,800 and growing: all bad. It’s close to becoming the worst reviewed thing ever. Even the Titanic got better reviews, and I’m talking about the ship, not the movie. Amazon temporarily even took the game down off of their site because of the server issues. This comes at the worst possible time for EA, who is still reeling from massive consumer hatred over issues stretching from their use of DRM to the ending of Mass Effect 3. They were voted the worst company in the world last year. Worse even that BP, who spilled countless barrels of oil into the ocean.

Today, and yesterday, a company doing something positive for fans ran into a similar problem. Marvel up and dropped 700 free comic books on comixology.com, a free site with paid content. Users could download various titles, mostly classics and #1 issues, freely and legally and read them on a variety of devices. The offer was only for a limited time, however, and the unexpected surge crashed the servers. I couldn’t even log in to see my loot until this afternoon. The offer has since been put on hiatus while they deal with the influx, but the site is still experiencing connectivity issues. The idea of free comics, or certain key comics entering public domain has been tossed around for a while. There’s Free Comic Book Day, (May 4th, also known as Star Wars Day), where you can pick up special free issues at your local comic book shop. Most nerds have taken to illegally downloading comic books, which is forcing comic publishers to seek revenue from other sources, like movies and merchandising. That’s fine for the big two, but it hurts the little guys. Now there’s a move to make a Netflix style service, where you can pay a monthly subscription and read to your heart’s content.

Me, I’m still having massive problems with Halo 4. I don’t know if it’s just me, or everybody, but I keep getting disconnected. Even if I’m able to finish a match, it doesn’t register.