For the past eight years Choice, Australia’s biggest independent consumer organisation, has been running the Shonkys — an awards ceremony that names and shames Australia’s ‘shonkiest’ products and services. The Shonkys are taking place right now and EA Australia has just won an ‘award’ for its handling of the debacle…

Word is that SimCity plays better these days. But it's safer to just wait for a sequel and not step back into early 2013's messy metropolis-builder, right? (Well, "smallish-city-builder," if we're being accurate, but you get the idea.)

The good news is that SimCity will soon be allowing user-generated content. The bad news is that EA is looking to place so many restrictions on what you can actually mod that it seems almost pointless.

SimCity had one of the most catastrophic launches in video game history. Even after the server problems went away, fans slowly found out the game was a city-building mirage, with many key features and mechanics simply not working. Somehow, at EA, this qualifies as a "success".

I've seen some very similar responses to today's Xbox One news, whether it be the mandatory 24-hour "check-in" or the restrictions on game lending. It's a defensive sort of reply, brought up by somebody who doesn't see the news as downright terrible.

Originally slated for a June 11 release — that would be this coming Tuesday — EA and Maxis have pushed back the Mac version of SimCity to an unspecified date in August because, as senior producer Kip Katsarelis tells it, "we do not believe it is ready for primetime yet." Thank goodness for foresight.

SimCity's latest v3.0 update has added an exciting new feature to the game: a disappearing or erratic mouse cursor.

Meet the Rogers. They live in that tiny little house. One of the first families to move into my burgeoning metropolis of Windfall Islands, they are stalwarts of the city, having stayed in the same spot, in the same house, for what feels like an eternity.

Nevermind the bugs: the folks behind SimCity say it's doing just fine.

Will Wright created SimCity. Will Wright did not work on the digital clusterfuck that was is the 2013 version of SimCity, though, so what did he think of the game?

This week, hopeful eyes turned to SimCity as the troubled city-building game received its first major patch. Maxis has promised that SimCity 2.0 would fix a number of problems in the game, but it sounds like the 2.0 patch has also brought with it a raft of new, equally annoying bugs.

Never write a question in a headline if you don't really want people to answer the question, but there it is. I'm wondering how stupid I should feel for playing the new SimCity day after day last week—while I was on vacation! Especially since I was getting angrier about the game day after day.

One month ago today, EA and Maxis released SimCity into the wild. The game's launch was… troubled, to say the least. In fact, you could very easily call it a disaster. Server woes, a debilitating online requirement, AI shortcomings, lost cities, and slow customer-service left many gamers angry.

Misinformation. Server errors. Fan backlash. Since EA launched SimCity two weeks ago, the online city-builder has been nothing short of a catastrophe for everyone involved.

If you register a copy of SimCity by March 25, you get a free copy of one of eight PC games from EA's catalog, including Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

Last week, two of our writers played SimCity and deliberately turned off their Internet connections, both finding their games continued normally and then abruptly ended after 20 minutes. Someone now has posted what appears to be code for the game that orders a shutdown after a disconnection exactly that long. That…

Stop holding your breath for an official offline mode for the new SimCity. It doesn't seem like you'll be getting one, perhaps ever.

This video from Maxis' Guillaume Pierre demonstrates the in-progress fixes for the game's traffic congestion problems.