10 Images That Completely Killed The Magic Of Gaming

2. "Unable To Connect To The SimCity Servers" - SimCity

One of the great fading joys of gaming is that it's instant gratification at the press of a button, though with our increasing reliance on the Internet, the offline experience is being edged out in favour of "persistently connected" gaming, which is basically a sneaky means of Digital Rights Management and naturally not too reliable. Take last year's massively-anticipated SimCity, which going by Maxis' track record with the series probably should have been one of the greatest games of the year. But what happened? DRM ruined everything, as the game's requirement to be always-online, and Maxis' servers failing to handle the player load, rendered the game glitchy and unplayable for the majority of players. There are few things as a gamer that are as annoying as trying to play a game and being met with such an arbitrary, unnecessary brick wall. It dampens our enthusiasm for the game, and in the case of SimCity, pretty much killed the game's player base off entirely, and it wasn't until around a year later that they finally granted those who remained an offline-only patch. Though Maxis created a vibrant world we couldn't wait to dive into, it wasn't much use when it was such a struggle to remain connected for more than 5 minutes.