Last week we asked our readers if they believed that it really took EA Maxis six months of development time to change SimCity from an online-only game to an offline game that supported modding. The majority of you weren't buying EA's claim.

Around 79 percent of the 204 votes cast said that they did not believe that it took EA six months to develop SimCity to run in an offline mode. Only around 21 percent said that they believed the statement.

On this week's show hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the latest GamePolitics poll (SimCity's offline mode), the plastic surgery game that got booted off Apple App store and Google Play store, the changes made to the Steam Controller, and Nintendo's ongoing financial woes due to poor Wii U sales. Download Episode 84 now: SuperPAC Episode 84 (1 hour, 12 minutes) 83.3 MB.

Last year, Electronic Arts launched its new SimCity game and even though it is and always has been a predominantly single player game, the new title had no offline mode.  This decision was so unpopular that it's likely the major reason EA earned the Consumerist's Worst Company in America award for the second year in a row.

According to a new blog post over at the official site for SimCity, lead engineer Simon Fox says that transitioning the once always online city building simulation into an offline game has taken him and his team six months to complete.

Ten months after EA released its always-connected online-only SimCity game, the company has decided that it would finally make it so that players could build their own virtual metropolises offline. According to a post on SimCity's official development blog, the game will be playable offline next month after a major update.

Electronic Arts has released guidelines for what kinds of content the community can create using the new SimCity mod tools. To say that these rules put limits on the creativity of the community is probably an understatement. According to EA's guidelines the community is basically limited to cosmetic changes, such as reskins of buildings.

GlassLab has released SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge!, an educational game built using EA's SimCity to educate students in America about important issues. GlassLab collaborated with ETS, Pearson, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), and Electronic Arts to create the game-based classroom tool that uses elements from the SimCity franchise to engage students in real-world challenges.

GlassLab, a collaboration between Institute of Play, Electronic Arts, the ESA and others, strives to improve education through the use of digital games.  The lab's first game, SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge!,will be integrated into select U.S. school ciriculums next month.

In an interview with GamesBeat, EA's Frank Gibeau revealed a couple of interesting facts about the company. The first fact he revealed is that Apple was the company's biggest partner in the last quarter, raking in an estimated $90 million in app sales. The game that made the most money for EA on iOS devices was The Simpsons: Tapped Out. EA's sales through Apple's Store represented about 18 percent of its business.

When EA launched its online-only, always-connected SimCity game earlier this year, they insisted that the game just wouldn't work without the ability to let the cloud have access to all the game's data and computations. But if that's the case, then why is EA asking people about the possibility of an offline SimCity game?

A brand new update to EA's always-online city management game SimCity finally turns on some features that were turned off during the game's launch due to wide scale instability and connectivity issues. With those problems behind them, developer Maxis has been focusing on new content, and tweaking the game to make it run as smoothly as it can.

A new massive update for SimCity released on Monday has apparently added a number of new bugs, much to the chagrin of players who have taken to EA's forums and Reddit to complain about them. The new bugs apparently plaguing the game after the v2.0 update include city sewage overloads, new traffic errors, a number of building construction issues, loading errors, and a few audio problems.

The update was meant to address some issues with traffic congestion, pathfinding problems and a list of other minor problems.

It's been a while since the disastrous launch of EA's "always-online" game SimCity and things have calmed down enough that Maxis has turned "Cheetah" speed back on. Maxis had disabled the "fastest game mode" in SimCity on March 7 because the game's servers were having trouble staying online. Now that everything has calmed down a bit it has decided that it's safe to let players build their cities in hyper mode again.

Whatever anyone thinks of SimCity, the proof is in the early numbers, and those early sales numbers from the first two weeks of the game's release show that the game is doing pretty well despite a rough online launch week. EA said that during those first two weeks of release SimCity sold more than 1.1. million copies. The company said that the majority of those copies were sold through digital channels. This does not surprise me at all considering that everyone I asked today said they had made a digital purchase.

SimCity's "always-online requirement" may have irritated consumers at launch, but by most accounts anyone that reads this or any other gaming web site was well aware that the game would require a constant Internet connection in order to play (EA made that fact clear quite awhile ago).

On this week's show we talk about Congressman Frank Wolf's hearing this week to slam "violent video games," changes being made to the ESRB, the ESA's plan for a PSA campaign, the latest SimCity news, and the results of the latest GamePolitics poll. Download Episode 45 now: SuperPAC Episode 45 (1 hour, 12 minutes) 66.6 MB.

As much as EA and Maxis want to smooth things over with fans and make them happy, this latest blog post from Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw isn't being received very well, if you believe the comments following the article.

Stone Librande, the Lead Designer of SimCity over at EA Maxis has written a lengthy blog post over at the game's official site detailing some of the tweaks, adjustments and fixes that Maxis is working on.

A new SimCity mod detailed in a YouTube video and later explained in-depth on a Reddit thread reveals that it is possible to play SimCity offline indefinitely with a few important caveats. Despite those caveats the mod shows that the game can easily be transitioned from an "always connected" game to an offline single player game, despite what both EA and Maxis have said. According to modder UKAzzer he was able to do this with a little bit of work and by enabling the game's secret debug mode. This allowed him to turn off the disconnection timer limit.

Remember when EA and Maxis said that being connected to its servers was important because it handled a "significant amount of the calculations" for SimCity? Well it turns out that that might not be true if you believe the Maxis insider who offered some details on how the game really works. Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, an unnamed Maxis employee said that Maxis isn't being entirely truthful.

EA Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw took to EA's blog for three updates over the weekend to talk about the progress the company has made in making SimCity a bit more stable for players. In her first update on March 8 Bradshaw said that they had increased server capacity by 120 percent and that it had proven to help more people get in and play the game. Bradshaw also said that the number of "disrupted experiences" had dropped by roughly 80 percent."

Andrew Eisen plays a little game called Let's Try to Connect to SimCity and Play the Game. It's a game that was sweeping the nation this week, but unlike the hula-hoop or baseball, this week's American pastime was not that much fun. Check out Andrew's reenactment of what a typical SimCity player probably went through this week.

On this week's show, hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the first Tropes vs. Women video, "Bronies" and if rights holders should be a little kinder to fan projects, and the nightmarish launch of SimCity this week. Download Episode 44 now: SuperPAC Episode 44 (1 hour, 6 minutes) 60.4 MB.

EA Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw acknowledged in an internal memo obtained by Polygon that readjusted review scores and lower reviews scores coming in everyday is fair. Bradshaw admitted that, since SimCity is an online game, and the game is having trouble providing the service it promises, it is not surprising that it is getting bad reviews.

Well, the good news is that EA's official Twitter for its digital distribution service Origin has confirmed that you will not be banned if you ask for a refund on your purchase of SimCity in light of the fact that you probably can't play it.

The bad news is that you more than likely ain't getting that refund.

It's been a pretty rough day for both customers who bought SimCity and the developers trying everything under the sun to get it working at full capacity. While EA has been trying to solve the problem and get gamers playing the game, some fans have been very vocal about how the game's DRM has broken it beyond repair.