A video examination of EA's advertising platform masquerading as a city simulator.

This is the second in our series of reboots that need the boot. We looked first at Alien vs. Predator. The third installment releases Sunday on Ars Technica.

There is a small handful of game series that I've sunk thousands of hours of my life into. The most enduring of them all is SimCity, the city simulator. A considerable chunk of my gaming career has been spent building large, sprawling metropolises: zoning land, redesigning transport infrastructure, balancing budgets, building public amenities, and occasionally burning the entire thing to the ground.

As much as I loved the series, it was long in the tooth. SimCity 4 was released a decade ago and though it remains to this day an enjoyable game (especially with third-party modifications) its age is readily apparent. The graphics look a little stale, there are performance and compatibility issues, and it lacks features that people want, such as co-operative multiplayer city-building.

When a new SimCity game was announced, I was enormously excited. The games of old had always been constrained in various ways, and the early publicity promised an even richer simulation that lifted these constraints, enabling us to build far more realistic cities. For the first time ever, we would have curved roads!

What we got instead was Electronic Arts' newest advertising platform. Riven with bugs, broken by design, and nothing more that a cynical ploy to exploit the SimCity brand to sell ads.