LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The goal of Sim City is to be a mayor and build a city. Actually, you control a region of several cities which can be played individually or with friends who also own copies of the game. Players manage everything from budgets to police departments to unemployment and zoning. Despite the seemingly boring premise, it's all actually great fun and beautifully rendered -- when it works.

Like millions of others around the world, I enjoy playing computer games on the rare occasion I get the time to play them, and like millions I eagerly anticipated the release of Sim City. Going into the buy, I was aware of the always online DRM and the fact that the game would not be available for download until midnight Eastern Time on March 5, which meant there would be a tremendous crush on their servers.

Logically, I expected some launch-day difficulty with installation. I also understood that I'd always need to be connected to the internet to play the title, but dismissed this since I enjoy a permanent internet connection into my home, as do most Americans.

However, I was unprepared for the shock I received yesterday when I sat down for my precious hour of free time. Although installation went smoothly, gameplay was fraught with bugs and crashes that forced me to repeatedly start over.

Going online to the troubleshooting forums, I found I was not alone. Distraught customers publicly posted hundreds of complaints decrying the quality of the product and the troubled release.

Electronic Arts has been rated the worst company in the world, beating out Bank of America for the number one spot. Gamers have a poor opinion of the company, believing that it willfully sacrifices quality and value for short-term profit. Naturally, if such a thing is true, then the company should eventually lose customers and go out of business. However, EA remains a good investment for shareholders, as the company's financials reveal.

Still, customers are disgusted.

Sim City received high marks in previews. A lavish marketing campaign drove sales and even persuaded me to pre-order the title. I was allured by the virtually unprecedented 90th percentile scores from professional critics across the board. Critics have uniformly praised the title as a refreshing reboot of the franchise, simple to play and complex to master, with pleasing, often humorous interactions.

However, those like myself who paid $60 for the standard edition and others who paid $80 for the deluxe edition, were far less impressed. In a time where most titles cost less, the price tag was steep, creating an expectation that this would be a premium title.

So far it hasn't lived up to that expectation. As of this morning, individuals on Metacritic, an review aggregation site, shows a professional rating of 91 out of 100 which it calls "universal acclaim" but a user rating of 2.7, "generally unfavorable."

Disgruntled buyers have flocked to the site to vent their frustration at a product that doesn't work out of the virtual box. Every title has bugs on day one, and for their first few weeks following release -- how can they not, with a virtually infinite number of permutations of operating environment out there? So some bugs are to be expected, but to have a product that absolutely does not work for thousands of customers is virtually unpardonable, particularly at the price paid for it.

Astoundingly, customers who contacted technical support complained of wait times in excess of ten hours just to chat with a specialist. Several posted screenshots of their wait time prediction as proof.

At the suspected root of the problem is the requirement that the owner always be online to play the game. Known as "Always Online Digital Rights Management" or DRM, the goal is to prevent software piracy by ensuring that all players are paying customers. To accomplish this, the game state is "saved" online every several minutes with the game presumably phoning home and verifying that it's a legitimate copy.

Electronic Arts has downplayed this to the press, saying that the new multiplayer feature of the game requires constant synchronization with other players to work, which is why it must constantly be connected to their servers to play. That's understandable. However, Sim City has traditionally been a single player franchise and most players have expressed dismay that the game isn't working for those who wish to play in that fashion. For myself, I have little desire to play the game with others.

Unfortunately, the constant "phoning home" is where the crashes occur. Many players report only being able to play for 5 to 10 minutes before the game crashes and they lose any progress they built. Worse, players cannot save the game on their own, so it's not possible to save the game each time you complete a minor project.

This is likely because the servers that EA ...