SimCity developer Maxis' senior vice president and general manager Lucy Bradshaw gave a brief update last night of the game's unstable condition, noting the company is "committed to fixing" the game. Would have been better if the game had been working in the five days since its North American launch, but what can you do at this point?

How about a free game? Sure. As recompense, on March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email (likely the one tied to their Origin account) explaining how to redeem the free game.

"In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent," wrote Bradshaw. "It's working - the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent."

She went on to say, "So we're close to fixed, but not quite there. I'm hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us."

As of this writing (8:46AM Eastern), we are still unable to access SimCity. We are told by the servers that it is either unable to load a city or we receive an endless loading screen - which is exactly what we stared at while writing up this post.