In what appears to have been an accidental leak, popular digital distribution store Green Man Gaming has posted up details on the first expansion pack to hit Maxis' simulation title SimCity (via Joystiq).

Titled Amusement Park, the new expansion will offer mayors of SimCity the chance to lay down customisable parks which will include attractions and entrances. Those who do place down parks will also gain an increase in cash through shoppers, tourists and boosting the local commercial economy.

No price on the expansion was sadly revealed, however a smart YouTuber by the name of HypnotoadProductions was able to capture the page before it was taken down which you can check out below. Since accidentally going live, SimCity's official Facebook page has responded stating that "some of you may have seen thrilling new SimCity content that arrived too early at the gate. It’s coming May 28th. We think you’ll be amused."

After launching to a not-so-great-start, today's financial reports for publisher Electronic Arts has revealed the simulation title SimCity has sold over 1.6 million units since March, topping its initial two-week sales of 1.1 million. Of those sales 50% are digital according to the fourth quarter report.

Electronic Arts' Frank Gibeau has stated during the financial call (via Polygon) that while the game is "far ahead" in the company's forecast, it did have a "challenging launch."

"The short explanation for the launch is that the initial rush of consumers overwhelmed our game service, disrupting the consumer experience," he said. "As we stabilized the game and improved service in the first week, fans continued to pour in.

"The key takeaway here: SimCity is a highly resilient, global franchise with a long service life in front of it. But we learned our lesson and are now building better processes to anticipate and service demand. This won't happen again."

For those still clinging to their cities a new update will be making its way to the game this week, offering various tweaks and bug fixes to the game.

Developer Maxis will be launching update 3.0 for their building simulation title SimCity this week according to a new post on the game's official forums. The patch notes include a long list of fixes, varying from pollution changes through to trading fixes that make "gifting more reliable."

Among the changes included in the 3.0 update is a large list of traffic fixes, hopefully to fix the not-so-smart AI. The routing system has been tweaked to offer more information to vehicles through "u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types", hoping to make traffic "smarter" in the process. Vehicles will also be able to perform right-hand turns at red lights, improving "some cases of traffic." Fixes to school buses will also be fixed, hopefully eliminating congestion in neighbouring cities.

Trees have also been given an internal boost, now lasting longer but not eliminating as much ground pollution. Continue the pollution changes cities will also be a tad cleaner with sewerage taking "a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city."

Update 3.0 will mark the second major update since the game launched to a rocky start back in early March. For the full patch notes you can check out the forum post over here.

It seems SimCity isn't stopping at Nissan-branded Leaf advertisement, with EA announcing a new campaign with specially marked Crest or Oral-B products, though sadly only available in the US. On offer for those who do purchase the advertised-riddled products is an in-game Attraction Set, which includes five attractions: Giant Garden Gnome, Dolly the Dinosaur, Llarry the Llama, MaxisMan Statue and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

Similar to the Nissan Leaf advertisement, the Attraction Set will offer in-game happiness to those in proximity to each building, and will also act as a tourist point for your town. Interesting enough however is that those who do buy the branded products will be able to redeem the coupon for either the Attractions Set, The Sims Social SimCash, or a $5-off coupon for Origin. Those who don't want to purchase the branded toothpaste can also send a hand-written postcard according to the FAQ, which might be a way for Australian gamers eager to get their hands on the advertised content.

Via Kotaku.

EA and Maxis has today revealed that their somewhat controversial city simulation title SimCity will be making its way to Mac-orientated computers come June 11. Players who have previously purchased the title on PC will also be happy to note that you will gain a copy of the Mac title in digital form completely free.

“SimCity is coming to Mac on June 11 and one purchase will give you both the Mac and PC versions. You only need to buy SimCity once to play together across the same servers, regardless of which version you’re playing,” said Lucy Bradshaw, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EA’s Maxis Label. “We didn’t want to make any compromises when it came to the Mac so we created a native version that is optimized for the hardware and OSX.”

The press release also reveals that both PC and Mac players will be cross-compatible, allowing everyone to play on the same servers for maximum building efficiency. Maxis is also touting that the Mac version has been completely re-done in OpenGL, "ensuring the best performance for the platform."

Yesterday we saw the return of the "Cheetah" speed mode, allowing players to increase their city speed to maximum overdrive plus a translated leak at what is currently on offer in the upcoming Update 2.0 patch. Check those out here.

A new update on the official SimCity Facebook page has confirmed that the quite controversial simulation title has now enabled "Cheetah" speed, allowing players to further increase the games speed.

Previously the option to play SimCity at Cheetah speeds was disabled during the disastrous launch of SimCity, restricting players to normal or "Llama" speed. Developer Maxis responded to the issues at launch by turning off "non-critical" features which included leaderboards and achievements in an effort to help amend the performance issues many were facing.

The Facebook update has also revealed that Maxis are also working on Update 2.0, with a promise that more information will come soon.

Update: It seems an early look at the Update 2.0 has accidentally been revealed on EA's Czech blog, with a translated piece by Reddit user StSomaa. Here's a quick look at what to expect:

Tourism: Repairs unexplained fluctuations tourists - passenger numbers of tourists are now collected in a better way.

Casinos: Casinos adjusted so that it is more profitable gambling - to activate this enhancement is needed to demolish the old casino and replace them with new ones.

More casinos: Number of modules Sci-fi casino casino and neat rose to six.

Game in the region: bankrupt city may receive financial assistance from the city.

Education: Addressed an issue with buses that are stuck in secondary schools; existing schools are already corrected themselves.

Education: Fixed a bug where school buses picking up students in neighboring towns as well as the absence of bus stops.

Education: Better student population census.

The blog post also hinted at the update coming sometime soon though an official announcement will most likely be close by. Check out the full list of fixes over here and let us know your thoughts.

If you didn't think it could get any more interesting in the recent SimCity saga, EA and Maxis have today revealed the first DLC for the simulation title, a Nissan-branded LEAF Charging Station. Luckily the DLC is free for those who own SimCity, especially when it offers actual gameplay changes like permanent happiness for anyone who leaves the station and surrounding neighbours where placed.

Need an extra incentive to go green in SimCity? Maybe you need a little boost in the form of the new Nissan LEAF Charging Station that is available today. This free in-game item is the perfect way to kick start your desire to create a city that will make you (and your Sims) happy. In the case of your Sims, In the case of your Sims, the Charging Station provides happiness to the Sims that use it and a onetime wave of happiness to the nearby businesses. Need another bonus? It produces no sewage or garbage. That’s right! Green indeed.

The Nissan LEAF item is the Nissan LEAF Charging Station. The Charging Station will be a new destination in player’s cities where their Sims will drive their Nissan LEAF cars in order to re-charge them. Once they leave the Sims will find themselves happier.

Plopping down the Nissan LEAF Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles. The Charging Station produces no garbage or sewage as well making it pollution free.

This doesn't mark the first time that EA has dealt with in-game advertisement, previously the Sims titles have included various product placements including Nissan itself. It seems Nissan were only interested in a short advertisement with the offer available for six months starting today. Oddly enough the charging station uses no power, which begs the question on what exactly the cars run on.

Players interested in obtaining the free DLC can do so via the in-game advertisement billboard or over here.

Since launching just under two weeks ago, Maxis' latest simulation title SimCity has definitely had its round of controversial issues. Ranging from the troublesome launch which found many players unable to connect to EA's servers (and in some cases consistent crashing when able to connect) through to modders discovering developer mode tools which enabled further development of a city outside of its artificial zones, the launch of SimCity hasn't been the smoothest that EA and Maxis were hoping for.

Today EA has revealed the full list of free games on offer through their Origin download service, a offer given to those who have purchased the SimCity game in hopes of mending the bond that Maxis believes they have betrayed. Currently eight games are on offer, however two of the eight games (SimCity 4 and Bejeweled 3) will automatically be given to those beneath the minimum age.

Our SimCity Mayors are incredibly important to the team at Maxis. We sincerely apologize for the difficulties at launch and hope to make it up to you with a free PC game download from Origin.

At Maxis, our studio values dictate that we innovate and create something that is quirky, complex and challenging. Sometimes this bites us in the butt, but our servers are green and we’re seeing record numbers of players all online and having a great time.

On offer for those who have purchased the SimCity title before March 26th is Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition), Bejeweled 3, Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition), Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition), Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition), Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition) and Plants vs. Zombies. Interesting enough is also the offer of SimCity 4, the predecessor to the new SimCity title which gives players the chance to play singleplayer in a completely offline experience, without the hassle of any DRM or server connection (something that Maxis has said isn't possible)

Players who have redeemed their game before March 26th will receive an email detailing instructions on how to obtain the free PC download title, with EA opening up the redemption portal country-by-country, with March 22nd having anyone being able to pick their game. A FAQ is available for those with more questions then answers over here.

With the launch of SimCity past us and the many issues revolving around server congestion and crashes at an almost minimum level now, the sights have turned to the title's gameplay. Many players have since discovered that the AI used in the game isn't the brightest, with the largest problem being the simulation of traffic and how easy it is for your city to burn down due to this problem.

In a new update on the official blog, SimCity lead designer Stone Librande has confirmed that the team at Maxis are well aware of the congestion issues, and that they are "working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city." Librande also explains just how the new GlassBox engines works in respect to the AI, and that an internal patch is in the works to hopefully fix these quite crippling problems. You can also check out the video below of an internal change to the traffic which should give a bit of relief to those with traffic problems.

We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.

The blog post also goes into a fair amount of detail into how exactly the Sims - the actual residents of a city - work and just how persistent they actually are. From playing the game it is clear that only certain features are actually tracked between Sims, something that Librande touches on by explaining that "happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are [...] persistent", but also revealing that they "don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment." It's also noted that certain other fluff features are not present, such as gender, names or race "in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city."

Librande has also revealed that the online features that were turned off last week to help battle server issues are now being slowly turned on, and asks players to try out the test server available for continued assessment.

The SimCity news doesn't stop there though, as several modders have discovered through reverse engineering that is indeed possible to have a fully offline city, albeit without the social interactions that the online experience gives. According to a user named AzzerUK on Reddit, the modder has discovered that "with a little bit of package editing within SimCity thanks to the modding guide posted to Reddit earlier, and a little playing about in the code, it's possible to enable debug mode." Once this debug mode has been enabled, it can allow players to "mod out" the disconnect timer that would usually appear after roughly 20 minutes of being offline to the servers, causing an indefinite offline play. Discovery of several debug tools allowing the modification of highways outside of the city area through to terraforming tools and even cheat codes was also made through the modding files.

Modders have also discovered various other tools including the ability to remove the fake population that occurs once a city gains more than 500 residents. Other discoveries include mentions of "big maps" which could be possible DLC, ability to play outside the city region and behaviour for offline save handling which looks to have been hastily cut.

Currently Maxis or EA have yet to offer an official response to this modding discovery, however several Maxi employees have offered Twitter posts congratulating the modders, however also confirm that is unknown at this time whether modders will be banned or not. Stay tuned for more.

Since the launch early last week of EA and Maxis' latest simulation title SimCity, the game has been marred not just by tedious game bugs and server issues, but also by the consistent online-only connection that many believed was a necessary part of the game. Previously head of Maxis, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Kotaku and Polygon that the requirements for the online-only connection was due to the use of their cloud system, stating that "we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers", but also adding that single player would not be possible without "a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

According to a report from PC-gaming enthusiast site RPS however, an unnamed (and apparently verified) member of the Maxis development team has come out and supposedly clarified that this isn't actually the case, and that "engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort." RPS's source also states that the cloud-based servers are not actually handling calculations for non-social aspects.

The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

Recent tests by both Kotaku and Minecraft creator Marcus "Notch" Persson have also confirmed that players can continue up to roughly 19 minutes in-game without the need for an Internet connection, something I personally verified by simply pulling the connection plug. The only real issue that was found was when trying to interact outside of your city, which would cause the client to drop you citing server errors.

RPS report that while the servers are involved in allowing players to share the same maps and process imports and exports, they are also there for checking whether players are cheating or hacking. According to the rumoured Maxis employee however, this isn't actually done in real-time.

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Hopefully an official statement will be revealed soon to clear up the confusion, but until then all we can do is simply wait.