I launched SimCity: Complete Edition last night at around 8 p.m. I played around with my new city, getting a feel for the controls, zoning for residences, commercial ventures and industrial centers.

I zoomed in and out to get up-close and bird’s-eye views of my own private Idaho (well, Squifton, if we’re being literal). I checked out the various data views, gave my city police buildings and power, water and fire departments. I added parks, more residential areas, roads and even created a neighboring city — a sleepy little hamlet that purchases power and water from the main city. Just a quick little foray into a game that I’ve been itching to play.

When I glanced up at the clock, it was three hours later.

SimCity has been plagued by server problems since the day it arrived last March, and despite a series of updates and patches, EA still hasn’t been able to find a complete fix. As a result, the company has reversed its always-online policy and announced it will be adding an offline mode.

When SimCity launched for the PC earlier this year, it was a total debacle. Huge swathes of players could not actually play the game they’d purchased at launch, because SimCity perversely required a persistent Internet connection to play. The result was that players experienced long loading times, constant disconnections, crashing and the loss of saved game data. It was such a bad launch that Amazon actually stopped selling SimCity temporarily in response to the criticisms.

Yesterday, SimCity for the Mac launched. And surprise, surprise! The Mac launch is turning out to be just as much of a disaster as the PC one!

EA and Maxis have today announced that their latest SimCity game is coming to the Mac on June 11, and pre-purchasing will begin tomorrow, April 11. The title will be available to download through Origin for Mac — which launched earlier this year — and those who have already bought the title on PC will get the Mac version for free.