Forbes have published their latest list of the planet's richest people, and have declared Valve co-founder Gabe Newell the Newest Video Game Billionaire. Of the 1226 billionaires on the planet, Newell is the 854th richest with an estimated worth of $1.5 billion.

Valve keep their finances strictly private, so Forbes consulted "video game industry insiders, equity analysts, investment bankers, and technology analysts" for figures and factored in the tremendous success of Portal 2 and the continued growth of Steam as factors in their latest estimate.

"Even the most conservative estimates put Valve’s enterprise value at more than $3 billion," they say. Newell owns more than half of Valve, placing his estimated worth at the 1.5 billion mark.

Well done them. That is rather a lot of cash. They could probably pool all their resources and create a working Portal gun if they wanted to, but they'd probably rather make games.

EA Maxis have been talking more about next year's SimCity reboot, and the new GlassBox engine that's powering it. Just earlier we went inside the GlassBox engine to talk a bit about how the new tech will work differently to SimCity games of old, but there's even more good news. Shacknews sat in on a GDC panel in which Maxis confirmed that the new engine has been designed with modders in mind.

Creative director Ocean Quigley said that the new SimCity will use the "same package format The Sims and SimCity 4 used," which means it'll be more familiar to seasoned SimCity tweakers. "We know modding is hugely important to our community," Quigley said. "We know the reason why people are still playing SimCity 4 ten years later is because the modding community has kept it alive. GlassBox is built to be moddable, but beyond that we haven't announced anything."

We don't know if there's an official SDK in the works, then. Yet. Even without one, top modders will hopefully be able to tinker with the new engine's insides and bring us a new wave of add-ons and updates, so hooray for that. Have a look at the SimCity trailer for an early look at how it's coming along.

I didn't think I'd find myself writing that headline when I woke up this morning. There are big ideas behind the Bioshock games. The wars for Rapture and Colombia are battles between ideologies fought with bullets, each set in a fascinating, twisted dystopia. Never mind all that, though. No matter how smart your game is, there's always room for evil robot George Washington with a gatling gun.

The "motorised patriot" was revealed on G4TV, with comments from Ken Levine. "He's completely fearless," Levine said. "He doesn’t have a sense of self-preservation, so he’ll just keep coming at you and coming at you." Just like George Washington.

Update: There's a video! See the motorised patriot in action below.



Killing a motorised patriot will drop his massive weapon, called a Pepper Mill, worthy loot for a dangerous foe. "These are enemies that are used to not just be more powerful, but to augment the abilities of the more traditional BioShock enemies," Levine told G4TV. "You’re going to come across them in certain areas of the game, and they’re going to provide a really unique challenge."

"Unique challenge" is right. I don't recall fighting an evil robot George Washington with a gatling gun before, but games are mad, so it may have slipped my mind. Here's some concept art of the Pepper Mill and, below that, some concept art of the motorised Patriot, which would make a great Doctor Who villain.

Some games reward nosy players for their exploration with a pot of gold or a new sword, but a great view or an interesting place is so much more rewarding. That sensation of climbing up a gruelling mountain, coming over a ridge and seeing a gorgeous vista unfold before you is one of the things that games like Skyrim do so well. It looks as though Firefall is trying a similar trick. Mushroom rock is the perfect example of how to put a good view to good use.

Firefall will be free to play when it's out, but the only way to strap on a jetpack right now is to sign up for a spot on the Firefall beta. For more on Firefall, check out Mark Kern's impressive hologram powers in the last Firefall trailer, in which he also talks about Red 5's plans for rolling out Firefall.

At EA's Game Changers event yesterday, Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw confirmed that SimCity is back, and showed off a very pretty, but very gameplay-less, trailer. Today at GDC, however, Maxis went into detail when it unveiled the game's engine, GlassBox, which I also got a look at during a recent visit to the studio. Wow. Spore was certainly ambitious, and The Sims has reached incredible commercial success, but GlassBox may turn out to be Maxis' most impressive achievement yet.



The previous SimCity games rely on relatively high-level statistics to tell us what's going on--the pollution number goes up, so the happiness number goes down. GlassBox does the opposite. It simulates the little things--thousands of individual Sims--and lets the city mechanics emerge naturally. You won't have to look at a spreadsheet or graph to identify a crisis, because you can watch it all happen in real-time. Pollution will taint the soil and thicken the atmosphere with smog, Sims will get sick and fill the hospitals, businesses will lose employees, and everyone will be really ticked off about the whole thing.



Fire stations no longer provide statistical coverage--a fire truck must drive from the station to the scene of a fire, and the longer it takes, the longer the building burns. Every car and every pedestrian (which are referred to as "agents") is someone going somewhere to do something, and every traffic jam is the natural result of the patterns they create as they navigate your roads.

Creative Director Ocean Quigley demonstrated how agents operate by artificially populating a closed loop of road with vehicles and pedestrians.

"We’ve created all these people in here, and there’s no jobs for them, no houses for them, and no place to shop. They’re basically all miserable and would love to get out of here as fast as possible," said Quigley, as hundreds of his sadsack residents drove and trudged in an endless circle.

"So let’s connect their little maze to the outside world, and these people are going to abandon the city as fast as they can. So, all the little agents, they have an agenda, a mood, something they want to do. They hate it here, they want to get out, and so that’s what they’re doing."

Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.



Of course, if SimCity were an ASCII game, this wouldn't be quite as impressive. Lots of games feature detailed and intricate simulations. But it's not--every one of these agents is modeled, animated and dynamically lit. The engine's data is even detailed enough to play a different sound for a sedan turning a corner than it does for a truck approaching a stop light.

And, most importantly, everything you see and hear in GlassBox is really something happening in the simulation--it never creates ambiance for the sake of it. The jingle of a shop's door is a Sim entering, and the sound of a cash register is a purchase being made. A power plant's smoke puffs represent pollution entering the atmosphere, and the size of its coal pile represents its current supplies. When I saw all of this (and much more), happening at once, I really got the feeling that I was looking down at a tiny living world. So, wow. I think a bit of excitement for the project is justified, even at this early-ish stage of development.

But, of course, this is still an early stage (SimCity's release date is projected for sometime in 2013, and Maxis is only releasing concept art so far), and things can change. And while GlassBox is the foundation, there are all kinds of rules and systems that are going on top of it to turn it into a proper SimCity game, so there's still a lot to discover. We've got 8-pages of details in the May issue of PC Gamer US, which is on its way to subscribers, and will be on newsstands later this month. We'll keep you updated as development continues and more of our questions are answered.

In the Cambrian explosion of the Quake and Half-Life mod scene, many great game genres were born, survived and thrived - Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat. One of the few that failed to generate offspring, without quite dying, was Action: Quake II, a rapid, silly, pulp movie of a game, with ludicrous moves and all the tricks of a Hong Kong action movie.

The Showdown Effect is a crossbreed between Action: Half Life and Shadow Complex. Up to eight players enter a 2D side-scrolling action area, and battle it out. Their weapons are the standard tropes of 1980s action movies - uzis, Mac-10s, berettas, M16s, rocket launchers and their quips. (The team do plan to introduce stranger weapons, like laser guns and guided rockets later).



The game is extremely fast, with players running around the level and bouncing themselves off walls and doors in their rush to get the best weapons. Players can also slide, roll and generally have the uncanny athleticism displayed only by large middle-aged men in action movies. In the Neo-Tokyo level we saw (each setting, like Neo-Tokyo, will have multiple levels), they were free-running around an apartment block that seemed familiar from Hong Kong Hustle.

There are many guns lying around, but as these use up ammo quickly, almost every incidental object can also be used as a weapon, with its own lethality and uses. "We don't want you to pick up more ammo for a gun, we want you to throw it at the other person, and pick up a bar stool... it's important that you don't feel like you did this to get points, but did it because it felt right at the time." Beating a John Woo analogue to death with a broom will be deeply satisfying...



Given the fragility of their heroes, every player has a defense that can be activated and allows them to dodge incoming bullets - whether that's backflipping or just windmilling their arms, the bullets won't hit them as long as their meter has juice. The superb effects for these moves and the weapons are reminiscent of anime - and the developers cite Ghost in the Shell as one of their key influences for the look.

Each character, who mostly seem to be parodies of action characters, with names like The Stone Identity, will have its own personality and quips, and will be able to progress longterm in the game. Using these one-liners at the right moment is also important; these give you bonuses to certain actions. Sadly, they weren't implemented in the version we played, as the voice-acting hasn't been done yet. Beyond the simple Last Man Standing mode we saw, the team are planning various team modes, but none were available for us to play.

The Showdown Effect is looking like a light, fast lunch break game, throwaway and funny. Paradox are planning to release it in Q3 2013.

UPDATE: Notch has just got in contact, saying: "I said 'lost a single CENT!' Or at least I tried to say so. :D." We've clarified the story accordingly. We offer our apologies.

Notch has just finished his "Fireside Chat" with Chris Hecker at GDC. It sounds cosy, but that didn't stop the Minecraft creator taking on the thorny issue of piracy towards the end of the talk.

"If someone copies your game a trillion times, you won't have lost a single cent," said Notch. "Some people are using that to ruin the internet."

We can only asssume that Notch was referring to the SOPA legislation that rose its ugly head a few months ago. The billing would make it harder for pirated materials to be distributed, but would throttle our ability to share content on the web. Notch told us that "no sane person" would support it when we spoke to him in January.

"I still think piracy is wrong, but the the level of wrong me calling my friend an idiot. It's wrong but it's such a minor thing. It's ridiculously small," concluded the hatted developer.

Notch has expressed his liberal views on illegal downloading before. Andres Lea recieved a ;) after tweeting his intent to pirate Minecraft. The dev has also mentioned that pirates can be converted into paying customers if treated appropriately.

"It's an experience no-one's ever had before" says Matt Higby, Creative Director of Planetside 2. Then he frowns slightly. "well, except for Planetside players." He's just spent 30 minutes showing us impressive running battles across one of the continents in Planetside, with the support of 30 other developers. You can watch the footage here. It's when he points out that these same battles would normally feature between 300 and a thousand players that you blink.

First things first; it's free-to-play, funded by microtransactions. Despite SOE's earlier reticence in announcing this, Higby tells me that he doesn't imagine anyone will ever make an MMO that isn't F2P again; "I can't imagine why they would. It's going to be really hard to compete with this level of fidelity in a free-to-play game. I think most of the big successes in the last five years haven't been paid. The games that you hear aobut all the time are League of Legends, World of Tanks, Free Realms."



So, the in-game store is very much a (reskinned, more user-friendly) version of Team Fortresses - though with a lot more stuff. Like most of these games, it has in-game currency and paid-for (Station) currency, with game-affecting items only purchasable with in-game cash, side-graded weapons (which are minor changes designed to suit your playstyle - such as having a more rapid fire rate but exactly equivalent damage reduction). cost a mixture of in-game and Station currency, and purely cosmetic items (camouflage patterns, decals) are purely purchasable for real money.

But there's no necessity to buy any of this stuff to play the game. A quick reminder of what the game's about; it's a modern reconstruction of the original Planetside from the old team, with all the crap and chaff sheared away. There are no ANTs, no supply runs, no fluid classless system, no HART transcontinental air-drops, no mechs or irritating under-populated underground caves; there's just the core of the game, a variety of amazing-looking continents covered in military installations being battled over by the three factions. Those factions are the professional Terran Republic, the alien-tech Vanu Sovereignty and the bodge-jobbers of the New Conglomerate.

Higby and his team dive straight into a game demo, with Higby's goons mainly piling into tanks, while Higby gives himself the joy of flying his own Reaver. Old Planetside players will remember that the Reaver is the game's gunship, a slower plane designed for ground-to-air combat. It's interesting to note that, not only is Higby's Reaver customised to be hugely more effective against ground armour, but it's also been customised with his clan logo, its own camouflage, and that each faction has its own unique aircraft - which implies that the reaver is the New Conglomerate's airship.



To buy his Reaver, Higby accesses a terminal at his base, which shows the return of the Sunderer ground transport, Lightning light tank, the Vanguard heavy tank, the liberator bomber, and the galaxy, as well as a new small vehicle, the Flash). He lifts off from the base, throwing the Reaver all over the shop; "I do tend to make people puke when I'm flying," he explains. The base is a biolab, one of the many facility types, and is only capturable by infantry, to encourage combined forces when assaulting bases. It looks very much like one of the biomes from Sim City 2000.

To fly ships or wield weapons, beyond the basics, you need certifications which are earned faster during play, but also earned (like Eve) all the time you're offline. They also allow you to further specialise - for example, we saw that you can buy an acquisition-time reduction upgrade for the galaxy air-transport.

As he flies across to an ongoing battle, there's a touch of pop-up (especially on sharper turns) but this is still very early code. The dynamic clouds cast sunbeams and shadows across the landscape too, making it endlessly fluid. The combat we're watching is mainly tanks pounding away at each other in a wooded valley, with occasional infantry types getting flattened by the Vanu's faster floating Magrider tanks - and Higby's devastating gunship runs.



As the battlefield falls into darkness, the combat doesn't cease, though the infantry become at less of a disadvantage. The lightning and sound effects are still placeholder, but this night scene is pretty spectacular to watch, lit by the particle flare of Vanu lasers and NC tank fire. He tells me that they're also planning on introducing a satellite system, including stars and multiple moons. Higby performs a few more stunts, using the new PhysX real physics to good effect to barrel-roll narrowly around foliage, before flying to a new area.

This is a more desert area, complete with canyons, and is much less ground vehicle-friendly; the base here is smaller, mounted atop a mesa, with a road snaking down a ridge to another base. "It blows my mind how much effort it takes to make just a rock in this game" says Higby, "we're doing the exact same process that DICE uses to make Battlefield."

This time, when the column of tanks heads out (with Higby now driving a Vanguard) they have to be very careful not to topple over the edge. The column encounters light resistance as it pushes through a giant natural stone arch, before emerging on a plain with a Terran base in the distance. A few outnumbered Prowler tanks make a last stand, before the tank column rolls up to the base.



As an infantry-only area, the column dismounts and starts fighting from room to room. Higby hits the Auto-Join squad button to get in on the action, and immediately starts earning squad XP from his teammates involved in combat deeper in the base. Higby explains that they've tried to make the close combat as modern as possible, matching the advances of the last ten years of shooting games. True to his word, the combat is rapid and the base is laid out perfectly to allow flanking, and varied levels of combat. Higby, like many of the other drivers, is wearing light armour, which gives him access to jump jets (part of the special functionality unique to the new classes), so the NC spread themselves around the buildings and rooftops as they advance.

There's only one working Max in the game, the dreaded Terran Max, but the team feels he's far too powerful at the moment, so he doesn't feature in the base defense. "They're incredibly powerful, not balanced at all. One Max can kill eighty people... obviously, we're going to fix that." What does feature, though, is the Heavy Assault class, one of whom kills Higby several times while we're watching - Higby later admits to me that the Heavy Assault class is also unbalanced. "I hate it." he says.

Thankfully, a pilot has landed a customised Galaxy nearby, complete with respawn point and weapons terminals, so Higby doesn't have to fly back over from the base, eroding the defender's spawn tube advantage and meaning the NC finally push through the Spawn room and capture the base. The battle is won, temporarily.



"It always blows my mind that there aren't more MMO FPSes" says Higby afterwards. "I think you're going to see a renaissance of MMOFPSes, similar to after EverQuest shipped and there was new generation of MMORPGs... MMOFPS will be the 2013 equivalent of MMORPGs in 2003. Everyone will be making them... and they're really difficult to make, so good luck"

When you start Mass Effect 3, you don't pick a difficulty, but you do pick a mode: Action, Role-playing or Narrative. Role-playing is how we've played both previous games. But the other two are radically different.

Narrative mode makes all combat trivially easy. You can't skip it, exactly, but even standing in direct fire of multiple enemies, your shield is barely hurt and regenerates quicker than they can hurt you. Even the AI is different - enemies amble idly rather than trying to flush you out or surround you.

Action mode rips out the other half of the game: the combat stays the same, but you don't get to create a character, you have to play with the default male Shepard, you don't get to choose a class, you can't choose how you level up, and you can't even choose dialogue options - every conversation is just a pre-scripted cut-scene.

I actually think it's cool to provide options for radically different types of player. The narrative option in particular will open Mass Effect 3 up to a large and under-served group of people who are excited to explore the worlds games create and the stories they tell, but don't enjoy the challenge of combat. As hardcore gamers, we sometimes forget that even easy mode isn't easy for everyone.



Action mode is harder to appreciate. I would have thought that the kind of gamer who itches to get at the combat and doesn't care about the story would be the kind who wants to unlock cool new abilities. There's already an auto-level-up option in role-playing mode, if you want to skip the decision.

I'd understand better if it let you skip the story stuff, but it doesn't - as in all the other modes, you can only skip individual lines in certain conversations. Are there people who are allergic to choice? How much do we want to cater to that mindset?

I can hear myself being a jerk, here. I don't think anyone should begrudge the option of Narrative mode for the combat-averse, and here I am begrudging Action mode for the choice-averse. Really, I'm just disappointed it's not an Impatient Jerk mode that lets you skip anything and everything you want - something I'd actually really appreciate on a second playthrough.

Game designer at Square Enix, Francois Lapikas, has been talking Deus Ex: Human Revolution at GDC. We love that game. Tom even awarded it an outstanding 94%

Tom hates one bit of Human Revolution though: the boss fights. "They are terrible. And they cannot be avoided." he said in his review. "The game is so conflicted about this that there’s even a Steam achievement for completing it without killing anyone, which apologetically adds that boss fights don’t count." Ouch.

Unexpectedly, some of the design team agree. Francois has offered a sincere apology for the four bosses that featured in Human Revolution.

“We didn’t know what they were for. We saw them as a way to break the tension,” admitted the dev. But the fights weren’t designed until well into the game development and the team were pressed for time. “We figured by putting in enough ammo in the room, we would be fine and could move on... next time we’ll think about them more. They were a big part of the game and we should have put more effort into them. We are truly sorry about that."

Aww. Now I feel a bit sad too. How did you get on with the bosses in Deus Ex: Human Revolution?