When EA spoke of a future business strategy where "all of our games" include the dreaded m-word, reactions weren't exactly positive. CFO Blake Jorgensen shared that original statement during the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week, but he's now used another conference—the Wedbush Transformational Technology conference—to redact that statement. As Gamasutra reports, Jorgensen says he meant microtransactions will figure into all mobile games instead of EA's entire lineup.

"I made a statement in the conference along the lines of, 'We'll have microtransactions in our games,' and the community read that to be 'all games,' and that's really not true," he explains. "All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of our mobile games are going to a world where its play-for-free."

Jorgensen uses a different term for paid content on the PC and console platforms: extensions. "You're going to see extensions off of products like Battlefield Premium which are simply not microtransactions," he says. "They are premium services, or additional add-on products or downloads that we're doing. It's essentially an extension of the gameplay that allows someone to take a game that they might have played for a thousand hours and play it for two thousand hours. We want to ensure that consumers are getting value."

Though there is some difference between types of paid content, it seems like Jorgensen is mostly just side-stepping the phrase "microtransactions." Whether calling them microtransactions, extensions, or micro-extend-actions, EA (and, arguably, most other big publishers) will continue using whatever works to leverage the popularity of its games and sell additional content.

But enough of my yakking. What do you think?

The first three Assassin's Creed games are about Desmond Miles. Oh, you don't remember? That's fine. It's easy to forget such a bubbling font of personality, even though we wouldn't have controlled his way cooler ancestors and their Templar-slaying skills if they hadn't sprung from the mind of the world's most vegetative assassin. He's no longer the center of attention in the upcoming Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but Ubisoft isn't entirely ignoring Mr. Miles in the context of the franchise's meta-arc. In a self-published Q&A (via All Games Beta), Creative Director Jean Guesdon says the character constitutes "a very important legacy" for Black Flag and beyond.

"Desmond has been the main protagonist of the franchise so far," Guesdon explains. "This won’t be the case in Black Flag. That being said, the game isn't a reboot nor is it a spinoff, and we’re continuing to develop a consistent mythology. So yes, Desmond will be referred to as a very important legacy of the Assassin's Creed universe."

Ubisoft promised "more Desmond than you've ever had before" during the development of Assassin's Creed 3, and that game's culminating events wrapped up his saga in a clunky yet more engaging way beyond having him eternally lounge around in the Animus. It'll be interesting to see how the modern-day storyline progresses alongside the virtual assassinating we all know and love going forward.

Just as DICE adores filling Battlefield 3's battlefields with the bangs and bullets befitting its Frostbite 2 engine, it also loves sprinkling craftily hidden Easter eggs as nods to other games it's worked on. The futuristic, fan-favorite Battlefield 2142 previously left some graffiti on a shipping crate on the Wake Island map, but the impending End Game add-on includes something a little less subtle. Thanks to explorer KingEmperorPure (via Gameranx), a video shows the Kharg Island location of a cutely shrunken and silently floating 2142 dropship stickered with a faction logo.

And that's all it does: float. It's seemingly immune to any kind of weapon fire or any other sort of prodding, but it's a nice homage to those who hold the Titans and tech of 2142 close to their hearts. Yes, it's easy to jump the short gap to "ZOMG Battlefield 2143" territory, but it's more likely these tributary treasures are just that.

Of course, Battlefield 4 lurks on the horizon, and DICE is well aware of the community's desire for a 2142 sequel—Creative Director Lars Gustavsson previously mentioned he'd "love to" return to the creative freedom of the more sci-fi take on Battlefield.

As Valve finally prepares to roll out prototypes for its Steam Box in as little as four months, it's apparently as good a time as any for established Lords of the Living Room to comment on PC gaming's strongest push into their realm. During a talk at Microsoft's TechForum conference earlier this week (via The Verge), Microsoft's head of Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick—that's "Xbox boss" in non-corporese—gave a simple "no" in response to being asked if he considers Valve a competitor.

Thankfully, Mattrick keeps his respect just as high as his confidence, stating he admires Valve boss Gabe Newell and the studio's drive for "doing some innovative stuff." He indicates fellow tech and gaming giants Sony, Nintendo, Apple, and Google represent a "richer scale of products and things being brought to market."

Newell shared his own take on Steam Box's stiffest competition back in January, citing Apple's similar living-room ambitions as "the biggest challenge" facing the project. "I think that there’s a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed-down living room platform emerging," he said. "I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?"

As of the writing of this article, there is just over a day and a half left in the Kickstarter for At the Gates, the upcoming, Dark Ages 4X game from Civ V designer Jon Shafer. The team at Shafer's new studio, Conifer Games, has already demolished the original, $40,000 goal. Notable stretch goals already met include full mod support and two new factions. We caught up with Jon in a follow-up to our announcement interview to get his thoughts on how the campaign went, and what we can expect from At the Gates after it's funded.

PC Gamer: The Kickstarter is almost over, and you guys have already doubled your original goal. What has the experience been like, overall? How has the level of success compared to your original expectations?

Jon Shafer: I was pretty confident going in that we’d hit our $40k goal and expected that we’d finish a small bit above that. But you really never know. Hitting our target in under four days was a big surprise, and we had to nail down our stretch goal plans sooner than we’d planned. Based on the number we’re trending towards I would definitely say it’s surpassed our expectations by a fair bit.

Was there anything in particular that surprised you?

"Another surprise was the number of other companies that reached out after seeing the Kickstarter campaign."Yes, there were a few surprises along the way.

The first was the sheer volume of questions and supportive messages we received. For a couple weeks I was getting over a hundred messages per day, and there were definitely times when I was tempted to waver on my commitment to answer everyone individually. But the activity calmed down eventually and I made it through to the other side.

It was great to see people I’d never met or spoken with take up the At the Gates banner and wave it as their own. When people say that Kickstarter is more than just a way to fund a project but also a marketing campaign in and of itself they’re not kidding. This wasn’t even something I’d thought about before, but based on my experience the effect is very real.

On a related note, another surprise was the number of other companies that reached out after seeing the Kickstarter campaign - many of them through Kickstarter. Investment, distribution, localization, conversion to other platforms, IT, music... you name it, I’ve been asked about it. I’ll probably be sorting through these opportunities for several weeks after we’ve wrapped up. So far nobody’s offered a huge pile of free money, but I’m still holding out hope!

The core team at Conifer is about as lean and indie as you can get.

Are you still planning on keeping the team very small, or will some of this new funding allow you to expand a little?

The higher budget will definitely allow us to hire on more contract work. Prior to the campaign I was unsure of how much animation we’d be able to incorporate in the world, but we’re now looking at utilizing it for pretty much all the art. It’s also likely we’ll bring on some help to help with modding tools like the map editor.

"I want to explore new ideas and experiment with innovative features. They might not all work out, but with a small company they don’t have to."Aside from that, the core team and the goals are the same as they’ve always been. We’re mainly viewing the extra funds as giving us the ability to polish the game more than would have otherwise been possible. The gameplay is still our focus. I feel that many companies that smash through their funding goal and dramatically change their scope lose sight of that a little bit.

What is/are the best thing(s) about making a game through Kickstarter without the oversight of a commercial publisher?

The biggest perk is that you can focus entirely on making the best game possible. Every publisher wants to deliver great games, but large businesses have to be focused on the bottom line. If they’re not, people lose their jobs.

The advantage of being an indie is that you can set priorities for yourself. I certainly need to make enough money to keep doing this, but beyond that my goals are all creative. I want to explore new ideas and experiment with innovative features. They might not all work out, but with a small company they don’t have to.

Have you discussed post-launch content among the team members at all? Might we see some of the stretch goals (if they don't end up getting funded) as paid DLC or expansions down the line?

It’s possible. I’m not a big fan of the traditional DLC model, but the prospect of making the Roman factions playable really intrigues me, as that would require making big changes to the core design. My general philosophy is that as long as there are interesting ideas to explore I’m there.

I wouldn’t hold your breath for any map packs or sequels from Conifer though. If you do right by your community and offer an adequate level of modding then they can take care of that themselves.



What do you feel like you'd do differently, having just about wrapped up your first Kickstarter experience?

"If you do right by your community and offer an adequate level of modding, then they can take care of that themselves."I tried to prepare as much as possible before we launched and the campaign as a whole went fairly smoothly and has obviously done incredibly well. If I could go back and do it again there are a couple changes I’d make though.

Big, meaty articles are a great way to show potential and existing backers that you’re serious about what you’re doing, and that they have reason to trust in your promises. But each one requires a major time investment, and trying to squeeze those articles in with everything else can be exhausting. “Current me” would be a lot happier with “past me” had I been able to knock those out before hand.

The leadup for getting the Kickstarter out the door was also pretty rushed. In a recent update I shared the story behind the creation of Conifer, and those final couple weeks were pretty intense. Fortunately, next time I won’t also be launching a company at the same time, which should simplify the process quite a bit.

I’d also tweak the reward tiers. I received many comments along the lines of “I’d like to give you more than the base amount, but I’m not willing to go all the way up to a hundred bucks - what can you do for me?” We made an early decision to avoid physical rewards, but there are still other opportunities like digital strategy guides, soundtracks, etc. We added some of these after the launch, but a more organized approach would have helped both us and our backers.

Thanks to Jon for talking to us, and keeping us posted about the project all along the way with some very detailed dev blogs. Those interested in backing At the Gates still can—$25 gets a DRM-free copy of the game.

At their greatest scale, SimCity's cities are self-powering machines with hundreds of thousands of moving parts. They churn through endless feedback loops, feeding Sims into swirling cause and effect eddies that produce money, goods, happiness, and growth. After over a week of building, smashing, and rewiring SimCity’s machines to figure out how they work, they still surprise me.

SimCity is the series' greatest technical achievement. Will Wright's 1989 original and every Maxis-developed SimCity that came after are about the same thing: building and simulating cities. SimCity does that too, but with a drastically different method. It shifts the simulation from abstract data-crunching to the visible, real-time interactions of thousands of individual Sims, cars, residences, businesses, factories, and everything else you might find in a city.

The Sims themselves aren't exceptional as individuals—they live out their ant-farm lives with short memories and clockwork brains, behaving like small children motivated only by immediate desires and immediate discomfort. They hate crime, unemployment, pollution (called “germs” for some reason), high taxes, and death. They like parks, schools, and city services. They're dumb as individuals, but when thousands of them need caring for, SimCity balloons into a dazzlingly complex and addictive management game, and it's all beautifully rendered in three-dimensional space, scaling all the way down to blades of grass. And even with all that complexity, the game runs smoothly on mid-range hardware, happy to be Alt-Tabbed in and out of, and rarely crashing.

The joy of planning
 


To create a city, I choose a square plot in one of eight region layouts, all of which can be shared with other players or claimed alone. (The regions are attractive and diverse enough to quash my initial pining for the landscape terraforming in previous SimCitys.)

Then, with an empty field and a modest budget, I’m free to build creatively and experiment, pulling out straight and curved roads, as well as zoning residential, commercial, and industrial districts ("RCI" for in-the-know urban planners), and building basic services. It's a joy to seed the empty plot and watch Sims arrive in moving trucks to start their new lives.

If I wanted to play SimCity as a purely sandbox experience—more on that later—it might stay so free and easy, but I can never resist going big. Soon my content small-town Sims will have their dreams crushed by an urban nightmare of unemployment, poison-clogged air, and failing services. For now, however, I can zoom all the way to street level to watch them stroll around my city like windup toys, happy and unaware of the god-like madman peering down at them wielding bulldozers and bad ideas.

Enjoy it while it lasts, kids.

But back to the quiet town. At the macro scale, beautiful data overlays show me subterranean concentrations of water, as well as resources like ore, coal, and oil, which I can exploit when my city is ready for heavy industry. In the beginning, demand for services is low, and how you choose to provide power to your city is the most important decision early in the game.

Coal and oil plants cough out pollution and require resources from mines or the Global Market, an online feature that functions as a commodities exchange enabling players to buy and sell resources. Clean energy solutions—wind and solar plants—also pump power into the city, but require swaths of valuable land to keep the lights on. The type of power plant I choose first will influence the whole narrative of my city, not because I can't switch at any time, but because I refuse to be an inconsistent mayor. Big decisions like this happen at every stage of a city's development, and my choices often influence how I feel about my city more than my city itself.

Close-quarters
 
The early game is all about anticipating the midgame. As houses become towers, too many intersections and not enough high-capacity avenues will cause traffic gridlocks, and density won't increase at all without enough space. Bigger cities also need more water, more power, more sewage treatment, and more garbage trucks, as well as police, fire, and health coverage, public transportation, parks, and schools.

Buildings can be upgraded, but even upgrades such as extra water pumps and fire truck garages need space. And because service vehicles like fire trucks have to actually drive to where they're needed, seemingly minor details like whether they're more likely to make right or left turns out of their garages really do matter. Getting a handle on such minutiae becomes overwhelming when I try to expand too fast.

Topping off my fully-upgraded wind plant with a nice little sign.

The only way to learn how to plan for and balance all this is trial and error. Even after nearly 100 hours, I'm still discovering new quirks and features of the simulation. Sims sometimes do dumb things, or have unexpected complaints, and identifying and solving these behaviors takes time. Learning through failure is a frustration SimCity gets away with by allowing for failure. There's almost always room to bulldoze half a city, pass a bond measure, and start over. Weirdly, though, SimCity actually seems to encourage failure, making learning more difficult than it has to be.

For instance, the ratio of residential to commercial to industrial zoning has a very small sweet spot, which I like—it’s a hard game to master—but SimCity's advisers almost always push me to solve problems by expanding rather than by achieving balance with what I have. Industrial demand is high, even though there are 500 unfilled “low-wealth” jobs (a euphemism that would make any politician proud). Now residential and industrial demand are high. More people! More jobs! Build it all! I don't know what data it's using to inform demand, but it implies I'm doing something wrong even when I'm balancing RCI and optimizing services with the precision and efficiency of an MLG pro. Eventually, I yell back: if you want me to expand so much give me bigger borders, dummy!



The borders—every city is confined to the same sized square— put a hard limit on how creative you can be when designing high-population cities, but ultimately I like that they force tough trade-offs. Decisions about density, what to build, and how to zone are hard, and trying something, watching it all fall apart, and then rezoning to see what happens is part of the addictive fun. Do I ever wish I could defy the game and pull a road out into the untouched land beyond my dotted line? All the time. I eventually accepted it, though, because if I could solve every problem through expansion, many of the game's challenging trade-offs would be lost.

Sometimes, however, cities fail hard. When services can’t handle demand, Sims begin to leave. If too many leave, your income plummets. Now you’re losing money, so you turn off services to keep from going broke—but that makes things worse. Now there's no fire or police coverage, and even more Sims are leaving (or, you know, burning to death). And even though population is plummeting, the roads are more clogged than ever. What the hell is happening?

You may never know—cities can become unmanageable at populations over 100,000—and trying to fix things sometimes feels futile. Failed cities are ugly, claustrophobic burdens which require constant attention because they didn't achieve balance early on. Funnily, discarding them is a relief. It's actually an enjoyable part of the game, because all that frustration is replaced by the anticipation of running a new experiment in a pristine new plot. This time I'll get it right, just as long as I pay attention to the hard data more than the advisers or Sims.



Failure to communicate
 
Sims are really good at communicating what they're unhappy about, so much that it can be annoying, but they're terrible at communicating why they're unhappy about it. They constantly contradict each other: one house is concerned about crime, while its neighbor compliments the neighborhood's great police coverage. One house says shopping is great, the other can't seem to find the stores. Which are across the street. What the hell.

Pierre Apts is full of whiners.

The problem seems to be with what I began this review praising. SimCity isn't run by spreadsheets, it's a simulation of hundreds of thousands of dynamic parts, and I think it's unable to tell me the real reason Sims are unhappy because it doesn't know. If a Sim has money, it will try to find shopping. If it can't find shopping, it will complain. It won't tell me if it sat in a traffic jam all day, or if there are plenty of shops but no medium-wealth Sims to run them, or if it happened to go toward a shop that went under renovation and ceased to be a shop for a short period.

To diagnose problems, I have to ignore the implications of complaints. "Where's the shopping in this town?" suggests I should zone more commercial, but that's not always the case, and my investigation must begin with the roads, the shops themselves, and the people living near them. SimCity is saved by making its data available for study, and by representing every interaction in the world. It's a lot to analyze, but I still wish I knew even more about the simulation so I could make even better informed decisions. For example, how far are Sims willing to travel to shop? Is there a limit? Learning through trial and error can't teach me everything.

Everyone wants to be special
 
When I'm not worrying about all the things that make my childlike Sims sad, I'm playing an industry mogul and loving it. SimCity's specialization system is great. It adds a layer of challenge on top of RCI zoning, adds to the long-term story of a city, and can make you filthy rich if played right.

"City specialization" is a deceptive term. It implies that you choose one specialization, such as an ore mining town, and run with it. It doesn't work that way—you can select any specialization building from any category, so long as you've unlocked it by meeting a few prerequisites. The buildings enable mining operations, raw materials and consumer goods production, Global Market trade, and the development of a tourism industry.



One of my earliest cities, Murder Bucket (it's actually got great police coverage), was rich in ore and oil, so I opted for the dirty job of ripping it all out of the earth. As I pulled ore out of the ground, it needed somewhere to go, so I started building trade depots to sell it on the Global Market. When I reached a certain daily profit, I unlocked the Petroleum HQ, Metals HQ, and Trade HQ. Building and upgrading the headquarters gave me access to new buildings, such as a smelter which produces metal and ore. I was building a complete supply chain, making sure my trucks could get to and from mines, storage facilities, and processing plants. At first, my ambitions caused my city to hemorrhage money, but it was a proud moment when I solved blockages in the chain and started turning a profit.

The specialization system could almost have been its own game, and it adds a wealth of story to every city. As mines and oil wells run dry (resources are not infinite), a trade port enables the purchase of raw materials on the Global Market, so I can stay in the refinery business as an importer/exporter instead of sole producer. Or, I can imagine that when the wells dried up, my sad sack Sims turned to booze and gambling. Or maybe the city reinvents itself, investing in cultural landmarks and high-tech industry. I construct a personal story for every city I build, and specializations add context and detail, making my city’s past as important as its future.

County administration
 
A successful city can’t be successful at everything, however, so it must live in symbiosis with the whole region, some of which can house up to 16 cities. If I lack power or water, I can buy it from another city, and if I see that a city in my region can’t handle all its garbage, I can volunteer some of my trucks to help. There are also passive benefits. If I have no schools, my population will head to other cities for education. If I have a surplus of low-wealth jobs, unemployed low-wealth residents in other cities will hop on my municipal buses and add to my labor force.

Nearby cities are rendered accurately in the distance.

The idea is exciting, but it can be difficult to exploit meaningfully. It's missing information I need, such as what data influences whether or not Sims will commute to other cities, or what the limit on resource sharing is. I can buy power when I need a little extra, but trying to run a city without its own power plants doesn't work. I wasn't being cheeky or trying to test the simulation, I just thought it would be neat to have a dirty city dedicated to coal power supporting a larger, medium-income residential city. I tried: I built a city with a 250 megawatt power surplus to support another, but my powerless city refused to purchase more than 20.8 megawatts despite having a huge power deficit. Why limit how I exploit regional interactions, especially when it's supposed to be the answer to small city sizes?

Multiplayer also makes things tricky, because if I'm just supplementing power with surplus from a friend's city, I've got to yell at them every time their surplus dips. And it will dip—they aren't going to be watching it every second as their city grows.

Passive benefits sometimes confuse me too. When one of my cities needed more low-wealth workers, I founded a new city nearby and filled it with low-wealth residential. I tried not to include too much industry, instead focusing on region-wide public transportation, but it didn't work. The suburban city wouldn't grow like I hoped and was losing money, so I started building up the commercial sector. That got shoppers in from my first city, but I still hadn't solved the worker shortage.

The arrows indicate the direction workers are commuting.

City interaction works in general—I can see that workers sometimes commute, as do shoppers and students—but it can be hard to create intentional symbiosis, except with the simplest shared benefits. City hall upgrades, for example, unlock new building types for the entire region, and if I'm out of space to dump garbage, another city can send a specific number of garbage trucks to help. The hardest part of it is learning to not try to solve everything in one city. There just isn't enough room to be everything, so I have to avoid the temptation to try for a high-tech mining town and electronics producer.

That is, unless I'm playing in Sandbox Mode, which starts you off with 1,000,000 Simoleans and every building unlocked. It's a great place to experiment or just amuse myself with absurd cities. Only circular roads? Why not!



Server, there's a bug in my soup
 
To play in any region, multiplayer or alone, SimCity requires a constant server connection. Despite Maxis' design justifications, let’s face it—it's always-online DRM. SimCity is not an MMO. Having a constant connection to the developing cities in my region is fun, but no more than than a smidgen of SimCity's total fun relies on multiplayer.

And at the time of writing, the always-online requirement is terribly flawed. I've been able to play on the live servers for a total of 50 hours, so it isn't nearly unplayable, but it is very frustrating. I've been stuck in the launcher for 20 minute wait periods to connect to a server, only to have the timer reset after the connection fails. I've made it past the launcher to the menu, only to be told it still can't connect. I've been kicked out of my cities, only to come back to find that they can't be loaded "at this time"—often meaning an hour or more.



I might have been able to play on a different server—the Oceanic server has been more welcoming—but that’s not where my friends and cities are. Starting new cities is plenty fun, but if I can get anything positive out of the always-online requirement, it should be playing with my friends. That was a challenge. Even when the server let me in, adding friends took hours, and invites to join my private region either failed on the spot, or claimed success but still required multiple attempts.

At the time of this writing, Cheetah Speed—the fastest the simulation can run—has been disabled to help reduce the server load. That's a very significant gameplay feature, and that it has been yanked for the time being to deal with service issues is an indication of the magnitude of the server problems.

There are also bugs and poorly-streamlined features. Sims will sometimes refuse to build on certain streets until I bulldoze part of them and rebuild them. Buildings have appeared on top of other buildings. Zones sometimes stack on top of each other. Feature-wise, disasters are fun to watch, but in big cities the bulldoze tool—which is necessary for clearing rubble—is an annoying hassle. Finding all the little burnt-up houses, orienting the camera, and clicking on them is needless busy work.

Disasters are fun to watch, but cleaning up after them is just annoying.

The launch day rush is a unique situation, and I think it’s fair to assume service will improve and patches will fix bugs and improve features. Even so, the always-online requirement is a long-term issue. It means it's up to EA when we can and can't play the game we bought. It removes the game from ideal playing situations, like on planes or wherever shoddy WiFi exists. It prevents reverting to a previous save when things go wrong, and I've desperately, fruitlessly hit Ctrl-Z after some of my mistakes. It prevents modding, which could add so much value to a game like SimCity over time. Imagine if modders were able to tweak the Sims' flowchart logic, or add new building types and looks. What insane scenarios would be unleashed? We'll probably never know.

Worst of all, the always-online requirement might even prevent us from playing SimCity at all one day, if the servers are ever retired.

What might still be
 
SimCity 2000 is 16-years-old and still being played. It's a legend, and SimCity has the capacity to achieve the same longevity. Despite the quirky Sim behavior and communication failures, and despite the bugs and always-online requirement, I'm still barely able to pull myself away from it at 3 a.m. It's a fascinating game to study, and a joy to play.

After hours and hours of studying SimCity, my most successful metropolis is earning over 20K an hour. I love money.

Just watching SimCity work is amazing. I can watch the shadows cast by charmingly archetypal apartment buildings and factories creep along the ground as the sun sets. I can zoom in to watch my residents' lives, knowing they're all going somewhere and doing something, even if they don't know why. As a simulation of a real city, it doesn't seem especially accurate, but I don't play to become an urban planner. I play to build machines, to test hypotheses, to examine vexing behaviors and solve micro and macro problems—and to tell a story.

As a simulator, SimCity advances the achievements of SimCity 4, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 2000, but as a product, it is inferior to all of them. Constant connectivity does have benefits, such as leaderboards, worldwide challenges, and the Global Market, but it's not even close to being worth the hassle for those features, and hardly touches the essence of what makes SimCity so diabolically addictive and engrossing. If Maxis and EA would just loosen their grip on the idea that the game requires constant social interaction—a feature that also happens to function as an anti-piracy measure—and we're one day given the option to run local servers, SimCity could still become the legendary series rebirth it was intended to be.

It's hard to believe that we've been hearing rumors of the World of Warcraft movie's pre-production for more than half a decade. The project finally seems to be moving forward, indicated by the announcement of Duncan Jones as new director in January, but the man he replaced, Sam Raimi, recently shared some insights into the nature of the film's delays.

In an interview with Vulture, Raimi pinned the blame solely on Blizzard for keeping the cinematic adaptation of one of gaming's most successful franchises in limbo. "I read a screenplay they had that was written by the guys at Blizzard, and it didn't quite work for me," Raimi told Vulture. "I told them I wanted to make my own original story with Robert ."

Rodat's story was pitched to Blizzard, and according to Raimi, they accepted it with "reservations."

"Only once Robert was done did we realize that Blizzard had veto power, and we didn't know that," he continued. "And they had never quite approved the original story we pitched them. Those reservations were their way of saying, 'We don't approve this story, and we want to go a different way,' so after we had spent nine months working on this thing, we basically had to start over. And Robert did start over, but it was taking too long for the people at Blizzard, and their patience ran out. Honestly, I think it was mismanagement on their behalf."

As one of the few genuine PC gamers in Hollywood, I think Jones is a great selection, but as an Evil Dead fan (and a defender of the first two Raimi Spider-Man films as some of the best in superhero cinema), I'm still a little disappointed that he's no longer involved.

Source: http://bit.ly/XQp76W

Garry's Mod, that wonderful physics sandbox of posable characters doing very silly things, has done rather well since attaching a $10 price for its tomfoolery back in 2006. Last December, GMod passed the milestone of 2 million copies sold, an accomplishment made possible by word-of-mouth and creator Garry Newman's regular feature updates. Responding to a fan's question in a blofg post, Newman reveals the mod accrued an astounding $22 million over seven years, but he also says taxes took large bites out of the monstrous moneydollar amount.

"Over seven years, GMod has made about $22 million dollars," he writes. "We get less than half of that though. The tax man gets a bunch of that. Then when we take money out of the company, the tax man gets a bunch of that too."

A Google Image search for "Garry's Mod tax man" sadly doesn't provide an appropriate response image for Newman's achievement, instead showing a balloon chair, ponies, and a Teletubby mugging a Companion Cube. Wait, what am I saying? They're all appropriate.

As for the future of Garry's Mod and what's next for Newman and the rest of his team at developer Facepunch Studios, Newman lines up a few upcoming features in the works.

"Hopefully, we’re gonna get the Linux version out," he says. "Then hopefully we’ll move to SteamPipe, and I’ll get the NextBot stuff hooked up. Then I want to do another Gamemode Contest. But I want to knock out a bunch of gamemode creating tutorials first to help people get their foot in the door."

By the way, if you're leery of plopping down a Hamilton for a constantly updated playground of imagination ("Garry's Mod what are you thinking" in Google), you can grab the old-but-free Garry's Mod 9 from Mod DB.

Evolutionary theory

Abathur is a gobbet of wet muscle that lives inside a hole. He’s the keeper of Heart of the Swarm’s tech tree, climbing out of his gooey home when the game’s main character, Sarah Kerrigan, steps into his Evolution Pit. He speaks oddly, his yonic mouth and multiple skinny arms flapping as he discusses potential upgrades to the Zerg forces that Kerrigan commands.

"Blizzard wants to trim the vestigial tails and useless stumps from StarCraft II."
Abathur is obsessed with removing weaknesses and replacing them with strengths in the Zerg units he looks after. He is – ignoring the oozing skin, many sets of limbs and bug-like eyes – like Heart of the Swarm’s developers, Blizzard. They both want to trim the vestigial tails and useless stumps from their subjects – in Blizzard’s case, 2010’s StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty – but they both realise that the entities at the centre of their experiments are already largely fit for purpose. Heart of the Swarm is shaped by evolutionary finetuning, not a back-to-drawing-board approach, and it looks a lot like StarCraft II.

Heart of the Swarm is the second StarCraft II expansion, but it’s easily the size of a full game, with a 20-mission singleplayer campaign and a multiplayer revamp. Abathur lives in the singleplayer mode, alongside a cast of similarly monstrous friends. Iz’sha is a noseless Zerg ‘woman’, attached to the ceiling of the Leviathan ship that acts as Kerrigan’s transport and home between missions. Kerrigan herself is joined on the ‘bridge’ – more of an open, pulsating sphincter – by a Zerg queen. As in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty’s campaign mode, these characters can be clicked on and spoken to, advancing the story and providing useful background information.

Kaldir's so cold that the unprepared get flash-frozen.

Kerrigan is the centrepiece of that story. She’s an ex-Ghost: one of the human Terran race’s super-psionic-soldiers. After being betrayed by Terran pantomime villain Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, she was infested by the Zerg and became the self-titled Queen of Blades. She’s shed that moniker for Heart of the Swarm, losing her natty pair of bony wings in the process, but she’s still very much boss of the Zerg. It’s them you’ll be playing as for the duration of the campaign, supported by Kerrigan herself.

"Kerrigan acts like one of Warcraft III’s heroes, and she comes with unique abilities."
Kerrigan’s presence on the battlefield as a super-unit is the most obvious difference between Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. She acts like one of Warcraft III’s heroes, and she comes prepackaged with a set of unique abilities that can be turned against AI Terran and Protoss opposition. These abilities are set on a binary tech tree. Once Kerrigan’s garnered enough experience to hit arbitrary levels – 5, 10, 15, and so on until level 60 – she can make a choice between two powers. For my first mission among her Zergy colleagues, I chose to give her a passive buff to healing and an area-of-effect attack that suspended select enemies in the air.

Zerg units have similarly binary choices when it comes to upgrades. Abathur presides over the Evolution Pit, in which he concocts betterments for existing Zerg units, presenting them in short, playable vignettes. The concepts for these upgrades are taken from local fauna, and the minimissions involve killing the poor creatures in the most horrendous fashion. Cheerfully bouncy birds and beetles that split on death allowed me to improve my explosive suicide bomber Banelings in one of two ways: either turning their green acid sacs purple and giving them the ability to leap up sheer cliff faces, or having them split into two smaller, less damaging creatures on detonation. I mourned the poor beetles and chose the latter option, deliberately tailoring my strategy in the next mission to maximise my Baneling count, purely to enjoy the glowing green carpet I was now able to send across the map.

Hellions can transform into armoured Hellbats now.

Other units get the same treatment. Zerglings can either hop up cliffs or spawn faster from your home Hatchery, but unlike Kerrigan’s power selection, your choices are locked in: pick the bouncy Banelings and you’ll not be able to switch to the splitters. A third screen offers another layer of choice, giving unlocked units one of three passive abilities that can be altered between missions. Roaches, for example, can do more damage to ‘light’ class units, resist more pain at low health, or move around while burrowed.

"Heart of the Swarm flavours its singleplayer missions with gimmicks."
I got to test these powers across three missions – the first two of which took place on the icy world of Kaldir. Kerrigan and her chitinous chums are on the planet to find a missing Zerg brood. Their queen’s gone quiet, knocked out by a one-two punch of Protoss invaders and the planet’s lethal cold. I came across remnants of the decimated group as I right-clicked Kerrigan and a handful of attendant Zerglings across the frigid ground: roaches frozen in place by flashfreezes, they came to life as I neared and joined my posse.

The flash-freezes continued as I came across first a readymade Zerg base and then the planet’s Protoss forces. They’d kick in every few minutes, freezing the unprepared Protoss in place, but letting my evolved Zerg forces move around the map unmolested. Heart of the Swarm, like Wings of Liberty, flavours its singleplayer missions with gimmicks to save them from feeling like extended skirmish matches. The flash-freezes are a neat trick, allowing me to surgically pick off powerful Protoss units – glowing blue Archons and Roach-wrecking Immortals – while they were encased in ice. Defences down, I helped Kerrigan destroy a set of communication spires that ensured her presence on Kaldir was kept secret.

The Protoss are an ostentatious bunch and outfit everything in gold.

My second mission, also taking place on the planet, asked Kerrigan to build and maintain a base while stopping waves of Protoss shuttles from reaching warp-gates and warning the Zerg-crushing Golden Armada. As befits a Blizzard game, the mission emphasised balance: flitting back and forth between spawning mineral-collecting Drones, base-protecting Roaches, and shuttle-shooting Hydralisks.

"On normal difficulty, the task is fairly simple. On brutal difficulty, it’s a different matter."
On normal difficulty, the task is fairly simple. I powered up my economy quickly, spending all my early resources on Drones and parking Kerrigan under each shuttle as it neared the warp-gate. Her damage alone was enough to knock their shields down in a trice – if I had changed her powers pre-mission, she’d have been able to hurl a bolt of supercharged lightning at a given target, destroying the shuttle outright.

On brutal difficulty, it’s a different matter. Shuttles started coming two at a time, coinciding with Protoss pushes. The small gaggles of Hydralisks that I’d previously used to swat down enemy craft needed to be reinforced to shoot down now-faster shuttles, all while my mineral lines were being harried by quadrupedal Stalker raids. By the end, I’d built up three separate bases and had control groups strewn across the map.

Never give Kerrigan plus ones to parties.

The third mission I played took place on a smaller scale. One of the shuttles from the previous level had dodged my Hydralisk strike forces, and was soon to warn the Protoss fleet. Fortunately, thanks to some Alien-inspired chestbursting, I’d managed to sneak a tiny Zerg larva aboard the vessel. I was tasked with guiding the creature around a hostile environment, absorbing biomass by killing unsuspecting animals held in stasis, and hiding in smoke when bigger foes patrolled past.

"Heart of the Swarm on brutal is singleplayer RTS at its nervy best."
After enough creature murder, my larva became a Queen, able to poop out Zerg eggs. Together with her new babies, I carved a wave of destruction across the ship, methodically killing all the crew before they could communicate with the rest of their mouthless Protoss buddies. A spot of chest-bursting is always fun, but I enjoyed my third mission less than the previous two: divorced from a base and economy, my tasks felt prescribed and linear. It made for a change of pace, but I’m hoping for more missions like Kaldir’s tough shuttle destruction.

Heart of the Swarm on brutal is singleplayer RTS at its nervy best. It shows what happens when the best laid plans of mice and alien-insect-infested women go awry, and the tension of trying to juggle fifteen different considerations – economics, feints, pushes, and rushes – is mentally taxing and thrilling when you get it right.

This is not a vast departure from Wings of Liberty’s model. That game excelled by, just when you approached mastery, throwing another new unit, mechanic, concept or gimmick in your path. Heart of the Swarm takes the same approach. Like Abathur, it’s focused on refining rather than creating new life from scratch but, from early tests, most of the campaign looks just as well optimised as the Zerg it contains.

It turns out Dante was wrong about the whole Hell thing. Rather than consisting of nine circles (each more circular than the last), Hell is actually more of a straight ride down - a 99-level tunnel punctuated by the occasional boss fight, and with Hell itself waiting patiently at the end. Either way, I'm not convinced it's worth a visit - the museums are terrible - but that hasn't stopped the be-hatted, moustachioed dude from 99 Levels to Hell from diving in. His game is a roguelikey platformer with destructible terrain, guns, gore and plenty of demons trying to kill you; if you're a fan of Spelunky, you're probably downloading it already.

99 Levels to Hell is good with numbers; in addition to the game's 100 levels (I assume Hell is #100), it also boasts of 25+ monster types and 50-odd weapons and power-ups. Because this a roguelike, you can expect shops and casinos (wait, is that a RL thing now?) to make an appearance as well, on your procedurally generated journey to Satan's sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-basement flat.

99 Levels to Hell is available for $9.99/around £6.99. Here is the game's infernal launch trailer: