John Riccitiello, CEO of game publisher Electronic Arts, is stepping down from his position.

Former EA CEO and board chairman Larry Probst will take over while the board searches for a new replacement, EA said.

Riccitiello, who was first hired as CEO of the massive publisher in 2007, has faced criticism from investors and fans over the past few years as Electronic Arts has gone through all sorts of financial difficulties. In December, Riccitiello was listed as one of "eight CEOS to fire in 2013" by the blog 24/7 Wall Street.

Riccitiello always portrayed the image of an exec who actually plays games. The bosses at Activision or Microsoft wouldn't talk about the games they played. But Riccitiello would happily chat not just about his experiences with EA's own but about the competition's. And if you got him talking about, say, EA's Mirror's Edge, he'd express design ideas about how to make it better.

Here's what EA's stock has looked like since Riccitiello took over in April of 2007:

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EA's financials took a dive during the recession in 2008 and have not come close to recovering since. The past six months have been particularly rocky for the publisher behind games like Battlefield and Madden.

In 2007, when Riccitiello first took over the company, he divided Electronic Arts into four labels: EA Games, EA Sports, EA Casual, and The Sims. Later that year, he oversaw one of EA's biggest acquisitions in the past decade, the purchase of VG Holding Corp, the company that then owned Pandemic Studios and BioWare, the well-respected developers behind role-playing games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect.

In early 2008, news came out that EA had attempted to purchase Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two rejected EA's bid.

Although EA's sports label has found a great deal of success with the can't-fail Madden NFL series, the publisher has struggled to compete in the realm of basketball over the past few years, failing a few times to relaunch NBA Live, which has not been published since 2009.

Over the course of Riccitiello's tenure, EA took a number of risks on creative games that went outside the company's comfort zone, including Mirror's Edge, Brutal Legend, and Spore. They succeeded with some projects—The Simpsons: Tapped Out has been one of the most popular games on iOS—and struggled with others, like Star Wars: The Old Republic, which eventually had to go free-to-play after an unsuccessful launch in late 2011.

EA's most recent misstep was the SimCity debacle, which we've detailed here.

Here's the full press release announcing Riccitiello's departure, via EA:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)— Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that John Riccitiello will step down as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors, effective March 30. The Board has appointed Larry Probst as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition and to lead EA's executive team while the Board conducts a search for a permanent CEO. The Board will consider internal and external candidates with the assistance of a leading executive search firm.

Mr. Probst has played a leadership role at EA since 1991. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Board since 1994, he previously served as the Company's CEO from 1991 to 2007. As CEO, Probst successfully grew the Company's annual revenues from $175 million to approximately $3 billion, led EA into new platforms such as mobile, online and other emerging markets and expanded its international presence to more than 75 countries.

"We thank John for his contributions to EA since he was appointed CEO in 2007, especially the passion, dedication and energy he brought to the Company every single day," said Mr. Probst. "John has worked hard to lead the Company through challenging transitions in our industry, and was instrumental in driving our very significant growth in digital revenues. We appreciate John's leadership and the many important strategic initiatives he has driven for the Company. We have mutually agreed that this is the right time for a leadership transition."

On behalf of the Board, Lead Director Richard A. Simonson stated, "As we begin the CEO search, we are fortunate that Larry, who has a proven track record with our employees, partners and customers, has agreed to assume a day-to-day leadership role as Executive Chairman. He has 16 years of experience as CEO of EA and a deep understanding of the Company's strategy, management team, business potential and industry trends."

Mr. Riccitiello stated, "EA is an outstanding company with creative and talented employees, and it has been an honor to serve as the Company's CEO. I am proud of what we have accomplished together, and after six years I feel it is the right time for me pass the baton and let new leadership take the Company into its next phase of innovation and growth. I remain very optimistic about EA's future - there is a world class team driving the Company's transition to the next generation of game consoles."

And here's the letter John Riccitiello sent to EA:

To Everyone at EA –

I am writing with some tough news. I have resigned my position as EA's CEO. I will be around for a couple of weeks, and I hope to have the chance to say goodbye to many of you. Larry Probst will be stepping in as Executive Chairman to help smooth the transition. Larry first hired me at EA in 1997 and he was an incredible leader for the company during the 16 years he served as CEO. While he will continue to be the Chairman of the US Olympic Committee, he will also provide leadership for EA until a permanent CEO is appointed.

My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year. It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.

Personally, I think we've never been in a better position as a company. You have made enormous progress in improving product quality. You are now generating more revenue on fewer titles by making EA's games better and bigger. You've navigated a rapidly transforming industry to create a digital business that is now approximately $1.5 billion and growing fast. The big investments you've made in creating EA's own platform are now showing solid returns. I believe EA is alone in mastering the challenges of building a platform for our games and services – a platform that will provide a more direct relationship with our consumers. You are number one in the fastest growing segment, mobile, with incredible games like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Real Racing 3, Bejeweled, SCRABBLE and Plants v. Zombies. You have worked to put EA in a position to capture industry leadership on the next generation of consoles; and I believe two of our titles – Battlefield and FIFA – will be among the top few franchises in the entire industry. And the industry's most talented management team – Frank, Rajat, Peter, Gaby, Andrew, Patrick, Blake, Joel and Jeff — are certain to lead the company to a successful future.

I remain an incredible fan of EA and everyone who works in our world – from Stockholm to Seoul, Orlando to Edmonton, Guildford, Geneva, Cologne, Lyon, Bucharest, Montreal, Austin, Salt Lake, LA and, of course, EARS. My hope is that my travels and yours allow us the opportunity to talk more in the months and years to come.

In a few weeks, I will be leaving EA physically. But I will never leave emotionally. I am so incredibly proud of all the great things you have done, and it has been my honor to lead this team these past six years. After March, I will be cheering wildly for EA from the sidelines.

John

Misinformation. Server errors. Fan backlash. Since EA launched SimCity two weeks ago, the online city-builder has been nothing short of a catastrophe for everyone involved.

Much has changed since the game's rocky launch on March 5. Things have gotten better. But all still isn't well, even as EA takes its latest step to make amends with angry fans. In order to make sure you're caught up, we're zooming out and taking a look back at the whole SimCity Disaster so far.

Wondering how things got this way? What's gone right and wrong and right again? Fear not. We're here to explain everything.

Okay. I've heard of SimCity, but what's this new one?

It's a reboot! SimCity 2013, also known as SimCity 5 or just SimCity, is designed to take the popular simulation series in a new direction. Over the past year or so, the folks at longrunning studio Maxis—now a subsidiary of the massive publisher Electronic Arts—have been making lofty promises for SimCity. It'll come with all sorts of improvements, they said. New transportation options. Population determined by roads. And... an intricate multiplayer network that supports inter-city trading and requires SimCity to be online at all times.

That sounds really cool! Why's everyone so angry?

Well... for one, you can't play SimCity offline. So your $60 game probably can't be played on, say, an airplane. Or while on duty in Iraq. Or when your router's on the fritz. Or when EA's servers are down.

By now you may have heard something about servers being down.

OK, I don't get it. What makes SimCity different than other online games? I don't see anyone getting pissed that they can't play World of Warcraft on a boat.

That's how Maxis would like you to think of it: "In many ways, we built an MMO," Maxis boss Lucy Bradshaw wrote on EA's website last week.

But MMOs justify their connectivity requirement by offering players features that would only be possible in an online game. You can't really look at World of Warcraft and say "oh boy, I wish I could play this by myself!" It takes place in a persistent world where everything you do is connected to everyone else in one way or another. As you walk from area to area, you can see other people interacting with the world, and you can thoroughly grasp why this is a game that needs to be online.

In contrast, SimCity lets you sometimes trade with your neighbors. Every city is located in a region, next to a bunch of other cities, and they can interact and connect and help one another to a limited extent, but the majority of your time will be spent, like it is in every SimCity, creating and managing your own metropolis. Play the game for any serious amount of time and it becomes obvious that this is a game that could work well offline.

The game is made by Maxis, but everyone's mad at EA. What's the deal there?

EA is a very large video game publisher and a lot of people dislike them. EA also owns Maxis. So with a game like SimCity, people refer to the two companies interchangeably.

So with so much controversy leading up to release, surely EA must have been prepared for launch day? Surely they must have seen what happened to Diablo III and ensured that their servers worked flawlessly so everyone could play the game when it went live?

Ha ha ha. No. On day one, the game didn't work. Day two? Game didn't work. It took almost a week before people could actually play SimCity, and EA had to disable a bunch of features in order to get the game running properly.

So for way too much time, people who spent $60 on SimCity just straight-up couldn't play it. They couldn't play online because the servers were down, and they couldn't play offline because there's no offline mode. Whoops.

Did the people at EA/Maxis really not realize that this could happen?

Good question. In fact, way back in June of last year, Maxis producer Kip Katserelis assured Kotaku that this sort of thing wouldn't happen.

"We've got experience from Spore and Darkspore," Katserelis said. "EA is an online company. We're definitely watching what's going on at Blizzard, and we're putting in backstops and checks to try to prevent those kind of things from happening."

Wow, what a bummer. Couldn't they just let people play offline?

You'd think so. But EA insists that SimCity was built as an online-only game. In a blog post last December, Maxis's Bradshaw said just that:

Creating a connected experience has always been a goal for SimCity, and this design decision has driven our development process for the game. This is easily the most ambitious game in the franchise and we've taken great care to make sure that every line of code embodies the spirit of the series. To do this, we knew we had to make sure we put our heart and souls into the simulation and the team created the most powerful simulation engine in its history, the GlassBox Engine. GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game — the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.

Yet... something doesn't seem to add up. Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo found that he could play offline for almost 20 minutes without a problem. There appears to be some sort of code in the game that prevents people from playing offline for more than those 20 minutes.

On top of that, Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker says he spoke to a Maxis source who said that SimCity doesn't require server-side computing at all, and that in fact it could be played offline.

"I have no idea why they're claiming otherwise," Walker's source said. "It's possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I'm clueless."

So, wait. If it's not necessary, why is the game online-only? Why not offer a single-player mode?

Piracy.

Piracy?

We sure think so. But EA isn't saying. We asked them last year, and again two weeks ago, if they made the game online-only as a form of digital rights management. They won't answer. They won't talk about DRM.

OK. But won't these sort of crazy restrictions just encourage *more* people to try to pirate the game, even if they wouldn't before?

It's certainly possible!

Now I see why everyone was so upset. But by now, the servers must be working. So everything's good with SimCity, right?

Not quite. Last week, people started discovering that the game is fundamentally broken in a lot of different ways.

For example, Maxis/EA advertised that this SimCity would give every individual Sim his or her own life. That "massive amount of computing" went into SimCity's GlassBox Engine, a "revolutionary simulation technology" according to the game's product listing.

Except... fans discovered that GlassBox had some issues.

Instead of returning to their own homes, individual Sims would drive into the nearest home available.

Instead of driving on empty roads, Sims would take the shortest path available, even if that led straight into congestion.

As one EA forum member points out, SimCity's sim-people use the same sort of AI-handling "agent system" that traffic and sewage and power uses. The results are not pretty.

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.

"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.

Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

Wow.

"Wow" is right.

Has EA addressed any of this stuff?

Sort of. They're aware of all that AI wackiness, and they say they're working on it.

But it's really the publisher's insistence upon keeping the game online-only that continues to rub fans and observers the wrong way. While admitting that SimCity could very well have an optional offline mode, Maxis's Bradshaw shot down any notions that we might be seeing one in the future:

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision. We did not focus on the "single city in isolation" that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.

Translation: "Online-only is here to stay. Also we sold like a million copies. Deal with it."

But is there anything good about the game?

Sure. It's a beautiful-looking piece of work. It's got a lot of interesting simulation ideas. The music is great. The sound design is incredible. It's really fun and feels really good to play, at least for the first few hours before you realize how limiting it is to build on such a small plot of land.

It's just too bad about all that other stuff.

What a disaster. So what's next?

If you bought SimCity, you're getting a free game! Well, a free PC game. Published by EA. That's one of these eight choices.

And if this whole debacle has left a sour taste in your mouth—and not pleasant sour like a lemon candy, but gross sour like expired milk—rest assured you're not alone. Hopefully, we'll all come away with this experience learning to be far more skeptical of online-only games in the future.

Girls? Playing VIDEO games? YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE IT.

With the type of breathless astonishment usually reserved for miracles and alien sightings, local news channels across the country decided to report on the Major League Gaming tournaments in Dallas last weekend with the best angle possible: HOLY SHIT DID YOU KNOW THAT GIRLS PLAY VIDEO GAMES NOW?

Kotaku video editor Chris Person has put together a super-cut of the footage. You can watch it in all of its glory above. For the love of the game.

Note that these reports were all filmed in 2013, as opposed to, say, 1996.

I like God of War: Ascension. It's a violent video game. I've got nothing against that.

I like a lot of violent video games. I "get" where a lot of in-game violence comes from: games need to feel interactive; letting me control one character and eliminate another from the screen is still the most easily-comprehended—and enjoyed—act of video game interactivity.

I also like seeing images of attractive people. I prefer female figures, but there's capacity for physical beauty in any kind of person. Or place. Or thing. Or Greek deity.

Sometimes beauty is just that: beauty. Sometimes, it's sexualized. That kind of beauty is meant to appeal not just to the eyes or the heart but to the loins, to tap into something primal, to turn us on.

What makes me uneasy, what feels—my opinion!—gross is when these two things combine, when a game sexualizes some of its characters and then lets you bash their heads in the ground and rip them in two. That's when it feels weird. That's when I wonder why I'm being asked to have fun with this. That's when I start wishing that vivid violence and sexualized content wouldn't mix in video games in the manner they do in God of War: Ascension, not when there seems to be no other point than asking me to have fun with it.

Lighten up, you might say.

Or: I don't like it either, you might say.

Let's make sure we're all looking at and talking about the same thing. (There will be God of War: Ascension spoilers below.)

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God of War games take place in a version of the world described in ancient Greek myths. In these myths the gods are violent. And they are constantly having sex. The gods wreck lives. They sleep with relatives. They seduce. They rape. They don't necessarily wear a lot of clothes. Sex? Violence? They're all about both, often in close proximity.

God of War games are actually mostly about violence. The sex is minimized. The bias toward violence is in the name of the game. We're playing as a human, Kratos, who would be the god of war. His own sexual escapades have been limited to one mostly-offscreen sex scene per game. That's one more mostly-offscreen sex scene than most games have, but it is just the one.

In fact, if there's a sex scene in the new God of War, I never found it in the 10 hours it took me to complete the game's solo campaign. What I did find, early in the game. was a harem scene. It establishes what longtime players have known: God of War games may not have a lot of sex in them, but they have a lot of bare breasts.

Take a look:

What do you get out of this? What I get out of this is that, in Ascension's world, buxom = attractive = alluring. Not a stretch. Much of society is down with that equation. Genitalia isn't a part of it. Not in these games or most others.

As uncommon as breasts are in games, below-the-belt nudity is even rarer. Hence this void between Kratos' legs, as seen in Ascension:

Or his he wearing underwear? It's hard to tell:

The harem scene, the game's first heavily-sexualized moment, is a trick. It's an illusion cast by one of the evil Furies in the game. (Yes, the game's bad guys are female; but I wouldn't read much into that. They've been male in the other God of Wars).

Here's what happens next in the harem scene, in a cutscene you don't control:

Kratos is an angry character. The very first game inflects that anger with the sadness and regret Kratos feels for killing his own family. I've played all of the console and PSP God of War games, and I believe his longing for his family is cited in each of them. In Ascension that longing is at its most tender. Players briefly see a Kratos who has reason to hope for a reunion with his wife—who, I believe, we've always seen clothed in these games. Most of the time, though, Kratos isn't moping. He's murdering.

As God of War players, we're asked to act out that rage. Most of us do it, I would assume, without rancor. We're not mad at the Furies or at the many gods and beasts and enemy soldiers we have Kratos kill. We may well commit these acts of violence as a chess player eliminates a pawn or queen, with our mind on strategy, not fury.

But God of War games, to their credit, remind us with more and more vivid graphical detail, that the violence that occurs when blades meet flesh is not pretty. Its color is mostly red and, in the imagination of the series and in the animations of Ascension, guts spill from opened torsos, brains bulge from uncapped skulls.

The game's violence is brutish and primal. We see gore.

And we see breasts, big breasts similar to what we see in Ascension's harem scene.

Breasts code some enemies as female.

Here's one, as she's killed by the player-controlled Kratos:

Here's another:

One more:

Let's talk about this last one, as it puts all of the game's issues with violence against sexualized female characters in one nutshell:

• She's a snake-lady—a Gorgon—who is trying to kill Kratos. Killing her, in the context of being a mythological Greek Spartan warrior, feels appropriate.
• If we accept that godly creatures don't have to wear clothes and that it might be really weird if monsters did, then the the snake-lady being topless is a fair visual design decision.
• There might be a double-standard in that we never see Kratos' most-sexualized body parts, but it's not like we could see any of the Gorgon's below-the-waist reproductive organs. She's a snake down there. For her part, at least, we only can discuss toplessness.
• The interactivity of this kill is actually an advance for the series, as the trademark God of War executions are now mapped, more interestingly, to analog sticks and buttons, not just buttons. That enables players to make Kratos dodge this Gorgon's final, desperate counter-attacks, while slashing at her to finish her off.
• The richness of detail here is partially a byproduct of technology. This game is on a PlayStation 3, which can show details of hero and enemy bodies that simply couldn't be shown in older games. Note that Grand Theft Auto 3, on the PS2, didn't even render characters' fingers separately. In that game, everyone had flesh-colored mittens for hands. With more horsepower comes, simply, more body parts.
• That finishing move doesn't just split her head. It cuts her breast. Violence against both of those body parts is disturbing. But one's the norm in games; one is not.

As Kratos, you'll kill everyone.

Have a look at Kratos going after some of the enemies who read as male in Ascension:

The male enemies are ripped apart, too. The element of sexualization is absent. No knives to the groin, for example.

What to make of this?

***

For some gamers, I imagine, what we see and do in this game is no big deal. Those Greek myths were this violent, this sexualized. For some, there may well be entertainment in the subjugation or humiliation in sexualized females, though I'd like to think that's not who the game's creators were designing their game for.

When I've discussed the series' violence with them, they've been nuanced, championing the context of the milieu and the aspects of it as a game over simple thrills about gore. I've not spoken to them specifically against the violence against female characters bit, something I hope to do in the future.

For me? I find, in this game, the intersection of two ideas that don't comfortably co-exist. Games have been getting more violent, often as an expression of the interactivity possible in their combat systems. And game characters' bodies have become more and more believably—if not realistically—shaped. The abstract avatars of before are replaced with detailed bodies. Straight lines and polygonal shapes have been replaced with curves and fine details.

So we have a game that presents a form of feminine beauty that associates exposed, large breasts as beautiful. And we have a game that wants us, after many other battles, when we reach the last Fury, to stab the final boss of the game.

That leaves us with a game that literally provides us no good place to stab the game's final boss, no good place to do an action that, of course, should look unpleasant because, hell, it's about killing. We probably should feel something when we pretend to kill. I just don't know if what we've got here is progress. Maybe? Maybe it's gender-balance. Maybe it's a step into a future when simulated violence against virtual men and women is equally nauseating. Maybe we are marching progressively into a moment when of course she could be chainsawable, because we live in a world where women now can serve in combat in the U.S. armed forces.

Where, then, can we stab the game's final, sexy boss?

Spoilers for that end-boss battle.... if you're willing to watch, then, ponder, if this is what progress looks like.

The next title from Ken Levine and Irrational Games finally comes out next week. But the hype cycle for the next BioShock game has been spinning for a long while and people have been spouting out opinions every since the very first glimpse of BioShock Infinite. This video animates a bunch of vulgar, misinformed and straight-up weird YouTube comments about the game, with hilarious, dead-on voice acting bringing the trollery to life. Can't wait to see what these folks think once the game is out...

Tomb Raider's PC version is generally strong, offering a better-looking, higher resolution, smoother tomb-raiding experience than its console counterpart. That said, if you're using an Nvidia graphics card, the game could be pretty unstable, though that instability is usually fixed by turning tessellation off.

Good news: A beta driver released by Nvidia on Friday clears the issue right up, and ostensibly offers some performance improvements across the board, too. I installed the driver for my 660Ti and have been running with tessellation with nary a problem.

It's been cool to explore the island a bit in the aftermath of the story, just like Evan said it would be. That said, I think I might actually start a replay of the game on a higher difficulty. My bow and arrow misses having moving targets.

YouTuber/animator avemagnadude mashed together a few concepts from Assassin's Creed III trailers, but there's a distinct Gladiator feel here, too. Did you pick up on it?

Those references, combined with dramatic, slow-motion throws of Connor's tomahawk and a fantastic track (I need to have that track) make me want to see a Gladiator-styled Assassin's Creed game.

But I guess for now I'll settle for pirates. Or something.

Nintendo executives have many reasons to keep their games off of iPhones and Androids and to only let them play on Nintendo hardware. But what about the creators of a new Nintendo video game? They've got reasons, too.

Last week, I asked some of the Japanese and Canadian creators at Nintendo and Next Level Games if their new creation, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon would work on a cellphone. Obviously, it doesn't technically run on a phone. It's made for the Nintendo 3DS.

But could it? Could they imagine it? The context, I offered, is that some Nintendo-watchers believe Nintendo should put their games on smartphones. Toss a Pokémon or Super Mario Bros. on an iPhone and rake in the money. That's the theory.

The two Japanese developers I was talking to via video-conference tried to field this question first, but the 90 seconds of off-mic chatter, of back-and-forth with our translator, of discussions with other people who were off-camera in Kyoto, convinced me they were not expecting this question and maybe didn't know what to make of it.

I admit that it's an odd question, but a relevant one. Either we can imagine Nintendo's newest creations working on stick-free, button-less phones or we can't. Either they can or can't.

"Actually," the game's supervisor Yoshihito Ikebata finally said, "I really think that the feeling and the core of the game is only possible because it's on this particular hardware, the 3DS. And it is really hard to imagine it running on anything else."

That's not a wonderfully illuminating answer, but it was as much as I felt I would get in a time-constrained, translated interview. I could guess at what he meant. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is a three-dimensional action-adventure that has the player steering Luigi through haunted buildings and other venues with the 3DS' circle pad. Players make Luigi vacuum ghosts in a sort of cast-the-fishing-line-and-reel-back-the-catch combination of tugging back on the pad while holding down one of the 3DS' buttons. The game is displayed, optionally, in glasses-free 3D, an aesthetic inspired by 3D experimentation with the first Luigi's Mansion. It is indeed hard to imagine such a game on a non-3D button-less phone.

As I thought this through, the game's Canadian director, Bryce Holliday of Next Level Games chimed in: "For me, I would add that Luigi's an expressive personality. We spent a lot of time on the presentation and showing a lot of his face. Having your fingers on top of him—like you would have to do on a smartphone—would occlude some of that character. It's nice to have buttons basically.

"It also might be hard to do a fishing mechanic with siding and tapping on a touch screen rather than having a circle pad and shoulder buttons."

I can see what he's saying. I dislike having my fingers block some of the more interesting graphics I see in games I play on my iPhone. And while I can imagine fishing games on the iPhone—I'm currently obsessed with a very good iPhone fishing game—the feeling of tugging at a wriggling, resisting ghost, as I've experienced while happily playing Luigi's Mansion is hard to imagine working as well without tactile controls.

Maybe that was a good thought experiment. Maybe that was all of us being narrow-minded or them staunchly promoting the Nintendo hardware that is assumed to be necessary to support Nintendo's business model. I'm not sure.

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Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata can tell you when Nintendo would stop making its own handheld systems. He can tell you, hypothetically, when a line of machines that has gone from Game Boy to DS to 3DS would end and Nintendo's games would appear on the hardware made by other companies instead.
Last... More »

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If you register a copy of SimCity by March 25, you get a free copy of one of eight PC games from EA's catalog, including Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

This is EA's way of saying sorry for the server issues that rendered the city-building game unplayable for almost a week after it launched on March 5.

"At Maxis, our studio values dictate that we innovate and create something that is quirky, complex and challenging," the company said in a blog post today. "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."

Here's the full list of options:

• 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)
• Plants vs. Zombies
• SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

Not included: an offline version of SimCity.

BTW, here's what I just got when I tried to go to the blog post:

Can't make this stuff up, people.

Monday mornings are for morbid death compilation videos, right?

Director of the video above, BenBuja, says that it's every possible death scenario in the game. But if you catch a missing one, feel free to share it below. Otherwise, enjoy your morbid morning. And you're welcome.