The Gaming News Thread

[drone]

I'm not sure why EA keeps pushing this line (and I'm sure it's EA, not Maxis). Anyone with half a brain can do the math, it's not economically feasible to create a popular mainstream game where significant portions of the engine computations have to be done on company servers. The raw distributed computing power of thousands of gamers' PCs is much higher than what could be built and maintained by the developer/publisher at a profitable cost.

The game servers are there for the following reasons (in ascending order of importance to EA):

• Region multiplayer interactions
• Chat/comms between players and cheevos
• DRM (and judging by the above link, not very robust)
• the ability to push people to the next SimCity version in a few years, by shutting these servers down

And Diablo III was the best possible advertisement for Torchlight II.

[Papewaio]

Torchlight II is another game on my wish list I should get.

I wish SimCity had been setup more like Spore which was single player with multiplayer input. The economy could hav been based on the macro trends and updated at a pace you choose ie first login, every login, every ten minutes or never.

$80 AU for a digital copy of a cut down version compared with the previous version. It is way to expensive for a game that has put itself in the FarmVille clique with its always on gameplay.