As has become something of a yearly tradition for Electronic Arts, the publisher is shutting down the online servers for eleven of its games.
A fan-engineered sequel to the long dormant Wing Commander series is known to Electronic Arts and all of the franchise’s rights holders, but they are taking no action to shut down its development. That said, they don’t officially or unofficially endorse the game.
There are so many “leaked” trailers that have survived multiple days on YouTube, it’s hard to believe this isn’t deliberate. Whatever the case, this silent slideshow of SimCity 5 concept art is alleged to be source material for a GDC announcement, and the game will release in 2013.
Curt Schilling, the head of 38 Studios, has taken to his studio’s own forums (and also NeoGAF’s) to face the music regarding a buggy demo version of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and plans for day-one downloadable content. He’s as plain-spoken here as he was on sports radio when he was a Major League Baseball all-star. It’s an attribute that got him in trouble in his baseball career, but gamers seem to respond to it little better.
Earlier today, the makers of mobile gaming blockbuster Tiny Tower published the kind of open letter loved by video gaming’s instantly and constantly angry fuck-the-man constituency, not least because it can be disseminated by imgur. It alleged that Zynga, the popularly despised maker of Facebook McGames, stole Tiny Tower‘s idea and was reaping a dishonest profit from it.
You get exclusive items for Mass Effect 3 if you play the demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, but that shouldn’t be the only reason you play it. From the demo, Reckoning looks like it could be a fairly entertaining and worth-while RPG. If you played Fable and thought, “Man, this combat is too slow!” then Reckoning deserves your attention.
Electronic Arts is asking a federal judge to rule that it has a First Amendment right to depict real-life military helicopters in video games such as Battlefield 3 without the permission of the aircraft’s maker.
Electronic Arts has lost its bid to win the domain “ssx.com” from a holdings firm that bought it up in October. While the holdings firm parked the domain and briefly served ads leading to the game — an action that EA used as the basis for its complaint — an arbitration panel didn’t see that as enough evidence of bad faith to justify turning over the domain.