1. Maxis / EA needs to rebuild confidence around Sim City as a brand, as they famously destroyed consumer goodwill for purely monetary reasons.

2. They underdelivered on the game itself. For a brand as famous and longstanding as Sim City, their sales numbers and retention rates are terrible. And a lot of that comes…

PS3 and 360 games look similar mainly because cross-platform development tends to pull all graphics towards the middle. Even if there was a 2x power difference, developers would mainly use that for easily adjusted disposable parameters like draw distances and fog effects. Actually takin advantage of a power…

The Full List is:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
Underworld
The American President
Dumb and Dumber
The Wedding Planner
What a Girl Wants
Jumanji
Dave
Joe vs the Volcano
A League Of Their Own
A Little Princess
Teeth
Pure Country
Cruel Intentions
Braveheart
Godzilla
Empire Records
Arsenic and Old Lace
Richie Rich
My Blue Heaven
The Witches
Wh…

The MBTA has traditionally been open to people making maps of the subway system: It helps spread their message, gets new riders, and their maps play with scale so much as to be painful to use with other transportation mediums.

If this maps was close enough to be a derivative work, chances are the MBTA would let it…

It would be suicide to raise the prices right now. They're competing with Freemium, strong Steam Sales, and the previous generation of consoles for relevance. And they haven't yet made nearly as good a case as previous console generations. Right now is not the time To become even more pricing gated, especially with…

I'd contest the "just drop in another $300 graphics card" myth on PC's. If you update frequently? Sure. But you really only need to upgrade every 5 years or so, and by then usually your main chipset, RAM, and other things have moved so far ahead that the only way you're getting that $300 graphics card to be viable…

PC's have needed good inputs for 3D navigation for some time now. This could very well either be that technology, or be enough of a kick in the pants that we get an abstracted API for 3D motion in the same way we have abstracted Joystick API's.

You know what the intent is. If you download knowing there was a glitch in the system or someone made a mistake, it's not legally piracy but it is morally piracy. If you're OK with that, then do it.

I actually had two people at work (at a game company) cheer when they saw I by default went to blog.kotaku.com. The blog view was miles better for regular readers.

I'm glad to see Kotaku turning around a revamp in 2 years, which is significantly faster than their previous revamp, and appears to address more concerns…

Electronics that are sold as doing something, and which adhere to the letter of what it claims to do without actually fulfilling the need. Things like USB side monitors whose drivers crash the computer after ten minutes of use. Or "Routers" which "route," but which have built-in firewalls that can't be managed or…

This is how people acclimate to FPS games as well. It just takes a little time for most people, though some will never become OK with it. The Virtua Boy also took a little while to acclimate to.

I had a friend who fell in love with her phone, and so "protected" it with $7 a month insurance. She had the phone for about 9 years, when it finally gave up the ghost, spending almost $900 to insure a $400 phone. When she contacted the company, their response was "Oh, we don't insure those kinds of phone anymore." …

Snow Outposts of Other Countries: Space stations, hyperbaric nuclear proof bunkers, futuristic geodesic superstructures with advanced life support.

It's not technically getting their own airport, but that will still look pretty darned impressive on their eHarmony profile.

Also: Public Policy Polling does not include cellphone-only houses in their polls. And only includes people that actually respond to phone polls. These would be less on the overall tech-savvy side of things.

Getting a job as a video game writer is incredibly difficult. This is a broad generalization, but for every 10 artists you generally get one designer. For every 5 designers, you get one writer. The most likely route in is by helping with the endless churn of MMORPG quests. For that, you need to apply at Turbine,…

The Phantom Menace made 100 million in its 3D re-release. While not amazing, that's not exactly a bomb.

I'm guessing they don't. The project allows for 64 "realtime streaming" windows into that data from the ground. Maybe those are what is cached onboard.

You could potentially do shots that would be too dangerous to do with a live crew and a full-priced helicopter. Losing a 10k drone and a 20k camera is bad, but that's significantly better than losing a 150k helicopter + pilot + cameraman.

MAMT. More artistic merit than Twilight.