Games

It's not the first time a building was turned into a giant representation of the video game Tetris, as even in 2000 a Brown University group pulled off a similar stunt on the 10-story Sciences Library, but in that case they had permission of the university; not so in this case.

Hackers turned the Massachusetts Institute of Tehnology's (MIT) Green Building into a huge, glorified - and playable - Tetris game. Also known as Building 54, the building houses MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science.

Since its release last Friday, thousands of players have struggled to untangle the knotty thicket of puzzles hidden deep within Xbox 360 indie title Fez, the 2D-meets-3D puzzle platformer that drove us batty with its obscure stumpers. Since then, only a few hundred have managed to complete enough of the game's challenges to reach the 200 percent (yes, 200 percent) completion threshold.

The source code of the classic Apple II game Prince of Persia has been published on GitHub by Jordan Mechner, the original author. The game, which was first published by Broderbund in 1989, was developed in 6502 assembly. With the help of Apple II enthusiast Tony Diaz, the code was recovered recently from a 22-year old floppy disk.

Science fiction author John L. Beiswenger has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against game publisher Ubisoft in a Pennsylvania district court, claiming that the Assassin's Creed series illegally copies ideas and themes he established in his 2002 novel Link.

Some years ago — around the time that HD-DVD gave up the ghost, Blu-ray emerged triumphant, and thousands of Xbox 360 owners said, “Well, hell” — I made a prediction. I predicted that Blu-ray would never replace DVDs the way DVDs did VHS. I figured that Blu-ray would be the equivalent of LaserDisc, something AV nerds and consumer bandwagoneers would get into it, and that the next big media format would be digital downloads.

In a statement released today, Electronic Arts has announced that they will be shutting down online servers for more than a dozen games including some that are less than two years old.

EA said the decision would allow it server support staff to move into positions that could help more players. “We were rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games” the statement said.

Her name is Angelina: she runs on a heavy-duty Mac server and she's building some addictive computer games for you.

Electronic Arts has announced it will bring out the first new version of its iconic game SimCity in a decade, with the new build due out in 2013.

The new version, SimCity for PC, will include 3D graphics, the ability to build bendy roads and, most importantly, add a multiplayer and social twist to the game. Friends will be able to set up cities next to each other and interact to develop regions and undertake challenges together, and specialize in certain industries. There's even talk of players being able to be bad neighbors and spoil other people's cities.

With all the excited chatter among gamers about a rumored new PC-based game console from PC game publisher Valve, it may be worth taking a look back at one of the previous attempts to do something similar.

Zynga will launch its own social gaming platform and open it up to third-party game developers, the company announced on Thursday.

The maker of "Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille" will soon have its own website where people can sign up and play games with their friends. Today its games are played primarily on Facebook, Yahoo and a few other websites, as well as on smartphones.