Games

Gamers will soon be able to play Maxis's SimCity offline – despite the company's earlier insistence that the game absolutely had to be connected to the internet to work.

The turnaround was announced by Maxis studio manager Patrick Buechner in a blogpost on Sunday. He said Update 10 for the latest installment of the long-running urban modeling game series will include an exciting feature known as "Offline Play." This revolutionary technology lets a game work without a connection to the cloud!

Helping usher in the year of the Linux (gaming) desktop, Valve announced its Steam Machine—which will compete with Xbox One and Playstation 4.

When gaming vendor Valve's co-founder Gabe Newell told the Linuxcon USA conference audience last September that Linux is the future of gaming, he also hinted that his company's future consoles would be Linux-powered.

Talking over Valve's announcement of its Steam Machine prototype specs with a few people online (including Ars' own Andrew Cunningham), I've come to the conclusion that Valve might need more than its own free, standardized gaming OS (and, ideally, an exclusive killer app) to make PC gaming appealing for the living room console consumer. To really put up a fight, they should do something to simplify the dizzying variety of architectures and performance points that are inherent in parcel with PC gaming.

The week of Grand Theft Auto V's launch could have been a controversy cash-in for the publicity lovers at Rockstar Games. The game's checklist of features reads like Tipper Gore's personal hell: savage murders, psychotic heroes, strip clubs, an interactive torture sequence, and enough swears and offensive terms to do George Carlin proud.

Grand Theft Auto 5, the blockbuster sequel to Rockstar Games' ultra popular sandbox crime franchise, managed to rake in an enormous £496 million in its first 24 hours alone.

That's roughly $800 million - nearly $1 billion.

The game cost £170 million to develop and bring to market, soaring past some high budget  Hollywood blockbusters, such as Avatar. Fans across the United Kingdom queued up earlier this week for a midnight launch. So far every corner of the press is laying praise on the game.

Steam gamers are targeted by a trojan that steals their login credentials and defeats the service's password encryption mechanism by using HTML injection.

Attackers stripping users' login data with a variant of the trojan Ramnit since mid-July according to Trusteer fraud prevention solutions manager Etay Maor.

Steam has some 54 million members and was victim of a massive breach in November 2011 when hackers accessed the personal data of up to 35 million customers contained in a database. This time individual users were targeted.

Servers belonging to video game publisher Ubisoft have been compromised in a recent attack. Hackers are said by the company to have gained access to sensitive data, including usernames, e-mails, and encrypted passwords, and has started to e-mail Uplay account holders to warn about the intrusion and the data loss.

 Adventurers in the online game "World of Warcraft" generally have to worry about bandits and dragons, but their most dangerous threat this week comes in the form of gold-hungry hackers. By exploiting the Web and mobile applications for the game's Auction House (which allows players to buy and sell items), malefactors have stolen millions of gold pieces, but players who use two-step authentication are relatively safe.

Contrary to popular belief, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, was alive and well, this year. But the rise of Ouya, Steam Box, and GamePop later this year could mark the end of an era. With relatively small revenue generated by a typical open-source game, indie developers simply won't be able to afford to go.

At the same time, there's going to be more and more of them, playing a huge part in the gaming ecosystem.

Sony fired a direct shot across Microsoft’s bow at its E3 press conference on Monday evening, clearly positioning PlayStation 4 as the anti-Xbox One.

PlayStation 4 will fully support used games, said Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton. You’ll be able to trade your games in at retail, but also sell them to another person or lend them to a friend. Xbox One, in contrast, will only let you sell games to “participating retail stores,” and lending and renting are not supported.