Stories by: Matt Peckham

Hostile, bullheaded, mercenary, uncreative, all words that spring to mind when considering Ubisoft and EA's new "always on" PC games policies for upcoming single-player games like Assassin's Creed 2, Silent Hunter 5, and Command & Conquer 4. In order to play any of the latter three, you must have an internet connection or the games won't load. Make that a continuous internet connection, meaning the internet (and presumably each game's respective authentication servers) must be accessible at all times, not just at launch. Unplug your Ethernet cable or disable your WLAN radio (or suffer through a server crash on EA or Ubisoft's part) and the games will simply cease to function.

The glitch that nerfed my old-style "fat" PlayStation 3 and temporarily 'bricked' millions of others worldwide appears to have vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

It's probably just a 24 hour bug, but you'll want to leave your glitchy PS3s off in the meantime, just in case, says Sony.

Funny story, I was musing about a Civilization sequel just yesterday while out for a run, and lo and behold, 2K Games says it's in development as I'm typing this. What's more--and I have to admit, somewhat unexpectedly--it's still being developed for PC.

No one's jaw hit the floor when Microsoft demoed Xbox LIVE running on its new Windows Phone 7 platform earlier this week, but what about a similar connection to Sony's PlayStation Network?

Will the sequel to Nintendo's DS handheld video game system include a tilt sensor to one-up Apple's iPhone? Signs point to yes, says an inside source at a developer who claims he's laid hands on one of Nintendo's super-secret 'DS2' development kits, and that he's extremely impressed.

If you've been playing Mass Effect 2 on a standard definition TV, chances are you've been squinting to decipher the game's neon orange and green text. That's according to a 15-page thread on the game's official forums and noticed by Ars, anyway, claiming "the text is REALLY small" on even reasonably large SDTVs.

You might call BioShock 2 'BioShock with the top down'. You'll discover this early in the game, when its lid, sides, and bottom suddenly disengage and you're thrust beyond the safety of purpose-made geometry. In BioShock, Rapture was a nightmare metropolis beneath the sea, an abyssal macro-terrarium circumscribed by an ocean unwittingly intruded upon, but for all the rifting city's dribbling cracks and spitting leaks, the ocean never came to you.

Call Apple's tablet the iPad, because that's what Steve Jobs does, and hey, it can play games! Thank goodness, right? Apple's iPhone didn't for years, and even Apple probably realizes what an embarrassing mistake that was.

Yes, Apple's inviting game bloggers to its January 27 super-secret product reveal, but I wouldn't read anything into it. Unless the company's launching a completely unanticipated device (always a possibility, but the odds are against it) expect to see--as a footnote to its writing and drawing capabilities--a slate-style computing gizmo touting slick touch-based entertainment demos. Maybe even some clever riffing on stuff like Crayon Physics. But nothing for which you'd ever trade in a set-top console or gaming PC.