Having now fully recovered from Supanova Melbourne, I’m back with the news…

• EA have announced details of the upcoming 2.0 patch for SimCity. The update includes fixes for the nasty “Unable to process” error that has been stopping many players from even loading their cities since the game’s launch (I’ve lost two cities to this bug). It also fixes a bug that causes the recycling centre to stop working, as well as rebalancing and fixing issues with casinos, high schools, fire truck clumping, and several other major problems. The update is scheduled to launch on April 22.
• Following on from the announcement earlier this week that Earthbound will be coming to the Wii U virtual console (Can. Not. Wait.), the fan group behind the Mother 3 fan translation have offered their translation to Nintendo if they ever decide to release the third game in Shigesato Itoi’s legendary series (Earthbound is the second, known as Mother 2 in Japan).
• Remember Tim Langdell? The guy who claimed a trademark on the word “edge” as it applied to video games based on some shitty games he made in the 1980s? The guy who then sued a bunch of developers, including EA, Namco and Mobigames for supposedly infringing his trademarks with games such as Mirror’s Edge, SoulEdge and Edge? Yeah, well, he’s had his trademark cancelled, and can no longer claim infringement on people using the word in their titles. This ends a four-year process that has seen him lose all credibility in the industry.
• ArenaNet went above and beyond for April Fool’s Day, creating a hilarious fake ad for the Super Adventure Box, and showing a kid playing a game called Rytlock’s Critter Rampage on it. They then actually implemented an entire dungeon based on the concept in-game, using Minecraft-esque visuals to give it a 16-bit feel. Well, now the actual Rytlock’s Critter Rampage is a thing, proving once and for all that ArenaNet won April Fool’s Day this year.
• Using the lighting system of a building to run a video game has been a thing for a long time, but it’s rare that it’s done in as interactive and public way, such as has been done on the side of the Cira Centre in Philadelphia. Ars Technica details the process behind getting Pong running on this building, including the technical and logistical challenges of such a task.

Cover image of a Portal Gun model taken by me at Supanova last weekend. You can find the full set of photos I took here.