The Week in Review

This week we learn that the leader of LulzSec was not doing it for the lulz as we had initially thought, the Simpsons is too popular for the app store and you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Back in February, Electronic Arts pulled the iOS game Battlefield 3: Aftershock from the App Store because it sucked so hard that its mere existence was an intolerable affront to good taste. Today, the publisher removed The Simpsons: Tapped Out for the complete opposite reason: it’s just too damn awesome for its own good. The problem, to put a bit of a finer point on it, is that the “overwhelmingly positive” response to the game has clobbered the servers, resulting in serious connection and lag issues. Players who already have the game will still be able to play, but everyone else will have to wait until EA gets things squared away.(Link)

We haven’t heard much about LulzSec in recent months but for awhile last year it was the scourge of the internet, a sort of sugared-up, amoral Anonymous that really was just “doing it for the lulz.” Its brief rampage ended as suddenly as it began, but today the group is back in the news thanks to the rather startling revelation that its leader, the man known as Sabu, was flipped by the FBI and became an informant almost a year ago ago (Link)

There are only a handful of videogame designers in the world who are recognizable names, and of that small list there are few who are better known or inspire more conversation than Peter Molyneux. He founded Bullfrog Productions, which gave the world Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper and more, and then Lionhead Studios, responsible for the long-running Black & White and Fable franchises. And now, 15 years later, he’s moving on. (Link)

Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw revealed that Portal 2 originally was a very different project than the final game released in stores. In a discussion entitled “Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn’t Need One,” the two veteran writers explained to the assembled GDC audience that Chell, GlaDOS, Wheatley, and even portals weren’t intended to appear in the sequel to the popular first-person puzzle game. (Link)

The internet got itself pretty tightly wound when rumors of a brand-new Valve-designed game console, widely referred to as the “Steam Box,” bubbled to the surfaceearlier this week. The device would boast a Core i7 chip, Nvidia GPU and eight gig of RAM, and have the ability to run not just Steam but other services too, like EA’s Origin. And if that sounds to you an awful lot like a PC, well, you’d get no argument from me, but that’s a different story altogether. (Link)