SimCity sales ensure it has a "long service life in front of it" as EA learn lessons from a "challenging launch"
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EA rang their shareholders for a chinwag yesterday, and talked a great deal about the biggest event in their year so far: SimCity. Sales of Maxis’ messy mayoral reboot were “solid", thanks to an upsurge in direct downloads via Origin. But EA are working to ensure its disastrous launch, which saw servers swamped and inaccessible to a large proportion of players, “won’t happen again".
Last week we heard that 
Dead Space 3 is to be much the same game on PC as it is on PS3 and Xbox 360. So sa
Extra resources used in Dead Space 3’s weapon crafting system will be purchasable via microtransactions
Standard edition; limited edition; special edition; collector's edition; director's cut; XL; Bigger, longer, and uncut; megaxplex edition; extraordinary rendition; and now dev-team edition.
The problem with expanding the reach of your franchise - something EA have been loudly doing ever since the original Dead Space wound up quite likeable - is that new fans, by their nature, haven’t played your games yet. So what this latest trailer for co-op sequel Dead Space with Friends does is plug directly into your head and pump it full of words. But rather than kung fu or French, you’ll emerge with a working knowledge of Isaac Clarke’s peculiar career as an alien-lumberjack.
Put your scare-face on, because here's a twenty minute long chunk of Dead Space 3 gameplay footage, lovingly presented by the game's terminally energised executive producer Steve Papoutsis. That said, if you wouldn't mind configuring your scare-face to respond more to co-op action-horror than the series' traditional lonely survival horror, you'll have a much scarier time of it. This is relentless.
Whether they be drenched in wubwubs, besotted with Inception-esque brawngs, edited together by an ADHD lab-chimp or just grossly misrepresentative of the final product, everybody loves a good old-fashioned videogame trailer. I've gone ahead and pulled together the biggest PC game trailers of E3 and laid them all side by side, to save you wandering all over the internet and potentially getting hurt. Some of them are brilliant.
Like the pus leaking out of a rotten, red boil, we knew about Dead Space 3's co-op mode before it burst at EA's E3 presentation. Grim, ugly, and slimy, and I'm not talking about the pus.
Yesterday’s weirdly stilted Dead Space 3 trailer was about as informative as a Chinese instruction manual, but we at least managed to work out that Isaac Clarke isn’t the protagonist. But according to these wee screenshots, posted on 
Poor Isaac Clarke. Not only does he win the prize for the universe’s most easily-dismembered man, but he doesn’t make an appearance in the trailer for Dead Space 3. Somewhat beefier protagonist John Carver takes his place in this atmospheric but unengaging promo vid.
