There's a nice look back on various forms of copy protection and games. If you make it, they will pirate it - and it's an entertaining look back at some of the ways companies have tried to outsmart the piraters, sometimes somewhat successfully and sometimes not at all. But is there ever going to be an end in sight?:

With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel.

I'm always entertained to see what new forms of copy protection crop up in weird places, but when watching surreptitious deals going on in Taipei or even seeing the amount of odd stuff one can find on the internet, it does seem like something of a losing battle, no? At least the old school manuals and inbox extras required to complete a game were creative, if nothing else.

A History of Copy Protection [Next Generation via PlayNoEvil]

... SimRomes stick around for a reason. As much as I loved the alien nature of the Egypt in Tilted Mill's Children of the Nile, Rome remains the most accessible ancient city. A century of movies and books have primed us for gladiators, togas, legions on the march...much moreso than, say, Sophoclean drama, chitons and peltasts.

Oh, sure, they're generally wildly historically inaccurate (what else is new?), but panem et circenses, people - who needs realistic class conflict, slavery, and rioting when you've got red-caped legions and chariot racing? The wisdom of Roman satirists still holds true today. Anyways, it's a fun look back at one popular theme if you're a closet (or not) classics geek, or just a fan of some of the titles.

A History of the Ancients Game [Flash of Steel via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The folks at Computer and Video Games recently interviewed Jade Empire's senior producer, Diarmid Clarke about the process of making the game, the ideas behind it and it's translation from the Xbox to the PC. I very much enjoyed Jade Empire and often a game with a very different look and feel over other games will attract my attention more than the latest, most awesome, deserted space wasteland shoot em up game. The gameplay mechanic may have been a titch stale, but the story, missions and beautiful surroundings more than made up for it in my opinion.

One of my favorite quotes from the article didn't really have much to do with the game itself but rather the fanaticism of the internet and how things can quickly blow out of proportion.

Within 24 hours of us registering the name for Dragon Age, one of the fans had found it and posted on our site. He was saying: "Hey, guess what, BioWare have got this Dragon Age, and boy, is it gonna suck." Immediately, we had someone replying: "You've got to be kidding, it's going to have thousands of dragons flying around everywhere." All we'd done was register a name that at the time, we may or may not have been going to use, but yeah, some people get pretty fanatical. I think you could just post the name, and the fans would just design the game for you - the speculation is unbelievable.

Truer words were never spoken. Flynn De Marco

Looking Back... Jade Empire [Computer and Video Games]

In honor of Castlevania's 20th anniversary, IGN has put together quite an extensive retrospective of the uber popular side scrolling, vampire slaying adventure. The 10 page history takes us from the early days of Castlevania's 8-bit glory on the NES, through it's long, rocky history on multiple platforms and leaves us with the authors hope's and dreams for Castlevanias of the future. This is quite a hefty and well written article, so if you're looking for some good weekend reading about the vampire franchise that refuses to die, this is the story for you. Flynn De Marco

Castlevania: The Retrospective [IGN]

It starts with eyes full of gore: E3 1995 and the debut of the Virtual Boy.

The house of Mario was also busy pushing its ill-fated Virtual Boy system, calling it a "unique gameplay experience" (sounds familiar) and committing to spending $25 million to promote it. Nintendo claimed that over 100 third-party developers were working on games for it. Atari (the old one, that is) was also getting into the exciting world of futuristic virtual realities by showing off its own VR headset for the Jaguar console.

And, of course, E3 ends with Kotaku storming the showfloor, making even the most out-of-touch higher-ups realize what a slum the convention had become. Florian Eckhardt

E3: The Good Stuff