Microsoft says the Xbox One won't need an always-online Internet connection. But if you want to play it, the thing might need to check in with the home office once a day. Playing used or borrowed games also sounds like a real bitch. Only one thing that can save gamers from this: our old enemy, Fox News.

What will the world look like after the bombs fall? Can God exist in a place without hope? When man's desire to survive overrides his morality, is the empire he constructs worth saving?

It's revealing that at first I didn't get the point of this, which is Chris Hecker's rant at Game Developers Conference 2013. So much of the nonstop big budget press conference bullshit you hear in this business all sounds alike, forcing me into a kind of weird active listening where I'm trying to decode pabulum and…

Well, that didn't take long. A video recently uploaded by Redditor AzzerUK shows what appears to be SimCity's unlocked debug mode. Here's AzzerUK (emphasis mine):

Near the beginning of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, as the noble pirate Jim Raynor and the psychic-soldier-turned-evil-Zerg-queen-turned-confused-human Sarah Kerrigan are escaping from a squad of invading marines, Kerrigan picks up a gun.

Providing a little more detail than was briefly offered yesterday in a series of Twitter exchanges, Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw has written a blog post outlining the progress that continues to be made fixing SimCity's back-end woes.

Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio's official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game's release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She's already given a preview answer to the question most of…

Looking back on this week's SimCity launch debacle, it isn't just remarkable that the game's servers failed, it's remarkable how many different ways they failed.

In light of SimCity's disastrous launch week, publisher Electronic Arts has suspended the marketing campaign for the game, according to an internal email obtained by Polygon.

The head of the studio behind the troubled new SimCity told Kotaku today that efforts to solve the game's server woes will continue aggressively into the weekend.

Everybody's sick of this SimCity disaster. Everybody!

Lately, a rumor has spread about how EA might ban users who request for refunds on SimCity. It's bunk.

As the disastrous SimCity launch lurches toward the end of the week, it feels like it's been one catastrophe after another.

Hey, remember when video games came out and then you could actually play them?

To many fans of the original city building simulation series, the idea of an online multiplayer game that required even solo players to be connected to the internet at all times seemed like a recipe for disaster. Maxis' latest creation is easily the most compelling SimCity I've played since the 1989 original. Update: …

With SimCity's launch debacle entering its third day and the game remaining inoperable for many people, EA is shifting its tone and promising a resolution, but with no time or date for the fix.

See that image? If you try to play SimCity on the U.S. servers right now, you probably will. It's a little different from the image we saw last night, and the server issues we saw all throughout yesterday, but the problem remains the same: people who bought SimCity can't play it.

Maybe you bought SimCity today.