Well, this is interesting. While the rest of the world was ogling over what’s coming down the pipe from Google, Steam introduced collectible virtual trading cards that you can earn by playing games, and trade in for bragging rights and prizes.

Sound odd? Sure, but it’s also rather neat. Steam Trading Cards are currently in beta, and themed after the few games that support them. You earn cards by playing the participating games, though you can only earn about half of a game’s total card set on your own. You’ll need to collect the rest of the set by bartering with friends or other Steam users.

Here’s where things get interesting (and potentially valuable): complete a set of cards, and you can craft them into a game badge. These badges can be displayed on your Steam profile, but you’ll also earn random goodies like backgrounds for your Steam profile and (more lucratively) coupons for DLC and discounts on Steam games.

These collectible cards can be sold on Steam’s Community Market, and as of the last hour virtual game cards have been selling for about $2 - $3—which sounds ludicrous. There is of course the potential to earn a badge and get a coupon for 50% off a game or DLC, and… nope, still ludicrous. I’m sure the market prices will level off once that “shiny new feature” smell wears off, more folks get invited to the beta, and a true median price is determined by supply and demand.

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Following in the footsteps of 2010’s Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light improves upon the gameplay of its predecessor without destroying what made the series great in the first place: the setting. Last Light takes you back to the post-apocalyptic Russian wasteland, employing an excellent soundtrack and bleak, desolate imagery to deliver a first-person shooter with surprising pathos and one of the most genuine game narratives in recent memory.

Boot up Last Light and you'll be dropped into the boots of Artyom–a man haunted by memories of his mother, or lack thereof–as he attempts to leave the Russian Metro to capture “a dark one”, monstrous remnants of the world before it was devastated by all-out nuclear war. Of course, nothing goes smoothly for Artyom, and along the way you'll be captured by other survivors and work together with another captive, Pavel, to orchestrate an escape. Arytom's quest ranges across the Russian wasteland, ultimately leading you through areas devastated by nuclear destruction and nests of enemies mutated by the apocalypse before culminating in one of the coolest and most intense firefight finales I've ever experienced.

But frenetic, fast-paced combat is tiresome without a meaningful reason to fight, and Metro: Last Light tells a meaningful story through emotionally-charged flashbacks to the moment the nuclear missiles struck, and how that moment affected the Russian people. It’s a series of powerful scenes scattered throughout the 9-12 hour campaign that don’t force themselves on you, allowing different players to experience as much–or as little–of the narrative as they like. That’s one of Metro’s greatest strengths: it doesn’t force anything on the player. There’s plenty of optional areas to explore at your leisure, allowing you to intuitively control how long you spend in Metro: Last Light's bleak alternate reality.

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Acer got a few things right and a number of things wrong with the Predator (specifically, Predator model AG3620-UR12). On the “right” side of the ledger, it has one of Intel’s better processors—a 3.4GHz Core i7-3770—and 32GB of DDR3/1600 memory. With those components, the asking price of $1299 is very reasonable.

On the “wrong” side of the ledger, the Predator has an AMD Radeon HD 8760 video card (the OEM version of the milquetoast Radeon HD 7770), a chintzy custom motherboard with just one PCIe x16 slot (occupied), and a miniscule 16GB SSD that serves as a cache to the 2TB, 7200-rpm mechanical hard drive.

The all-steel case is wrapped in painted satin black, with glossy black accents on top. Three doors in its face flip down to reveal 5.25-inch drive bays. Of these, one is occupied by a 16x DVD burner, and a second has a slide-out tray with SATA power and data connectors in the rear of the bay. Though this isn’t a hot-swappable drive bay, it does provide an opportunity for data backup that you can remove to an offsite location.

Also included are two empty 3.5-inch drive bays (accessible only from inside the case), but you’ll need to supply your own SATA cables and Molex-to-SATA power adapters if you decide to populate them (leads from the 500-watt power supply are available).

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Times are tough. The economic recovery still hasn’t rained pixie dust on your bank balance, but you’re still determined to play the latest PC games in their full visual glory. Sounds like an impossible situation, right? Not so fast. You don’t have to choose between a first-rate gaming experience and paying the rent. With the right midrange graphics card, you can get your game on without having to move into a van down by the river.

In fact, AMD and Nvidia are clamoring to place one of their cards in your system for less than $200. Just last month, AMD announced the Radeon HD 7790, a gaming card that delivers considerable performance without a high cost. Then, one week later, Nvidia announced its own budget card, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, the successor to the GeForce GTX 650 Ti.

Three different cards, at three slightly different price points. Which one is best? To find out, we staged a battle royale of budget graphic cards, since the benchmarks never lie. First let’s look at the contenders, and then we’ll turn to the test results.

MSI Radeon HD 7790

The Radeon HD 7790 fills the gap between the 7770 and the 7850 in terms of price and performance, and emerges as a great entry-level card for budget-conscious PC builders. For $150 you get 1080p gaming for cheap. Up until the 7790’s release, Nvidia’s GTX 650 Ti had no competition at the $150 price point, giving Nvidia a monopoly in the budget-minded-enthusiast space.

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It's only been a couple of months since the launch of SimCity and the debacle that followed (which still lingers today), but Maxis and EA want to cleanse your palate with a new addition to the Sims franchise: The Sims 4 is coming to PC and Mac in 2014.

Electronic Arts

EA writes on their blog: "The Sims franchise is fueled by the passion and creativity of its millions of fans around the world. Their continued devotion to the franchise ignites the fire of creativity of the team at The Sims Studio, driving them to continually improve and innovate on one of the world’s most successful simulation game that has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide."

Before the SimCity boondoggle, the announcement of a new Sims game would barely be newsworthy. But in a post-SimCity world, any new EA game is worth scrutinizing: Will a constant connection be required? Will multiplayer features be shoehorned in? Will extravagant features be promised but then redacted until further notice? Or will it all come together smoothly, and redeem EA in the eyes of an audience still smarting over the belly-flop that was the SimCity launch? I guess we'll find out in 2014. And no, I'm not bitter at all!

(Okay, I'm a little bitter.)

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Gaming research and prototypes have created a lot of buzz at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Paris this week.

Watch a video version of IDG Daily on YouTube.

Microsoft Research presented its IllumiRoom project, which is designed to create an immersive experience for gamers. Using a Kinect sensor, the geometry of a room is taken into account and then a digital projection of complementary content is displayed on a gamer's walls.

Another project called Kinect Wheels allows games using the Microsoft Kinect sensor to recognize a wheelchair, allowing people in wheelchairs to control those games in the same way as people who are able to stand. The project is aimed at both young and old gamers "to experience something interactive" according to one researcher.

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Online gamers have become rich targets for cybercriminals, according a report released this week by the Anti Phishing Work Group.

Over the last two quarters of 2012, phishing attacks aimed at online gamers jumped from 2.7 percent in the September frame to 14.7 percent in the December quarter, the APWG said in its Phishing Activity Trends Report for the fourth quarter of 2012.

Online gaming credentials are valuable to certain criminals, who sell them on the black market, the report explained.

In-game items held in those accounts can also be sold by phishersfor real-world cash, it continued. Depending upon how much information is revealed, the victims can even have their real-life identities stolen.

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A U.S. judge ruled Thursday that Motorola Mobility is entitled to substantially less royalties than it wanted from Microsoft for the company's use of wireless and video-encoding patents in its Xbox products.

The ruling, handed down in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is significant because it is the first time a judge has determined specific royalty fees for the use of standard-essential patents. Standard-essential patents are those which cover technology used in international standards and ensure various products work together, and their licensing fees are often the source of patent disputes between companies.

The ruling also suggests that companies with standard-essential patents may be better off joining a patent pool, or an organization that licenses a group of patents from different companies and collects royalties.

Motorola initially sought around $4 billion from Microsoft when the two began negotiating for the licensing of technology incorporated into the 802.11 Wi-Fi and H.264 video-encoding standards. Companies typically attempt to privately negotiate royalty rates before they turn to the courts.

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Nintendo’s President said a lack of compelling titles for the Wii U is hurting sales, and promised to improve the console’s lineup this year.

The comments from Satoru Iwata came Wednesday, a day after the Kyoto-based company revealed it had sold 3.45 million Wii U consoles worldwide by the end of March, only 60 percent of its goal when the console went on sale late last year. Nintendo also failed to reach the more modest goal of selling 4 million consoles that it set in January.

“As for Wii U, it took off smoothly in the holiday season, but due to the lack of new software titles, we were unable to maintain the momentum this year,” he said in published comments from a talk given to Japanese analysts and media.

“As a decisive factor in buying a console is that you cannot play a much-anticipated title without the hardware, we will do our best to have you feel from this summer to the end of the year that there are plenty of great games for Wii U.”

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So you've driven your PC into the ground, no doubt angering it the process. Why not even the score with some of the best PC games that will frustrate you to no end?

Check them out and let us know what your favorite frustrating game is.

One thousand dollars. That’s how much AMD anticipates it will cost you to acquire a video card packing two of its most powerful GPUs on a single dual-slot PCB. AMD has provided us with  reference design hardware, with retail cards expected to follow by the end of the month. So consider this a hands-on preview of the Radeon HD 7990. We’ll follow up with an official review as soon as we get a card that people can actually buy.

The Radeon HD 7990 is essentially two Radeon HD 7970 cards melded into one. You might call it CrossFire on a card. Each 28nm GPU packs 4.3 billion transistors (8.6 billion in total) and a total of 4096 stream processors to deliver compute performance of a staggering 8.2 teraflops: That’s 8.2 trillion floating-point operations per second. And each processor has a 384-bit interface to 3GB of GDDR5 memory (that’s 6GB in total), so games with large memory footprints perform extremely well on this card.

The card is capable of supporting up to five displays simultaneously, even if they don't support DisplayPort multi-streaming, thanks to the presence of four Mini DisplayPort connections and one DVI port. AMD’s Eyefinity technology can support up to six DisplayPort monitors (provided at least one supports multi-streaming), although it's unlikely that you could run six high-resolution displays at once.

That's because the DisplayPort standard is capable of delivering maximum bandwidth of 21.6 Gbps. Four 1920-by-1200 displays with color depth of 30 bits per pixel and a refresh rate of 60 frames per second would consume most of that bandwidth. And as I discussed in my earlier DisplayPort multi-streaming primer, playing games with more than three monitors isn’t the best experience because it leaves a bezel in the middle of your view.

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Traditionally, gamers have voluntary segregated themselves into two camps: console gamers and PC gamers. Hostility between the two runs irrationally deep, and rare is the gamer who’s willing to proclaim allegiance to both sides. Either you’re part of the Alliance, or you’re part of the Horde.

But the times, they are a-changin’.

Convergence is the buzzword of the day, and it’s rearing its head big-time in the gaming world. On one side, the upcoming PlayStation 4 console sports a suspiciously computer-esque core. On the other side, a wave of new technologies is bringing a remarkably console-like experience to PC gaming. The lines are beginning to blur. Mr. Miyamoto, tear down that wall!

The implications of a shared gaming backbone could span a whole series of articles, but this is PCWorld, not Game Informer. As such, we’ll limit our scope thusly: What does this titanic technology shift mean for you, die-hard PC gamer?

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Slay my foes, and then eat their skulls? Well, that's hardly sporting. Or sanitary. But the horde of undead foes I'm facing in 17Bits'  Skulls of the Shogun certainly won't hesitate to tap into the unparalleled power that a calcium-rich snack will offer, so it's a case of getting them before they get us, really. And who doesn't enjoy crushing the occasional skull?

As befits a turn-based strategy game, securing resources is the linchpin for success. And Skulls offers no shortage of resources to manage, some less obvious than others. The most important is rice—rice paddies are strewn about the game's single- and multi-player maps, and while the dead don't have much need for food (besides skulls, but I'll get to that) haunting rice paddies will allow you to stockpile the rice you'll need to acquire resource number two: soldiers.

Can't have much of an army without soldiers; haunt a shrine, and you'll be able to spend rice on the game's three primary units: infantry, cavalry and archers. Infantry will form the backbone of your army, offering decent attack power and strong defensive capabilities. Cavalry have meager defenses, but their expansive movement range allows them to dive in and out of combat quickly, helpful for capturing buildings or harassing enemies. And then there are your archers: their powerful attacks are devastating and the extra range means they can only be counterattacked by other archers, but they can't hit enemies in melee range, so you'll need to keep them protected. And no one needs to be protected as much as your general—he's a powerful fighter in his own right, but once he's slain it's game over.

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What's the most difficult thing you did in the last year?  Now stop. Before you answer, can it compare to creating a full-fledged indie game—slated to be approved on Steam—created entirely with QBASIC? Probably not.

QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is. Here's a little video of a game created by IBM to show off the awesome power of QBASIC when it first launched:

You get the idea after about 45 seconds. Now, over 20 years later—but with the exact same programming tools—we have Black Annex. Check out this trailer with actual gameplay—and I can't say it enough—using the same programming language that the above video was "showing off."

Not only are the simple visuals awesome, but the gameplay actually looks complex and tough to master—not something you'd expect from a programming language with simple loops and statements.

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According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed for the North American video-game sales crash of 1983. Atari’s bubble burst because of a little alien.

In December 1982, Atari released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, and critics quickly labeled it the worst game of all time. In light of many more-recent debacles—I’m looking at you Aliens: Colonial Marines and SimCity—granting “worst game ever” status to E.T. in perpetuity seems somewhat unfair. Nonetheless, this primordial Atari 2600 title continues to top “worst of” charts, including our own, time and time again.

So why should you give it another chance? Because a code hacker managed to fix some of the games most glaring problems, and now it’s actually fun to play.

What went wrong?

When Atari finally got the rights to the E.T. name in late July 1982, it wanted to make the game a holiday-season sales hit. Steven Spielberg chose Howard Scott Warshaw (designer of both Yars’ Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, two of the best Atari games ever) to design the game, and Atari established a schedule that gave him just five weeks to do the job.

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There was a time when my de facto response for “which gaming keyboard should I buy” would’ve been something Razer-flavored—likely the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate ($140). Keyboard recommendations are serious business: You’ll spend all of your work and play time hammering away at these slabs of plastic, and Razer’s mechanical wares are solid, capable devices with excellent customization options—in spite of onerous software.

Roccat’s Isku FX gives me pause. It’s a bit cheaper than most gaming keyboards at $90, and offers loads of programmable keys and on-the-fly macro recording. But the Isku FX’s keys aren’t mechanical, which accounts for the disparity in price. That’s unfortunate—I’m a sucker for the clackity-clack of a cluster of Cherry MX Blue switches, and going back to comparatively soft membrane keys felt wrong, somehow.

I got over it. The Isku FX’s keys are comfortably sized and evenly spaced, so I had no trouble settling right in to work and play. The keys are backlit, and you can toggle the brightness and disable the annoying pulsing effect through Roccat’s software. Yes, you will need to install driver software; the keyboard will work out of the box, but you’ll need to head to Roccat’s website and grab a relatively small 20MB package to tweak the keyboard’s settings.

The keyboard’s layout is fairly standard, though there are a few extras scattered about. Five macro keys run along the left side of the keyboard, joined by three thumb-keys nested under the spacebar, and the macro-recording key, dedicated media keys, and a backlight toggle button planted at the top of the keyboard. The Caps-lock key has been replaced by the Easy-shift button, which can paired with a number of keys on the keyboard to activate a secondary input option. 

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Dell could be angling for “Steam box” status with the Alienware X51, a living room-friendly, small form factor gaming desktop that is now available with the Ubuntu Linux operating system preinstalled.

Alienware has been selling Windows-sporting versions of the X51 for more than a year now at $699 and up, but only recently began offering a Ubuntu-powered variant. The Linux-based PC promises 1080p gaming at a base price of $599, in a compact tower design that can stand upright or lie flat. With Ubuntu installed, the basic X51 is $100 cheaper than a comparable Windows configuration.

Base specs for the Alienware X51 include a 3.3GHz Intel Core i3 processor, a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 645 graphics card, 6 GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a DVD drive.

More expensive configurations include up to an Intel Core i7 processor, a 1.5GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard drive, with the price maxing out at $1100. However, due to a current sale on higher-end Windows systems, the Ubuntu version is actually $50 more expensive for the high-end model with 2TB storage option.

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At last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, record numbers of industry players converged to showcase their latest titles. In full force were smaller, independent developers, showing off their indie games on a variety of hardware: Mac and Windows laptops, and iOS and Android devices.

Windows-based devices, however, were conspicuously absent—outside of the Microsoft booth, of course.

This is troubling. GDC is the place where game developers and publishers convene to talk shop, and neither Windows 8/RT nor Windows Phone was a significant part of anyone's conversation. And while the Gaming category was one of the most promising sections of the Windows Store when we took stock earlier this year, we've also seen a sharp, sudden decline in new Windows app releases. This alone should have spurred Microsoft to ramp up its courtship of game developers, big and small.

I sat down with Microsoft representatives at the conference, and I'm confident that the people working on Windows understand how games are a critical component of any healthy app ecosystem. Nonetheless, Microsoft still has hard work ahead. Some indie game developers don't like Microsoft's business philosophy, while others haven't had access to the development tools they need.

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Awards were handed out earlier this week at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, honoring the best games of 2012.  The widely acclaimed first-person game The Room took home the award for best Mobile/Handheld Game while the indie success Journey joined the ranks of major blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft Auto to win Best Game.

The show floor at GDC offers glimpses into the future of gaming, from new consoles to exciting new releases across every platform.  Honorees and exhibitors at the awards show included a larger portion of independent companies than recent years, but news about popular tent-pole franchises have grabbed the headlines, such as mobile sensation Temple Run finally hitting Windows 8 platforms.

Among the hot topics being discussed at GDC is the revolution of mobile gaming, and a session yesterday titled “The Future of Mobile Gaming” examined mobile technology advancements that are shaping the future of this booming industry.

With cinematic graphics, complex gameplay, and intricate storytelling now the norm for games, some serious players may balk at the concept of “real gaming” on your mobile device.  But evolutions in technology, particularly within the processor, are empowering game developers to push the envelope of what’s possible.

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AMD took the wraps off a new high-end reference-design video card at the end of the company’s GDC press briefing Tuesday night: the dual-GPU Radeon 7990.

Details are exceedingly sparse: Matt Skynner, general manager of AMD’s graphics business unit, simply held up the card for the audience to see. “This is the first public showing,” Skynner said. “We’re not saying much about it other than it’s two series-7900 GPUs on a single card, and it’s whisper quiet.”

AMD

As you can see from this slide taken from AMD’s presentation, it’s a full-size, dual-slot card. A heat sink runs the length of the board, and there are three cooling fans. AMD had previously mentioned that the Radeon 7990, code-named Malta, at the CeBit trade show in Germany, but this is the first time the card has been shown.

The Radeon HD 7990 will compete with Nvidia’s Titan for fastest video card on the planet when the card ships (unless Nvidia manages to come out with a dual-Titan card). Expect to see cards like this at retail before the end of the first half of the year, because AMD is expected to ship its Radeon HD 8000 series GPUs in the second half.

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Nvidia today fired the next salvo in the GPU arms race: The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Nvidia and arch-rival AMD have decided that 30 frames per second at 1080p resolution is the gaming sweet spot, and so the GPU designers have set about beating each other over the head to build the best chips for delivering that performance at a $150 price point.

While both companies happily oblige gamers craving higher performance-those with the financial means to satiate their hunger, that is-it's the mainstream products that generate the most cabbage. And they're certainly justified in designating 1080p a "mainstream resolution," since that's the spec most consumer-oriented 23- and 24-inch displays deliver.

To that end, Nvidia is looking to chop the legs out from under AMD, which announced its own "1080p sweet spot" offering- the Radeon HD 7790 -just last week. AMD set a price target of $150 for Radeon HD 7790 cards in order to compete with boards based on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti, which until then had been the sole occupants of that price bracket.

Nvidia

AMD maintains that its 7790 is on average 20 percent faster than Nvidia's original 650 Ti. But Nvidia announced that existing GeForce GTX 650 Ti cards with 1GB of memory will now sell for just $129. The new and faster GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost-which Nvidia claims is on average 40 percent faster than the original 650 Ti, and 10- to 20-percent faster than AMD's pricier Radeon HD 7850-will sell for $149. But there's a slight catch: The 1GB 650 Ti Boost cards won't begin shipping until early April. The models Nvidia says consumers can buy today come with 2GB of memory and cost $169.

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An administrative law judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled against a ban on Microsoft's Xbox as he found it did not violate a patent owned by Motorola Mobility.

In a one-paragraph ruling, Judge David P. Shaw gave an initial determination that the Xbox did not violate section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

Section 337 investigations conducted by the ITC most often involve claims regarding intellectual property rights, including allegations of patent infringement and trademark infringement by imported goods, and can lead to the ban on their imports into the U.S.

The commission may, however, review, adopt, or change an initial determination.

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At first glance, the Razer Edge Pro is indistinguishable from other Windows 8 tablets: It’s 2.2 pounds of matte black metal with a 10.1-inch screen and a single Windows button. But pick it up, and you'll immediately feel the heft in your hands. It's bulkier than the Surface Pro, and also runs much, much hotter.

That heat flows from the powerful components nestled inside. An Nvidia GPU and an Intel Core i7 CPU allow Razer's tablet to compete with similarly priced ultrabooks in terms of raw processing performance. The goal? To deliver no-exuses PC gaming in a handheld tablet form factor. Throw in a Gamepad Controller accessory, and the Edge Pro begins to approximate a console gaming experience, care of dual analog sticks, a D-pad and action buttons.

I haven't yet spent enough time with the tablet to know whether it delivers on its promise—look for our full review next week—but Razer's latest gaming hardware began to leave a strong first impression the moment I pulled it out of its packaging.

Playing PC games on a tablet is fantastic

The most important thing you need to know about the Razer Edge Pro is that it delivers in terms of frame rates and battery life. You can use it to play contemporary PC games at decent settings, and the battery lasts long enough to let you play for at least two to three hours at a stretch before you need to recharge. You can augment battery life with an extended battery pack, which Razer sells separately or as part of a Gamepad Controller bundle.

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By gaming standards, the HP Envy Phoenix h9-1420t's appearance is positively subdued. This midsize tower PC has some red backlighting and a clear pane so that you can gaze at the liquid cooling unit, but aside from that it could easily pass for a conventional HP desktop. Although it doesn't have much in the way of bling, the Phoenix delivers better-than-average performance at a cheaper-than-boutique price. Down-the-road upgrade options, on the other hand, are limited by its decidedly nonenthusiast motherboard.

Components and performance

Our $1840 h9-1420t test configuration sported an unlocked 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-3770K processor. Thanks to the liquid cooling unit, the system had no problem maintaining 4GHz, and it likely has at least a little more headroom. The Pegatron (that’s Asus’s OEM arm) 2AD5 motherboard offers minimal overclocking controls in its BIOS, but it isn't completely locked down. You can set each core's maximum frequency multiplier separately, but you get no provisions for tweaking the operating voltage, for instance. The board also has just a single full-size PCIe slot, so you can forget any dual-card graphics upgrade via SLI or CrossFire.

Fortunately, HP picked a strong graphics card, inserting an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. With that card in place, the Phoenix managed a playable frame rate in Dirt Showdown right up to the 2560 by 1600 resolution of our 30-inch test display. The game wasn’t as silky smooth at that resolution as it was at lower ones, but it was certainly playable. Should you decide to buy an h9-1420t online, HP allows you to customize the configuration to a degree, but your options don’t include Nvidia’s best GPU, the GeForce GTX 690.

The other core components on our test machine included 12GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive, which helped the h9-1420t produce a very good WorldBench 8 score of 87. A solid-state drive would have boosted the score even more, but that option wasn’t available when we ordered our evaluation unit. HP has since corrected that omission, but there’s no getting around that single multilane PCIe slot, which is a puzzling design decision in a PC whose primary reason for existence is performance.

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The desktop PC isn't dead, it’s just shrinking. There’s a new breed of miniature marvels on the market, and they boast a nonexistent footprint when attached to the back of a display. Unlike some micro-size, micro-priced computers—the $35 Raspberry Pi, for example—these incredibly small machines provide more than enough processing power for all but the most strenuous computing chores.

New generations of powerful but cool-running CPUs are largely responsible for this sudden onset of wee-ness, so it makes sense that AMD and Intel would both conjure tiny PCs to demonstrate what’s possible within the confines of an ultra-small size. Intel has christened its concept the Next Unit of Computing (NUC), while AMD’s primary manufacturing partner, Sapphire Technology, has dubbed its effort the Edge VS8.

Alas, neither the NUC nor the Edge VS8 Is cheap.

Intel’s Next Unit of Computing

What the heck is a Next Unit of Computing? It's Intel's vision of a miniature-size computer. It measures four inches square by two inches high, and it's available in three kits: The $323 DC3217BY features a Core i3 3217-U processor, an HDMI audio-video port, and a Thunderbolt port (supporting DisplayPort 1.1a); the DC3217IYE ($293) has the same CPU and dual HDMI ports; and the $172 DCCP847DYE is outfitted with a Celeron 847 processor and dual HDMI ports. (Video resolution through HDMI maxes out at 1920 by 1200 pixels for all three models).

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Building a city is hard work. Armchair urban planners have known this for nigh on three decades, ever since 1989’s SimCity introduced us to a game world of zoning regulations and budget balancing. ­_­

It’s been a long time, but SimCity has been reborn. Powering the experience is developer Maxis’ GlassBox engine, which attempts to dynamically simulate conditions in a city. You can track individual citizens as they shuffle about your city, filling residential areas as they move in and causing traffic jams as they attempt to commute to work. While much of the gameplay has been simplified (no more laying down power lines and water pipes), new complexity has been introduced through a focus on multiplayer cooperation and specialized cities.

The end result is a visually striking homage to a classic series that takes city building in bold new directions, but troubling business decisions and technical snafus ultimately hamper the game’s ability to eclipse its predecessors. Is the new SimCity worth your hard-earned simoleons? Let’s find out.

Moving on up

Cities in the new SimCity are decidedly smaller than previous entries in the series; the sprawling metropolises of yore have necessarily given way to a focus on careful planning and design, largely because of the GlassBox engine's hefty computational requirements. The new SimCity keeps the familiar Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zone trinity, but the classic approach of plopping down low-, medium- and high-density zones to balance your city’s development has given way to a more organic approach: buildings start small, and only grow when they have enough money, happy residents, and space. Roads are the lynchpin to a thriving city: power and water flows along your roadways, which are themselves available in low, medium, and high capacities, ultimately determining how large your zones can be.

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