Review copies of Electronic Arts's Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are starting to reach critics, who have made a surprising collective discovery: an insert containing a code to download a "House of Valor" content pack featuring "seven additional single player quests."

EA has confirmed to Ars Technica that this downloadable content will be included free with all new copies of the game, including digital copies purchased on the PC through Origin, Steam, or other services. Players who would rather purchase a pre-owned copy, however, will presumably have to pay an additional fee if they want to access to this portion of the game.

Charging used game players for such an "Online Pass" is nothing new in the game industry, of course. But implementing an Online Pass in the single-player Kingdoms of Amalur represents a continuing tumble down a slippery slope for the entire game industry.

The rise of purely digital online game sales has changed the industry in a number of ways, but the most important change might be the introduction of games as impulse buys. Anyone with a credit card tied to their Steam account knows how scarily easy it is to, with just a few clicks, dump more money than you intended on a whole passel of games that seem vaguely intriguing. You might not have read any reviews, or even heard anything about the game outside of the Steam description, but when it's so cheap and the purchase process is so seamless, your consumptive id can often act before your conscious brain even has a chance to question whether you really want the game you're buying.

Digital stores on platforms from Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have similar setups to encourage this kind of impulse purchase—enter your credit card once, then buy with a few clicks forevermore. Nintendo is the lone holdout, as it often is with online features, refusing to store credit card information for users with a Wii or 3DS. But that might change in the next console generation, with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announcing today that the Wii U will use near-field communication technology "as a means of making micropayments."

If you crossed the asynchronous multiplayer component of a game like Words With Friends with a simple but engaging turn-based strategy game, what you'd end up with would look a whole lot like Hero Academy. This free-to-play iOS game, developed by the same team behind Orcs Must Die, is an excellent way to get in some satisfying strategy gaming in quick bursts. Just make sure you have some friends to bring along.

A recent Kotaku post cites "one reliable industry source" to suggest that the still-unannounced successor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 will somehow prevent used games from being played on the system. The idea remains an unconfirmed rumor, of course, but it's something that members of the game industry have floated repeatedly in the past. It's also a move that would likely find hefty support from publishers looking for a way to stop what they see as erosion of their profits thanks to used games (the reality is a bit more complicated than that, but we won't rehash that old argument here).

The renewed debate got us wondering, though: how might such a used-game prevention system actually work on a technical level?

Fans of the iOS version of Quarrel, released last August, already know that the game's mix of Scrabble-style anagram making with Risk-style positional battles makes for a truly addictive mix. The Xbox Live version, hitting the Marketplace today for 400 Microsoft points ($5), adds a crucial online multiplayer feature but takes away some of the interface simplicity that makes the iOS version so easy to get into.

The primary reason Blizzard gave this morning for announcing its decision not to host a Blizzcon fan gathering this year was that the company is "heavily focused on getting Diablo III, [World of Warcraft's] Mists of Pandaria, and [Starcraft II's] Heart of the Swarm into players' hands as soon as possible." While this is probably true, the justification doesn't fully explain the decision to my satisfaction.

The first three DLC packs for Gears of War 3 seem to each have been created with different players in mind. "Horde Command" was obviously aimed at fans of Horde mode, and the fact that all three of the new maps in this first DLC pack were later bundled for free with remakes of two maps from the original Gears of War suggests the lasting value of the pack lay in the fortification upgrades. The second DLC pack, "Raam’s Shadow," was geared towards campaign fans, and now "Fenix Rising" (available for 800 Microsoft Points, or $10) seems aimed directly at Gears 3's online multiplayer die-hards.

Five new multiplayer maps make up the bulk of the new content in this DLC offering, and each one is designed to represent a distinct stage in the journey of series protagonist Marcus Fenix. While all five maps are playable in Versus, Horde, and Beast modes, we focused mainly on Versus mode in our testing.

"Citizen science" is a recent movement to get interested members of the public involved in scientific research. Participants—who may or may not have scientific training—can perform tasks that can't be automated well, such as analyzing images. One of the most successful citizen science projects has been FoldIt, a game based on the biochemistry of how proteins form structures in three dimensions.

When asked to figure out the likely structure of a protein, FoldIt players have done remarkably well, in some cases surpassing the best algorithms devised by computer scientists. But until recently, all they've been asked to do is figure out how existing proteins fold. That has now changed; the people behind the FoldIt project have added tools that allow players to engineer new variants of an old protein. Once again, the gamers have come through, figuring out changes that dramatically improve the protein's activity.