StarCraft 2 comes with a powerful set of tools for making your own maps and game modifications, but there is no local storage; you have to upload your content to Battle.net and let users grab that content from Blizzard's servers. If your content is considered inappropriate or obscene, Blizzard can take it down. The story is making its way around the gaming press, but this shouldn't be a shock... gaming content has long fallen under the control of the company that created the tools.

Does this hurt us as gamers? Absolutely.

Arkham Horror is a board game played with over 700 pieces. You can play with up to eight players, all of you working together to beat one of the Ancient Ones and playing against the board itself. You see, the monsters get a turn, and the card pulled during that phase controls how they move, where the gates to the Other World appear, and how close you are to the Great Old One waking. If that happens, you have a choice: fight or be devoured.

Although, if you fight, you will still probably be devoured.

The last time my group played, the game lasted around five hours; brevity is not one of its strengths. And you can't get too upset if you lose, as the chances of victory are slim when still learning the rules. That being said, in our last session we closed the final gate with two turns left before our Great Old One awoke, narrowly winning. 

Sounds like a game for masochists? Well, it's not for the faint of heart, but Arkham Horror is a great board game for those with the time to play.

We enjoyed the system when we played with it at E3, and the line to catch a glimpse of the 3DS enjoyed multi-hour waits. The game library is already filling up with new games and 3D re-releases of Nintendo classics. It has almost universally positive buzz around the Internet.

Still, it's a new handheld from Nintendo released while people are still enjoying their DS units, and it's in 3D. Will you be buying?

Torchlight was a wonderful surprise, a single-player Diablo-style dungeon crawl with strong graphics and fun gameplay, released digitally for a low price. It wasn't just a critical hit—it sold 500,000 copies to gamers—and Perfect World Entertainment purchased a majority share of the game's developer for $8.4 million. Now, after a long tease on their official site, the secret is out: Torchlight 2 is coming in Spring 2011, and it's bringing a few upgrades from the original.

Yes, finally, co-op is coming. The gods are truly smiling. What else can we expect?

Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community. 

Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.

According to a news feature on Foldit, the project arose from an earlier distributed computing effort called Rosetta@home. That project used what has become the standard approach for home-based scientific work: a screensaver that provided a graphical frontend to a program that uses spare processor time to solve weighty scientific problems. For Rosetta, that problem was the task of figuring out how proteins, which are composed of a chain of chemicals called amino acids, adopt their final, three-dimensional shape.

It's been a good long while since we've seen a new entry in the Syndicate series. The last game in the real-time tactical franchise was released back in 1996, leaving fans without a fix for more than a decade. While people like Peter Molyneux have expressed interest in revisiting the series, we haven't heard much in the way of news. Until now.