Coders Discover 20-Minute Offline Timeout In SimCity  Last week,
two of our writers played SimCity and deliberately turned off
their Internet connections, both finding their games continued
normally and then abruptly ended after 20 minutes. Someone now
has posted what appears to be code for the game that orders a
shutdown after a disconnection exactly that long. That
allegation further punctures the talking point that SimCity is
necessarily an online game, or would take a great deal of work
to make it so.  The code is here. “Simply commenting out Line
#22 defeats the force disconnect,” says the person who posted
it. The removal allows offline play indefinitely.  SimCity‘s
launch week was a scandal because gamers simply couldn’t connect
what they’d bought to EA servers. It prompted apologies and
offers from Electronic Arts and Maxis, the studio that makes the
game. This sort of thing had been seen before in launches like
Diablo III, and for certain Ubisoft PC games. Gamers resented
these lapses as they have al