The reason that the big content is on the right is that it is the most popular content, likely already read. The new stuff is on the left, and we want the eye to move across the page in the natural way to help promote newer and rising content.
The big content is for the people who jump into the site and want to read just a few articles. It's the "most important". It gets clicks. The people who sit on the site all day are going to appreciate the left column, but it doesn't have the same prominence, because we already have their attention.
By throwing the big stuff on the right, we're also making people who jump into the site for the big stuff move their eyes across the content, which might prompt a click.
We've thought very hard about who our site is designed for and the path their eyes will take. The column hierarchy is designed for different groups of people looking for different content.
What led to the demise of games like this? More time-intensive, slow, thinking games; simulations like these have always held interest for a lot of people. I certainly didn't become less willing to buy them.
Combat flight simulators are another thing that seems to have disappeared.
I'm far more excited by this then by another mindless space-marine-kills-aliens game.
Once you get off the low-hanging fruit like cities, small countries, and civilizations (SimCity, Tropico, and Civilization, respectively), simulation games require domain knowledge in order to be fun. Since commercial games are aimed at a mass market and require higher costs for things like 3D graphics engines and game assets, this means that anything that narrows the addressable market, like requiring tons of domain knowledge to play the game effectively, makes it a less profitable investment. So you have to go for things that lots of people have domain knowledge about already, something like professional soccer. Which is why one of the best selling time-intensive, slow, thinking games out there is Football Manager.
I'm counting Football Manager over other sports games because in other sports games you actually control the players, whereas in Football Manager you only get to be the manager, and most of what you do in terms of buying and selling players, dealing with contracts, selecting players for a match, designing tactics and so forth are all classic sim-game stuff with lots of going through menu systems and toggling switches and moving sliders and none of the arcade stuff. Even matches you just sit there and watch (in abbreviated highlight form, or with an eye on match data), and occasionally make substitutions or tactical adjustments. If you didn't actually like soccer a great deal, you wouldn't really care; if you did, you might be willing to pay for new features and roster updates every year or two.
SimCity Societies doesn't count. That's like saying "The Sims: Urbz" was a part of the Sims series. Different developers just using the brand, it played more like a really dumbed down version of Civ crossed with Spore.
Oh, owch. You had to go mention "The Sims: Urbz", didn't you? I was hoping that was long forgotten. But yes that's a very good analogy between SimCity Societies and Urbz. An unfortunate case of brand dilution: Societies was developed by an outside company, and it didn't have much to do with the original game.
To be fair, SimCity Societies was an excellent game. But it was very much a spiritual decendent of Ceasar III and Pharaoh. I think the branding did it more harm than good; the people who love Maxis-style city games disliked Societies, and the people who love Impressions-style city games never bothered to pick it up assuming they would dislike it.
Node isn't an application framework, it's an event-driven javascript-based server. This is totally an acceptable way to handle it, so long as it takes advantages of Node's event-based system.
The best part about this in my opinion is that the controller system works on both the client and server. I've been waiting for this, was planning on building it myself if no one figured that out.
