More guff from the BBC

The holy grail for game makers is to use ray-tracing to depict scenes far more realistically

I wish they'd stop putting rubbish like this in their news stories about games. Still, I bet by the time you read this they'll have changed the caption for the ray-traced Spider Mastermind so it doesn't say it's from Quake.

A solution to the problem of games piracy

Immediate press release to all game publishers: The 'as old as the industry' problem of games priacy has been solved by the no-nonsense, clear-headed thinking of Craig, from Hampshire.

He writes:

I dont condone donwloading pirate game as they are too expensive to buy.
At the moment an average cost of a PC game is £29.99 and £39.99 for a Xbox 360 game.
If you took the PC price and multiplied it by an average amount of people that buy the game (say 3 million) thats a total of £89 million pounds.
Out of that £89m you have to take out overheads, maufacturing costs and other things but i would still stay they made a profit of £50-60m I know that the companies have to make a profit to be able to make better and more interesting games but why should it be at the cost of the public.
If they lowered the price of buying a game to say £10-15 then surely in the long run more people will buy it and in doing so profits would increase.

So, there you have it - quarter the prices of games, and you will sell over four times the amount (that would be 12 million per title, given our current average).

While we're at it, we should probably let the rest of the business world know that making a profit from consumers isn't really on. Hopefully sometime soon Craig will let us know where the money for our wages is allowed to come from.

(If you're bored, I recommend reading more of the comments published with that article. You don't want to miss gems like "The internet is so vast hackers can literally go underground if they so wished!")

This will not end well.

Dave "Not the Games Animal one" Perry has apparently created the largest game development studio in the world, with a whopping 20,000 professional, enthusiastic, and talented staff. Or maybe he's just collected e-mail addresses on the internet, but I think that's much less likely than the first option.

Using the tried-and-tested "infinite monkeys" theory Perry plans to create a jaw-dropping, World of Warcraft-beating masterpiece. And certainly not just "WoW, but with like, planes and cars, and dinosaurs, and ninjas, and pirates, and it'll be awesome".

The 1998 PC game Half Life spawned an entire industry when fans created a modified (mod) version of the title, called Counter Strike.

I now realise that my games history is incredibly shaky, since I was aways under the impression that CounterStrike had essentially been created by two talented and driven people, whereas apparently it was the result of some kind of horrific forums-and-media circus.

A professional team of artists, programmers, designers, and audio staff will build the MMO but the creative impetus will come from the users.

Sucks to be the paid designers in that little group. What the hell do you know about finely tuned weapon balance, you schmuck? WoW_is_gay_309 has just posted a poll on the forums and 573 people agree with him that "the M16A2 rifle is, like, way underpowered, in real life it does more damage", so get it sorted to his satisfaction - or you're not going home this weekend.

"accepting that the combined intelligence of all these people is far beyond your own."

I almost agreed with this, then I remembered he was talking about MMO players. Still, even with all my negativity, it's good to see that they are entirely confident in what they're doing, safe in the knowledge that out of their expected 100,000 developers they will definitely get a lot of good ideas. I mean, it's not even as if they've got a back-up plan, in the (obviously extremely unlikely) chance that all of the submissions they get are utter fanboy toss of the highest order.

But he also said there was a back-up plan in place, if the contributions from gamers prove disappointing." If they deliver zero, we can still ship a title," he said.

Oh. Never mind.

Clunk, click, vroom, smash.

Not content with causing all of the world's murders and wars, it seems that games are now the cause of bad driving.

I can believe this "indisputable link" based on the evidence presented in the article, though - I mean, Road Rash on the Megadrive is pretty realistic by today's standards, you know? I can't help but think the 'Games Animal' Dave Perry would have been a better source to quote, though. If anybody knows about slightly mental people playing games, it'll be him.

edit: Ok, it seems the BBC have "got with the times" and updated the article. When I wrote this update, it was a Megadrive controller in that picture, not a CUNTNUC one. I didn't just pull that Road Rash thing out of nowhere, honest!

Important Research News!

Moving about will burn calories, or so say boffins at Liverpool John Moores University. Good work, eggheads - now that these pressing issues have been resolved, maybe you can move on to that 'cancer' thing.

Would you like to know more?

US troops finishing their stint in Iraq are being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder using some kind of fancy computer game. I could be flippant and suggest they just sit them down with an Xbox and a copy of Ghost Recon to save themselves a bit of cash, but obviously this game is much more advanced.

"the system pumps in smells such as gunpowder, burning rubber and body odour"

My 360 makes 2 of these during any 4-hour playing session. And I make the other. So maybe my jokey suggestion is a possibility after all.

Or so I thought, until I read this:

"Speakers provide the sound"

Truly, the next generation of immersion is upon us.