As 2008 is slowly moving toward its end, Torrentfreak.com took a look at the most pirated game titles for this year. It makes for pretty interesting reading, especially as the good games with poor Digital Rights Management are the top of the list! Spore is interesting, as the DRM is the contraversial SecuROM software, which effectively spies on your activities and does it's best to block you copying the game... and everything else... on your computer. EA is currently bieng sued over SecuROM, we'll have to see where that one goes.

The list is a very rough guide but it although it is very insightful, with 1.7 million downloads of Spore, this amounts to a huge £51 million estimate loss. No wonder they are resorting privacy invading software such as DRM when they are making losses on such a huge scale. Perhaps most surprisingly on the list is The Sims 2, with 1.1 million downloads. The "strategic lifestyle simulator" was originally released just over 4 years ago in late 2004. I am sure this list will provoke a response from game publishers!

You probably have him in your hands right now. The mouse was 40 years old yesterday. The first wooden mouse was butt ugly as you can see right now and just about worked, it apparently didn't really have good tracking and it would certainly not make you Haxx in CSS thats for sure.

Leave a comment with your congratulations to one of your most following servants

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Robbie Cooper's film stills capture children's faces as they play violent videogames and form the basis of an art project that could also help us understand the effects of spending time in a virtual world.

There is an account, apocryphally, from medieval times, of a person walking into a room and being confronted with the sight of a man transfixed. The man in the room is holding something in his hands, staring at it. His eyes are glazed. His lips are moving soundlessly. His soul is elsewhere. The onlooker, unsettled, concludes that the man has been possessed by an evil spirit. In fact, he is simply doing something the onlooker has never seen done before: reading a book.

When a child's concentration is fixed on a computer game, a cousin of that uncanny absorption can be seen in his or her - though it is most often his - face. And, just as in the story above, this unaccustomed rapture has become the occasion of suspicion and anxiety. Where has the child gone, and what harm is being done to him there?

As games such as Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto offer ever more immersive environments and realistic depictions of violence, those anxieties are, if anything, rising. Scientific studies of the effects of videogame violence on children - do they encourage copycat violence, or 'desensitise' children? - have so far proved contradictory and inconclusive.

Do you see anything of yourself in these images? Kinda interesting to find out eh?

Click here for the full story...

Imagination (Kings Langley, England) announced Monday (Nov. 24) that it has signed a license agreement with a new partner, a major international consumer electronics company, for a forthcoming member of Imagination's POWERVR SGX graphics processor family.

According to sources today's announcement by Imagination is for an upgrade to the Sony PSP2 and the SGX core is expected to be the SGX55x.

Note that both processor and PSP haven't been announced yet.

Source: EETimes.com

In WoW, "feign death" is a skill acquired by hunters at level 30 that allows them to take a page from the possum playbook, collapse to the ground, and convince their enemies -- who lose all ingrained animosity in the process -- that they've died.

According to Norwegian site Nettavisen , Hans and his sister apparently enraged one of the local moose (mooses? meese?) during a walk in the forest near their home. After shouting at the gigantic creature to ward it away from his sister, Olsen dropped to the ground, and presumably his lifebar plummeted to zero.

Moose have never been known as the wisest creature in the forest, and the boy's show of necrosis seems to have worked, as both he and his sister survived intact.

It's easy to decry video games as a menace to society but in a world where MMOs save adorable, tow-headed Norwegian children from a deadly moose, can they really be that bad?

Source: http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/12/boy-survives-mo.html

Richard Eldridge, a gamer from Pennsylvania, brought a case against EA. According to Eldridge SecuROM was "secretly" installed on his machine without permission when he installed the Spore Creature Creator trial edition. The Pennsylvania man says that once installed the technology can never be completely removed. Eldridge is wants a compensation for the damage done and would want others to give the same chance to get compensation.

Dianna Cortez from Missouri, is the second gamer sueing EA. Cortez is fan of The Sims and bought in september 2007 The Sims: Bon Voyage. After installation of the game (and the SecuROM software) Cortez couldn't play a few CD's with backup files of The Sims anymore. Even files from her iPOD and USB Flash Drive weren't able to be transfered to her system anymore.

The SecuROM technology is being described as 'unfair', and even 'immoral' and 'oppressive' too by both gamers.

Here is a video on Net Neutrality. If you've not heard of that, or aren't sure what it is. It's been around for some time, this video should explain it.

This is quite a big thing and the best that we can all do, is inform as many people as we can. All it takes is to spread the word, family, friends, collegues, everyone!