September 2008 Archives

West Midlands police have developed a "ground breaking" internet-based game to teach students in the region how to stay safe.

The idea behind the game, available at the West Midlands Police website and which can be imported into networking sites such as Facebook, is to encourage groups of students to look after their friends during nights out.

Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Hyde said: "By using Facebook we hope to get a serious message across to this hard-to-reach group in a very fun way.

"We are constantly looking at different ways to communicate with our various communities and if social networking sites prove useful for this we would look to use them in the future too."

All very laudable - but to be fair I'm not sure how 'ground breaking' the game is in terms of rivaling new titles such as, say Crysis.

In the game you 'play' Rhiannon, a student who must find her friends on a night out.

If I was being unkind, I would say it ENCOURAGES binge drinking - with FOUR (count 'em) pints to collect for bonuses in the Pac-Man type game.

A number of ne'er do wells wearing balaclavas replace the 'ghosts', trying to catch you before you collect your chums.

At the risk of coming over a bit Al Murray Rhiannon is a GIRL. And she is drinking PINTS. It just shows what a state this country's come to!!!!

Below - a girl with a ladies' beer glass - as it should be (in the name of ALL THAT'S DECENT):

To view the game visit www.bestmates.org.uk.

The excellent new game from EA has run into controversy over the use of a copy protection device called SecuROM, which I blogged about on a previous occasion.

Basically PC buyers are only being allowed to install Spore three times.

So what, you might ask? Well for one thing when you normally buy a software title, you buy it in perpetuity, so you can install it as many times as you want.

You can also sell it second hand if you so wish. Clearly this issue has implications for sales so software manufacturers might want to find ways of halting it (and so, I would say, rob their customers of legitimately selling on their property).

But the issue of installations is also important - many people install and uninstall games frequently to free up hard drive space, just keeping the save games.

Why should a software company prevent this perfectly legitimate practice - I often wipe something I haven't played in a while, and hang on to the saves, only to fancy another bash later and put it back on again.

Perhaps these software restrictions are a step too far, and taking the capitalist ideal of trying to squeeze every last penny out of something to the point where they are annoying their own customers.

As to if this stops piracy - well, presumably hacked copies (which apparently were available before Spore was even released) get round this three installation rule anyway, rendering it somewhat pointless.

I don't know about you, but one of my bugbears is being called in the evening by people trying to sell something.

You pick up the phone, and then the technology kicks in, and there's a mysterious long pause.

This is because in the age of computerised phone systems, companies think it's more efficient (ie they can employ fewer people) to have microchips organise their calls - and if someone answers, they put it through to a human being to speak to you - assuming someone's available to do so.

So the Liberal Democrats are planning to win support by cold-calling 250,000 people on Wednesday night.

Nick Clegg has recorded a message which will be automatically played down the phone line to 'raise awareness' of the party.

And it's hi-tech - those taking the calls will be able to press their phone keyboard to choose which LibDem policy - on crime, education and so on - they want to hear more details about.

Just imagine - you're sitting there, spending a bit of time with your family after a hard day at work. The phone goes and it's Nick Clegg, saying 'press 5 to hear about Liberal Democrat education policy'.

Only the Lib Dems would try and gain support through a medium which is one of the most annoying - cold calling. Well done guys! Just sit back and wait for your position to rocket in the opinion polls.

This video proves scientists aren't nerdy no-hopers with no idea of popular culture.

After all what could be better than a 'science rap'? I think the Anfield Rap, Joe Pesci's efforts and Vanilla Ice's 'Ninja Rap' have finally been surpassed.

This comes from scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern who are currently trying to restart the big bang, and as a side product, end all life (what better thing to make a cod-rap light hearted jingle about?).

After all with lyrics like: "Twenty seven kilometers, a tunnel underground, designed with a mind to send protons around.

"A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France, sixty nations contribute to scientific advance," how could it fail?

Edit - OK OK by popular demand I'll embed The Ice - Go Ninja, Go Ninja GO!!!!!!

Ubisoft emailed me yesterday with some long-awaited news - Far Cry 2 will be released on October 24.

And not just the game - some other announcements too - the special edition will come in a WOODEN (!) box, and also available in the tie-in product fest are a limited edition Far Cry 2 t-shirt," The Art of Far Cry" Art book, collector 50km² map and Making-of DVD.

I can't imagine many people wanting to see a 'making of' DVD, but all said and done, I'm looking forward to it.

I remember the first Far Cry - and it was what made me into a real 'tekkie'.

It killed my computer at the time. No computer game had ever done that before - most were capable of running in some form on lower grade rigs.

But Far Cry just froze solid and wouldn't do anything. So it inspired me to self-build my first ever state-of-the-art computer.

Hopefully the latest version will be more lower-end system friendly - after all it doesn't do to make half of your potential market unable to run your game.

And it also highlighted for me the dodgy nature of 'recommended' system suggestions on the back of the box - mine at the time should have been ok to run Far Cry - but it didn't even run it slowly - it didn't run it at all!

Below - Far Cry 2 - hopefully you won't be seeing it as a slideshow on your computer.

I watched the epically long King Kong for the first time on Saturday night on ITV1 and found one aspect to be incredibly annoying.

The film itself was better than I imagined it was going to be [notwithstanding the poorly executed and completely unbelievable CGI brontosaurus stampede section] but why on earth could ITV not time the ad breaks better?

Every time there was a big fight, or right in the middle of an orchestral crescendo in the soundtrack, and some times in the middle of dialogue, it just cut immediately to some important messages from Daz or Peugeot.

In the age of advanced editing computer technology and software, surely someone must have come up with a way of inserting ads at proper moments - a scene change or similar.

As it stands, the only possible reason for what happened on Saturday is that the breaks were inserted purely on a time basis - advertisements were going to be shown at 8.45pm come what may.

Come on ITV - sharpen up!

A REPORT released today claims installing high speed broadband in every UK home could cost an eye-watering £29 billion.

The figure comes in a study by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) - the Government's advisory group on broadband - on the costs of fibre-based next generation broadband in the UK.

One way to reduce costs by about a half would be to miss out the 30 per cent of homes who live in the more remote rural areas.

Superfast broadband will allow speeds of up to 100 Mbps (megabits per second), up to four times faster than current speeds.

Interesting - but I wonder whether there really is an urgent need - would users really notice an awful lot of difference?

The average user probably doesn't download massive files all that often, and online games seem to run as fast as offline most of the time.

The thing to also remember is, the speed of download often depends on the server and how oversubscribed it is.

Slow servers [no finger pointing here for obvious reasons ;)] mean that it doesn't matter if you've got the fastest turbo nutter broadband ever.

I often find a crucial patch or update downloads at snails pace because of popularity making the server slow to a crawl.

I see Electronic Arts has come under fire today for a stunt to promote their new game Mercenaries 2.

£20,000-worth of fuel was being given away free of charge at the Last Stop garage in Finsbury Park, north London, to promote the game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

But by 7.30am a huge queue of 150 cars was causing traffic chaos in the area with security staff brought in to tackle unruly motorists annoyed at the delays.

People could fill up with up to £40 worth of fuel - Louise Marchant, from Electronic Arts, said the scenes of queuing mimicked aspects of the game.

She explained: "It's set in Venezuela, you play a mercenary and fuel is used as a currency." She denied the promotion was irresponsible, saying: "We've got security on hand."

Below - the scenes today in London:

Well it certainly had the desired effect in terms of publicity didn't it?

Below: petrol pump attendant Lizzie Jay-Hughes *must resist making the obvious sexist joke*.

Microsoft has announced big price cuts for the XBox 360 in the US, Japan and other areas.

But would you just guess, in Blighty prices will remain at their current level.

The cuts mean that the Xbox 360 Arcade will drop to $199 (£112), the standard Xbox 360 to $299 (£168) and the Xbox 360 Elite to $399 (£224).

This will take the Arcade even cheaper than the Nintendo Wii.

A quick look on Amazon shows that UK gamers will have to fork out £150 for the Arcade, £190 for the standard version, and £250 for the Elite.

Microsoft have also made the statement: "Pricing is handled on a region-by-region basis. We do not have a price drop in this region [theUK] to announce."

Thanks guys!

Below - an XBox 360. As this pictured one is from the UK it's inherently more valuable than rubbish foreign ones...

Just to add to the post below - the beta version is now available and can be downloaded from here.

Feel free to post any feedback.