Sony Corp could face legal action across the globe after it belatedly disclosed a security breach of its popular PlayStation Network, infuriating gamers and sending the firm's shares down 5 percent in Tokyo today.

Sony shut down the network on April 19 after discovering the breach, one of the biggest online data infiltrations ever, but did not tell the public about the theft until Tuesday.

In the United States, several members of Congress seized on the breach, in which hackers stole names, addresses and possibly credit card details from 77 million users. One U.S. law firm filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of consumers.

Nintendo said it would launch a successor to its aging Wii game console in 2012 as it struggles to win back users from rivals Microsoft and Sony and seeks to reverse a slump in profits.

The maker of the DS handheld game player, which is also facing competition from smartphone and tablet makers including Apple, said Monday it will demonstrate the Wii's replacement in Los Angeles on June 7 at the E3 game show.

Nintendo is looking to repeat past successes in the gaming market. The Wii took the industry by storm five years ago by offering motion-based gaming that appealed to a broad audience rather than just ``core'' video game fans.

Schools are snooping on social networking sites, and googling potential candidates before appointing new staff, teachers were warned today.

Teachers should be wary of what they post online and check what information is available about them, a fringe meeting at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference in Harrogate heard.

Karl Hopwood, an online safety advisor said he was aware of a number of cases where schools had checked up on teachers through the internet.

The royal wedding is mentioned online once every ten seconds, a study has revealed.

Data compiled by internet marketing agency Greenlight found there is an average of 9,000 posts a day on the subject and the last seven days has seen a flurry of internet "noise" about the impending nuptials.

Greenlight's study showed online media including news sites, blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook had seen a 700% rise in the mention of the royal wedding compared to March.

The TalkTalk Group was the most complained-about provider of landline and broadband services during a five-month period, according to new figures released by a watchdog.

Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the communications industries, today issued complaints statistics from October 2010 to February this year.

The number of complaints were published as a proportion of each provider's customer base - enabling consumers to compare providers on a level playing field, Ofcom said.

The data showed that, across landline providers with a market share of 5%, Ofcom received most complaints about TalkTalk, with 1.78 complaints per 1,000 customers.

An academic claims to have solved one of television's most enduring questions - just why are the Daleks so scary?

Dr Robin Bunce said the fear inspired by the creatures, who have sent generations of children scurrying behind sofas, is nothing to do with their robotic cries of "exterminate" or their relentless attempts to conquer the world, but because we are worried we might become like them.

The Cambridge University academic said: "The reason the Daleks are evil is because we recognise that they were once better. They are the nightmare future we dread."
Dr Bunce based his research on the original storyline which first introduced the creatures to the show in 1963.

X-wing

I wonder how many people bought (or wished for) PCs as a result of seeing this running on a (rich) friend's 486-chipped computer.

It was Star Wars space combat. Running on a computer in your home.

It was one of the most exciting things I, as a Star Wars-obsessed teenager had ever seen, and for once the actual experience of playing it wasn't a disappointment.

It certainly wasn't dumbed down, with as many controls as hardcore flight simulators, and defending your starfighter involved juggling power around between shields (front and rear) and weapons. You had wingmen and it used a truly 3D game engine, unlike many other space sims of the time and afterwards. It was the closest you could really get to jumping into an Incom T-65 and battling the evil galactic empire.

The original release climaxed with an attack on the Death Star, and there were two add on packs. A lot of top 100s tend to give the 'best' award to it's follow up Tie Fighter. Make no mistake - Tie Fighter is absolutely brilliant, but more or less identical to X-Wing, which was first - and best!

Incubation

It's turn based. It's tactical. It's terrifying. This was the tag line of this brilliant strategy game.

A sort of Aliens knock-off, one of the main selling points was the 3DFX accelerated graphics which did look amazing (it still plays on current PCs although ironically the graphical bells and whistles don't work).

Not often was such attention lavished on a turn based tactical game. Some of the levels worked almost like complex puzzles, while others could be got through with sheer firepower.

Heat was your biggest enemy - the weapons might have been futuristic but after about three shots in succession were ready to seize up, leaving you to be eviscerated by big-clawed aliens.

This all added up to a building up of tension, and you really had to get your thinking cap on to get through some levels, with very limited movement points, and only being able to fire when absolutely necessary.

Baldur's Gate 2

For sheer value for money alone this should make it into any role-playing fan's top ten.

It was estimated that the main mission would take something not unadjacent to 200 hours to complete - enough to satisfy any Dungeons and Dragons nut. Closely following the rules of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, BG2 had you controlling (up to) six characters in a team, balancing out abilities by ideally having a couple of warriors, wizards and so on, giving you the muscle and the hocus pocus power necessary to succeed.

A very lengthy main plot was always in the background but there were an absolute host of side quests, some small, some pretty epic to keep you going.

All in all phenomenal value for money, and for me never yet beaten by a role playing game.

And I did complete it - and I've never tried to work out how long it took, for reasons of trying to keep my own sanity.

Medieval Total War 2

"You burn time in the vault".

So said Special Agent Johnny Utah in surfing bank robbing buddy movie Point Break.

It is fair to point out that playing Medieval Total War 2 would also be a bad idea during a bank raid by a gang of surfdudes wearing masks featuring the faces of former US presidents.

Nothing makes time disappear like the total war series.

Each release has steadily refined the game engine. Each incarnation has in the main been better.

The battles are wonderfully tactical, and the city management, building, and so on is incredibly immersive.

There's always just one more battle to fight, city wall to repair and invasion force to build up. Hours fly by like minutes and you become a stranger to your family.

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Battlefield 2

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the biggest fan of online gaming. Mostly the reason is because the net, at least from a gaming perspective, is peopled by complete morons. And for another thing, those complete morons spend approximately eight hours a day getting impossibly good at said games and therefore you end up getting shot in the face on a regular basis.

But for me at least, Battlefield 2 made putting up with all that somehow worthwhile. At the time every new patch (and there were many...) was greeted with awe, and new threads sprang up on forums discussing them.

In many cases whole new installs were needed as part of the drama as EA conspired to put it's devoted Battlefield 2 players through hell.

So why did it work so well and become so popular in spite of the endless bugs and non-working patches? It was frantically paced, had brilliant graphics, although it ran pretty well on low end systems. It had a good squad system which could, depending who was on a server, work really well, At times felt like you were part of a huge battle.

UFO: Enemy Unknown

Before I ever got a PC my best friend had this on his system. For some unknown reason he had no soundcard, but all the same it was one of the most exciting games I'd ever seen.

As a former ZX Spectrum owner I'd played the Laser Squad and the Rebelstar games to death - and this was those writ large.

Of course, the same genius, Julian Gollop, was behind UFO too. Turn based tactical action was greatly jazzed up, you build your own base, go on missions, capture new equipment which you could then research. I don't think I've ever felt such tension in a strategy game before or since, creeping around a crashed alien ship with your squad.

As your men rose up the ranks, improving their characteristics and going on missions, they became almost like people, and you went into mourning when one of them bought it. And the terror of knowing there was a Cryssalid running around a level...Those guys could devastate your forces in short order, turning them into drooling zombies. A chill runs down my spine at the thought of it.

It was just brilliant. And you can get it on steam for £2.99 - buy it!

Privateer 2: The Darkening

At one point the Next Big Thing was video in games. In fact some titles blew their entire budget on it (Wing Commander 3 anyone..) leaving absolutely nothing to spend on the game itself, which sometimes were appallingly half baked.

But not Privateer 2. Oh no - with a huge budget, they were able to afford actors including John Hurt (for heaven's sake), Jurgen Prochnow, Christopher Walken and as the mellifluous voice of Dani Behr as your ship computer. And still have enough left over to produce a stonking game.

The protagonist (yourself) was played by Clive Owen. And it was completely brilliant. Overall the game was very similar to Elite - trading goods, which had to be carried in a cargo vessel which you had to protect from pirate attacks, for cash, and also progressing through the main plot - a Bourne Identity style mystery with you not knowing who you are.

The space combat worked very well, and it took ages to get enough cash together for decent upgrades, meaning you felt you had really worked for something.

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Keep checking technobabble for part 3.

Half Life

At the time when it came out I could only read the rave reviews with a sense of great envy as my PC of the day struggled to run any recent releases any faster than slide show speed.

In fact I ended up building my first ever system because of Half Life, only possible by reducing costs and doing the work myself. It was built around AMD's magnificent Athlon 64 4000 - basically a rebadged version of the massively expensive FX53.

Anyway how long this took can be judged by the fact that the Half Life I'd bought was some kind of commemorative edition celebrating 1.5 million worldwide sales.

I wasn't to be disappointed though. It looked absolutely great and well...the storyline was unlike any other first person shooter I'd played before. We'd come a long way since the 'see it shoot it' days of Doom, from a plot perspective at least.

One thing modern games could learn from Half Life is how to do 'scripted' sections better. Many a time, especially in more recent games, one feels as if the action is running 'on rails' with little chance of really participating or changing what's going on. I recall the Half Life equivalent - you walking into a large room packed with soldiers. If you managed to sneak in you look around wondering how to tackle it. Then suddenly the doors blow in and a host of aliens attack... you can watch what's going on, or help one side out. Load a save from just before entering the room and it could end a whole different way each time.

You didn't feel like everything was based around you, what was going on was part of a bigger story and it was just a lot of fun.

In most top games lists these days Half Life 2 is the one listed at the top of the tree. But it made me feel car sick (a known strange problem)... Add ons Blue Shift and Opposing Force are well worth a look now.

Homeworld

If I had to pick a number one game it would probably be this. When I was a kid playing on my ZX Spectrum this is what I dreamed games might one day look like. Massive ships, but still small against a colossal galactic backdrop. It just looked amazing at the time - and still holds its own.

Thematically it was similar to Battlestar Galactica, while combat and ship design seemed, to me at least, to take its cues from Babylon 5.

While seeming a bit daunting to begin with, control and command soon became intuitive and easy.

The panic which set in when swarmed early in the game by enemy fighters, or when trying to save cryo-trays containing the last members of your race from destruction, while still trying to use salvage corvettes to steal an enemy frigate for research purposes, was just amazing.

Pretty difficult, great design, along with probably (in my opinion anyway) the best and most atmospheric in game music ever. It also had those slight quirks which, once you get the hang of the game, it's fun to exploit. This was corrected in subsequent offering Cataclysm, but one of the addictive elements of Homeworld was salvaging as many enemy ships as possible, particularly the capital ones such as destroyers, heavy cruisers and carriers. If you really go for it with frigates it was possible to capture so many they stretch away out of sight after a warp jump.

Anyway even once you get impossibly good at the single player game it is quite possible to come a cropper on some levels, especially the last one.

Starcraft 2

The first Starcraft was an amazing game, which invented the 'three race' approach to real time strategies which has been repeated many times since.

It didn't do much different really to that 'genesis' of real time strategy games: Dune 2. Main base, create new buildings, collect resources, build up forces etc.

Anyway it was mega popular, doing especially well online. Fast forward 12 years and we have the follow-up. As I said in my review, it doesn't do much different from the first one, but due to a great storyline, brilliantly conceived units and great single player levels, it's completely brilliant.

I'm just playing it through now for the third time, and enjoying it just as much as the original.
It achieved the impossible task of bettering an absolute classic.

Forget playing online though. Servers are populated by superhuman automatons capable of 300 actions per minute.


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Keep checking technobabble for part 2.

The recent publication of the PC Gamer top 100 PC titles of all time got me to thinking.

Almost invariably in this sort of poll Deus Ex is top of the tree. Not this time! Never played it!

In fact out of the top 10 from PC Gamer, only two get in to Technobabble - showing, I feel, a much greater degree of quality control.

If there is a preponderance of strategy and first person shooter games in my list, I make no apologies! They're the games which work best on PCs. And I enjoy them the most. Which is the same thing really.

Ok the PC Gamer top 10 was: 10; Ultima VII, 9; Starcraft 2, 8; Portal, 7; Diablo 2, 6; Rome: Total War, 5; Half Life 2, 4; Team Fortress 2, 3; Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, 2; World of Warcraft, and 1; Deus Ex.

The far more authoritative Technobabble top 10 will be listed in no particular order.

So tune in tomorrow for the first part!

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