Loading ...An obese 26 year old man in Northeastern China collapsed Saturday on the final day of an online gaming tournament spanning the Chinese Lunar festival. The man was from Jinzhou, in Liaoning province. The gamer spent “almost all” of the seven day break playing video games China Daily said, citing his parents. Xu Yan, a local school teacher, said that the “dull” break usually prompts students to video-games or some other form of electronic entertainment. “There are only two options. TV or computer. What else can I do in the holiday as all markets, KTV and cafeterias are shut down?” the paper quoted Xu as saying. 13 percent of China’s 20 million internet users are under the age of 18 and are classified as addicts to video games, says state media.
-Elias Tsang
Austrailian developers have sealed the code for the next test of Ubuntu (Herd 5), a distribution of Linux which was initialy released back in October of 2006. Ubuntu is an African word for “Humanity for Others”. a phrase that fits in with the open source attitude of “Linux for Humans”. Ubuntu uses their own GUI desktop system and contains over 16,000 software components that are amazingly compressed down to fit on a single disc. The main code for Ubuntu has been finished, however no further changes will be allowed. This release candidate is scheduled to be available this Thursday, and the full version is expected to be available mid April ‘07. “Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project. “I and others do believe that 3D is an essential part of the modern desktop experience. It is difficult to buy a PC or laptop that does not include such hardware, and in terms of transistor count it’s almost as much as your CPU these days.” Ubuntu will make a great operating system for people with old hardware that they want to put back to use. The current version of Ubuntu 6.10 includes OpenOffice2.0, Firefox, Integrated Mail and Scheduling, and the Rythmbox Media Player. Additional software can also be downloaded with an integrated catalogue.
Windows’s Genuine Advantage(WGA) is Microsoft’s tool to catch pirates trying to get updates. This tool is probably hated by most because it rejects 1 out of 5 people, most of which do not even pirate software. Microsoft is getting a plethora of complaints because of this tool and it’s habit of falsely identifying thousands of people as pirates who aren’t, but Microsoft seems have eased up a little with changing the characteristics that characterize you as a criminal. This will hopefully help those people that were being accused of pirates falsely. The labels will now be genuine, not genuine or “maybe”. This tool, while helping users, also helps Microsoft in it’s fight against piracy by letting them know what some users are doing and let them decide later on what is considered piracy or fair play. However, this is also being scrutinized for making some users miss important updates and WGA also sends back personal information and is sure to bring lawsuits to Microsoft. WGA was never really popular but, at least this tool will help some of the users.
At NY ComicCon Bendis and Maleev annouced that after the success of the Halo graphic novel, they would be starting a entire comic series and Marvel will be going all out with this series. This is sure to be a great series with the people behind the New Avengers and Ultimate Spiderman, I’m pretty sure it can not go bad or at least let’s hope it doesn’t. But, is this new swing of Halo into the comics a sign that it is getting to big? The game that once started out as a unknown Xbox launch title has now become everyone’s “favorite” game and is Bungie really ready for all these different storylines that are bound to come out. Halo may just be the start and could be a signal into what gaming is going to develop into which would be a industry that rivals both movies and books in influence and following.
The NeoGeo by SNK was possibly the most expensive console ever(even beating the PS3) with a console at $649 in 1990 and games that were about $200 a pop, were their even people around to play those games in 1990? Well, of course their were and now they can begin to play them on the Wii’s Virtual Console, if you are in japan, that is. Nintendo annouced that it will have two MSX games at launch, Eggy and Aleste, for 800 Wii points. Nintendo also annouced a whole lot of other publishers and they will be bringing games like Metal Slug and Phantom Fighter to the VC. Let’s just hope these additions come to America ASAP.
Gran Turismo has always been known for being a great racing simulation and one thing that really add’s to the expirence is the great and realistic car modeling the comes with the game. This article at 
