31/07/2008 by swordfish.

Planned changes to the way video games are rated have sparked a row about who should be in charge of giving games their official age classification.

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge has announced a consultation on whether the ratings for games should replicate the system for movies.

But games makers oppose plans, backed by MP’s, for the British Board of Film Classification to rate games as well.

The games industry wants its own voluntary code to be made official.

Under the current system the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) only rates those games considered to have significant adult content such as sexual material or extreme violence.

About 3% of all the games sold in the UK fall into this category and can only legally be sold to those aged over 18.

All other games are rated under the Pan European Game Information system - an industry administered scheme.

Source: ‘BBC Tech News‘

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in PC Games, Software | Print | 1 Comment »

30/07/2008 by swordfish.

British pro-gaming team Birmingham Salvo have been crowned winners of the 2008 Championship Gaming Series (CGS).

The ten-strong team share the top prize of $500,000 (£252,000) for coming out top of the eight teams who made it to the grand final.

Birmingham Salvo dominated rival San Francisco Optx in the battle for the title winning four out of five events. The win marks the first time that the CGS trophy has been awarded to a British team.

“I’m extremely proud of my team right now,” said Michael O’Dell, manager of Birmingham Salvo in a statement.

Source: ‘BBC Tech News‘

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in PC Games, Software | Print | 1 Comment »

29/07/2008 by swordfish.

Former workers at the web giant Google have launched a rival search engine Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, Cuil is pitched as being bigger, faster and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way.

The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders.

But analysts believe the new search engine, like many others, will struggle to match and defeat Google.

Cuil, pronounced “cool”, says it uses more than 120 billion web pages to build up its index of the information it finds on the web. It claims this is more than Google uses though the search giant has stopped reporting how much it indexes.

Without revealing numbers Google claimed its index was still bigger.

Source: ‘BBC Tech News‘

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in Web Search, Software | Print | 2 Comments »

28/07/2008 by swordfish.

Microsoft has angrily denied a Forrester Research report which claims Windows Vista has been “rejected” by businesses.

Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel surveyed 50,000 enterprise customers and discovered that only 8.8% of corporate PCs are running Vista. Mendel suggested that firms that hadn’t already made the jump should “consider following the lead of Microsoft’s important partner Intel and re-evaluate the case of Vista.”

The report provoked an unusually spiky response on the official Windows Vista team blog, which accused Forrester of failing to understand the market.

Source: PC Pro

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in Software, Microsoft, Vista | Print | No Comments »

25/07/2008 by swordfish.

A truly breathtaking and stunning Tombraider Underworld teaser trailer has been released. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, you’ve been missing out big time! Sit back and enjoy - but beware, it will ask more questions than it answers, especially as Lara’s home, Croft Manor, is involved!

This is the first of a series of official teaser trailers leading up to the UK release of Tombraider Underworld on the  21st November 2008!

View it at the Tombraider Chronicles web site - www.tombraiderchronicles.com/underworld/trailers_01.html

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in PS3, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Software, PC Games, Technology News | Print | 1 Comment »

23/07/2008 by swordfish.

Microsoft has released further details on the latest version of its graphics API.

Among the major new features, DirectX 11 will introduce a shader technology that “lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor,” according to the chief technical officer of Microsoft’s Entertainment Business Division, Chris Satchell.

The company also revealed that DX11 will bring support for tessellation, allowing for smoother models, and multi-threaded resource handling to exploit multi-core machines.

As with DirectX 10, the latest version will only be compatible with Vista and later versions of Windows, although unlike its controversial forbear DirectX 11 will be backwards compatible with DirectX 10 graphics cards.

Source: PC Pro

Return to the main QBS site

Posted in Software, Microsoft, Vista, Technology News | Print | No Comments »