Games

The success of various DNA-sequencing projects promises to make genomic research an exciting new frontier. But studying the data has proved so tedious that some scientists have been tempted to quit.

Using thought alone and with some electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, four volunteers were able to control a video game, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

Simply by thinking the word "move", the volunteers played the simple video game, the researchers reported.

"We are using pure imagination. These people are not moving their limbs," said Dr. Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis who worked on the study.

Twenty years ago, when I wrote computer games for a living, the industry was pretty straightforward. I wrote games, the company packaged them (well before the advent of CD-ROMs and CD-ROM drives for PCs, games were distributed on cassettes -- can you believe it?) and sold them. My employer made good money, I made more money than a college student could make most other legal ways, and I got to play all the computer and arcade games I wanted. Life in the game industry was good! But I got bored, joined Real Business, and started working with Enterprise Applications.

It's one thing to see Lara Croft's hot-shorts clad posterior while you play "Tomb Raider." It's another thing entirely to see the sagging, slightly lumpy and entirely unclothed buttocks of Larry Lovage streak across your screen.

IN AN ATTEMPT to bolster its attack on the gaming sector, Nokia is expected to showcase an improved version of its N-Gage 'gaming deck'.
This improved version, labelled the N-Gage 2 by most observers, will cure two of its main deficiencies.

One much needed modification will be to allow MMC cards - used for storing games - to be inserted and removed without the necessity to disassemble the battery, like now.

Only a few years ago, online games still lurked on the fringe of American culture.

One category catered to young males interested in wreaking havoc -- at others' expense. And then there were the complex, virtual communities that more closely mirror the real world in their social interactions.

Today, those never-ending online "massively multiplayer" games like "EverQuest" have matured into mainstream, vibrant attractions, drawing hundreds of thousands of paying customers -- male and female.

A 13-year-old Hong Kong boy flew into a rage and threatened his parents with a kitchen knife after his father pulled the plug on his computer game, police said on Monday.

"The boy's mother told police the boy was thrashing about with a knife. Nobody was charged," a police spokeswoman said.

The father managed to overpower the boy and no one was injured in the fracas early on Sunday morning, a local newspaper reported.

The father pulled the plug on the game at around midnight when the boy refused to stop playing and go to bed.

What a year for video games -- online console gaming gained popularity, Nintendo's handheld monopoly was challenged by two new mobile products (N-Gage and Zodiac), and aggressive price drops fueled the battle for rec room dominance between the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube.

Here we look at the games themselves -- by choosing some of the best titles released in 2003.

Unless they've dropped some clear hints, choosing a gift for the die-hard video gamers in the family could be overwhelming this holiday season.

An estimated 250 new games are expected in this pivotal season for game companies -- it accounts for about half of the industry's $10 billion annual sales.

Whether you prefer adaptations of Hollywood blockbusters, realistic war epics or kid-friendly go-cart racing, there's something for just about every gamer.

Business Integration for Games provides a highly specialized client that game developers bind into their games. This client provides an API for accessing IBM WebSphere products that co-ordinate user-defined business logic. This business logic connects the game to Web services, allowing new content to be dynamically located and made available, payments to be co-ordinated, items to be traded between players, and secure messages to be passed between games and IBM's e-business environment.