The Virtual Anti Cash Crops

Recently there is this news of a 12-year-old boy runs up £900 debt on Facebook game FarmVille. Though in the news the boy's mother admit it is the boy who is at fault but the feeling of this whole set up which feels like a none savvy user's death trap seems all too real.

NVIDIA 'Fermi' (GF100) @ GeForce 400 Series (DirectX 11)

We know this has nothing to do with LEGO, but it has something to do with games - the hardware that powers games, in this case, on desktop computers. Over @ BrickTech, we've put up the latest news on NVIDIA's flagship graphic card, the GeForce 480, which comes from the new GeForce 400 Series, driven by the new GF100 GPU, called Fermi.

With this card, NVIDIA is on par with it's rival AMD, with their ATI Radeon HD5000 Series. Both sides now have DirectX 11 cards, which are supported on both Windows 6.1 (Windows 7) as well as Windows 6.0 (Vista), the latter via the Platform Update.

DX 11 is supported in new and upcoming games, and throws in new features like Tessellation (which was introduced in DirectX 10.1 with Vista Service Pack 1 and supported on Radeon HD3000 and 4000). DX11 also introduces a new Compute Shader which works with Direct Compute, which is an implementation of GPGPU, which allows games to use the card for processing, not just graphics. This comes in handy for AI, physics calculation via NVIDIA's PhysX, and real-time 3D Ray-Tracing, via NVIDIA's OptiX, which used to be a feature found in NVIDIA's Quadro professional workstation video cards, but now can be used for games too.

This is not a rendered 3D still image - it's a 3D motion rendering of a scene using NVIDIA's OptiX Quadro technology on the new GeForce 400 series of graphic cards. You can click on the image to view the full original size. Games can use this technology to have ray-traced 3D scenes.

He is higher Level than Me!

Mooo... oops where were we?

LOL... a foreign government official has been sacked for milking virtual cow in the popular Facebook title Farmville during government meetings. Read more in Bulgarian Sacked For Milking Virtual Cow.

New DRM: Paying Customers are like Pond Scum

Can't Command & Conquer without Connection

Seems like the new Command & Conquer 4 has a DRM scheme similar to that of Assassin Creed 2... constant connection needed to play. Read more on Command & Conquer 4 DRM.

Quote: "I'm so glad EA considers its PC customers as less than pond scum. "
Pond scum? LOOOL

Assassin's Creed 2 DRM

The biggest buzz currently on the gaming scene is about Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 unplayable as Ubisoft DRM servers go down. The terrible scene of corporate decision to protect its profit margin ended up punishing paying customers happens all too often lately.

Game - Identify LEGO MiniFigs via Mouth

Here's a LEGO game you can try - identify MiniFigs (Miniature Figurines) using your mouth - we kid you not (pun intended!) - a German kid has actually done that on a German reality show (Wetten Dass - German for Wanna Bet?)!

She (Sophia Heesch) can somehow use her mouth to feel what minifig she has and identify it correctly! That's some talent and she would probably make a geeky boyfriend - or any Star Wars fan - very happy too! So what LEGO can you identify with your mouth?