Brick Gamers 43 - The Day Xbox Live Died - Updated

Updated - Today is the day Microsoft Xbox Live dies. Own an Xbox? Time to upgrade to Xbox 360 if you want to play online :) [sarcasm] More @ Kotaku here.

As usual, click on the comic below to see the larger size :)

What? You didn't know that Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service has been terminated for Xbox in favour of Xbox 360 gaming consoles? Which means if you're an Xbox gamer, your online gaming console days are dead - unless you buy a new Xbox 360 of course :) Read it here.

Microsoft claims this is for the benefit of the community to maintain Xbox Live only for a single console, the same way they forced all Windows Live Messenger (formerly known as MSN) users to upgrade to version 14 (2009), as mentioned by our sister site BrickTech here.

Of course, if you've read our post here (and BrickTech's post here), you'll understand Microsoft is doing this to achieve their ultimate Live Anywhere online service. One service to rule them all? Sounds familiar huh? To see more pissed off gamers comments, check out this post here.

With all the DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues with recent UbiSoft games, ActiVision's evil actions with their acquired studios, and EA (Electronic Arts) increasingly-sucky games in order to 'rape' the gaming community of their money for their own corporate self-interests, it's about time gamers begin to vote against the pillage of the gaming industry as you would vote against politicians who destroy your own country. After all, we all remember a time when playing games used to actually be fun - before the businessmen took over and catered for them.

Video Games Live @ Malaysia - Update 2

Update 2 - Guitar Hero & CosPlay @ the Concert (see bottom)!

Update 1 - PIKOM now holds the rights to WCG Malaysia.

We know this has nothing to do with LEGO, but you never know if there will be LEGO games music @ this Video Games Concert! That's right, Video Games Live is a concert for gamers with music played from games!

It's just like a music concert - except they play music from games

This year, they're coming to Malaysia (@ the Kuala Lumpur City Centre Convention Centre Plenary Hall to be exact) on 17th April @ 2PM and 8PM with tickets ranging from RM80 to RM250. If you're a student, there's a 15% discount - but for the 2PM show only - and @ PS5 seating area only.

Visit Ticket Pro @ www.ticketpro.com.my or contact them @ +603 7880 7999. You can also buy your tickets @ TP Outlets.


In case you don't know, VGL will also be held in conjunction with the 2010 1st PIKOM PC Fair of the year, as well as the World Cyber Games (WCG) KL League qualifiers. Why? Because PIKOM now has the rights to WCG Malaysia. Let's hope the WCG here doesn't look like PC Fair!


Guitar Hero auditions will be held @ Room 405, Level 4 from 12 to 2PM and 6 to 8PM. You must be a VGL ticket holder to enter. Player with highest scores each session will win a chance to perform on stage with VGL live!

CosPlay (Costume Play) competition will be held @ Plenary Hall Foyer, Level 1. Registration starts @ 1PM and 7PM. Must be a VGL ticket holder as well. Finalists will go on stage and be judged by audience - loudest applause wins!

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