Tag: atari

Pensioners 'caught' pirating games

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Poor Gill and Ken Murdoch. They’re aged 54 and 66 respectively, and they’ve never played a computer game in their lives. Imagine their shock when they opened a letter from law firm Davenport-Lyons that accused them of downloading an Atari game called Race 07, at 3am on November 26, 2007.

The letter demanded immediate compensation of £500 plus £25 costs, with the threat that that figure could rise into the thousands if legal action began against the couple. Over to Ken:

“A Swiss investigator had identified us as the downloader of this software at 2.59am on November 26, 2007. At 10am that day, I was at a government conference. The thought of me being up at 3am was ludicrous – and there are no kids in our house. The whole thing’s been a nightmare. We have never even played computer games.”

Duncan Geere Gaming, Weirdness

Atari getting behind Apple's App Store – Missile Command and Super Breakout on the way

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Not only are Missile Command and Super Breakout both coming to the App Store for play on iPhone and iPod touch, but they’re also getting tacked-on motion controls to make playing them in public more than a little embarrassing. It is the way of the future.

Missile Command uses the Multi Touch feature to allow missile placement with your fingers, a clever idea which ought to emulate the original arcade machine’s trackball controller far better than any other modern day console could…

Gary Cutlack Gaming, Internet, iPhone, iPod, Mobile phones, MP3 players

Atari and Codemasters join video game piracy legal fight – £300 fines on the way to 25,000 game-sharers

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It would appear that yesterday’s shaming of poor Isabella Barwinska was no one-off – some of the largest players in gaming are joining up to (try to) eliminate online piracy.

Atari and Codemasters, who make half the stuff you’ve played during your lifetime, have joined Topware and another couple of companies in targeting P2P-using game pirates, and will, according to The Times, start sending out automatic £300 fines…

Gary Cutlack Computers, Gaming, Intellectual Property, Internet

Destroy your Mac laptop and use it to control Pong's paddles

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You’d be forgiven for thinking Tech Digest had turned into a blog focussing purely on ways to hack the game Pong and play it through various mediums other than your arcade or Atari systems. No, we’re not renaming ourselves Pong Digest, much to the distress of these guys, sorry.

One such Pong-enthusiast has created a version of the game to run on his Mac laptop using the sudden motion sensors and microphone. People who smother their Macs in protective laptop cases or daren’t take it out into the wild should avoid this game, as it actually involves ohmygod tilting your laptop vigorously and potentially harming your laptop’s microphone by screaming into it. Tilting the laptop controls the direction of the paddle as you’d expect, and raising your voice, by say, screaming into the microphone, actually increases the size of the paddle.

Take a look at the video under the jump for some Apple/Pong-hybrid humour, and the link where you can actually download the game for yourself…

Katherine Hannaford Gaming, YouTube Video of the Day