The reason I not do read an writing good? Because I play video games, obviously.

That’s the theoryput forward by filthy tabloid gutter-scum The Sun:

“Kids hooked on computer games have sent England plummeting down world league tables for reading… Ministers claimed pupils spend so much time on consoles that they are not burying their noses in books…”

Obviously all gaming websites are taking a fairly-blinkered ‘LIES IT’S LIES, IT’S ALL OBVIOUSLY LIES!’ approach to the story, without stopping to actually think for a second that actually, in a few cases, it might actually be true.

‘True’ to precisely the same degree that zoning out in front of soft-core grot like The O.C undoubtedly isn’t teaching kids how to spell ‘indubitably’ either, that is.

Still: coming from The Sun, a publication that might as well be written in crayon given the level of linguistic sophistication they use, those same gaming websites are probably a little bit right to scoff uncontrollably…

After Rockstar launched its appeal against the decision by the BBFC to refuse Manhunt2 certification, the BBFC have accepted that there is no provable link between violence and violent videogames. However, more research would be required, they said, in order to rule the possibility out conclusively.

Andrew Caldecott, on behalf of the BBFC, said “The research certainly achieves the objective of establishing that research does not demonstrate that there is a causal link. But what it certainly does not establish is that there isn’t.”

A date for the results of the appeal hearing has yet to be set. In the meantime, read the full story here.

Say what you like about Deus Ex: Invisible War, anyone who played the first game will have just done a little botty trump in excitement over this. I know I did.

Chris from Introversion has posted a quasi-rant up on their forums about the state of Piracy and DRM.

“…there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they’ve lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed.”

For an alternative view on thieving scumbags playing indie games for free, check Cliffski’s blog. He’s an angry, grumpy man: but then teenagers are metaphorically whipping tenners out of his back pocket and laughing.

“I wish I didn’t have to take time away from game development to do that crap, but as usual in life 1% of people are screwing it up for the other 99%. People who pirate games might as well wear a T shirt saying ‘I hope PC gaming dies’.”

Where do you stand on piracy? And if anyone has time to make a really funky ‘I hope PC Gaming dies’ T-Shirt, I’ll buy one. I choose to be ‘ironic’ like that with my dress sense…

[chris’ rant stolen wholesale from the newly-legendary RockPaperShotgun]

For £20 I really wasn’t expecting much from Endless Ocean (or Forever Blue if you’re Japanese). I thought it’d essentially be a sort of interactive screensaver where you can poke the fishies. I was wrong.

There’s a real sense of adventure, a story arc which I really wasn’t expecting, and various sub-missions to complete at your leisure. The sense of immersion is probably the greatest I’ve experienced in any videogame ever, and all that on Wii without the polygon-pushing power of the XBox360 or PS3 which was apparently essential to pull off this sort of thing.

The soundtrack features Hayley Westenra who, regardless of whether this sort of music is your cup of tea or not, has an undeniably perfect voice for this type of game.

All in all, Endless Ocean is the most emotive and pleasurable gaming experience I’ve had in a long time… and to top it all off, it’s all just wonderfully nice. Nothing dies, there’s no pressure, and you’ll end up playing with a massive grin on your face.

So more of this please, The Games Industry.

Ever wanted to convert a bitmap to a vector image so you can scale it up or use it as a printable logo?

You can do such things in Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE already, we know. However, it’s unlikely that you’ve been able to do it as well as with VectorMagic before.

Don’t believe us? Have a gander at the comparison page and be prepared to say, “gosh!”.

There’s a campaign afoot to get an Internet show called ‘Gamers’ made properly for TV. It’s horrible - sort of like Clerks, if Clerks was badly written and horrible and embarrassing instead of sharp and witty and funny. It’s the sort of thing that very much deserves to stay as far away from my TV as possible.

I made it about far enough through this drivel to hear one of the characters actually say ‘Double-U Tee Eff’ out loud. That’s as much as I could take before I felt compelled to criticise it on The Internets. Can anyone bear to make it all the way to the end? Dares you.

If you laugh at this at any point, you’re dead inside.

Free from the shackles of grumpy marketing men in suits, The Indie Games Business is renowned for its supposed risk-taking brilliance.

Look at indie games! Look how they risk-take.

Except they don’t, really: the truth remains that it’s all still mostly portal-friendly cloned pap.

Sometimes, however, Indies pull something special out of the bag. Looking like a cross between the classic Armadillo Run and all those scribble-based indie games that have been oh-so-popular recently, Crayon Physics Deluxe is clearly going to be The Best Game Ever.

While people who do physics brilliantly are clearly the life-blood of Next Gen Gaming, they can’t name games for toffee. I had to muster near-Herculean strength to be bothered to watch that video, given the boring-and-predictable name of the game.

I’m damned glad I did, though. It’s brilliant and magic stuff made out of The Future.

A Wii version asap, please. Thanks.

As everyone knows, the only reason to really want a PS3 is ‘Little Big Planet’, and that isn’t out yet.

But as this Tech Demo shows, Sony have got some faily clever bits of magic up their sleeves with the EyeToy.

The true future of VideoGames? Drawing your own games and then using your own wobbly genitalia as a tank.

Bring. It. On.

Could this be some of the greatest gaming news of the decade?

Ghostbusters is set to appear on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 courtesy of Terminal Reality, with Wii, PS2, and DS conversions by Red Fly Studios. The whole set are to be published by Vivendi.

That’s good news isn’t it, because that’s practically every platform known to man?

But that’s not the really great news - that was just the preamble. No, the great news is that Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis have all agreed to have their likenesses used and will be supplying voice acting! This means that this ain’t gonna be no poxy “Ghostbusters Universe” rubbish, this is actual bone-fide “proper” Ghostbusters - the storyline’s even going to be written by Ramis and Akroyd!

Hopefully, we’ll have blasting the crap out of hotel segments, baby rescuing, witty one-liners, churches being trodden on, and car driving segments where you can turn on the siren that goes, “WEAAAAAAA WEAAAAAAA WEAAAAAA!” very loudly. If done well, this has potential to be utterly amazing!

Bustin’ makes me feel good!