Burned
Judge Bray at Leicester Crown Court put the boot into the British games software industry, though he did sentence a pirate to 30 months' imprisonment for defrauding BT by "chipping" mobile phones.
The judge said: "Counterfeiting of games is now so widespread and the reason is the public feel that there is gross overcharging by manufacturers of discs."
Another defendant in the case was ordered to do 150 hours of community service and pay £5,500 compensation: he admitted selling several thousand games discs to friends for £5 each.
Terry Anslow, the chief inspector of the Elspa (European Leisure Software Publishers Association,) crime unit, said: "Many of the remarks made by Judge Bray were uninformed, his know- ledge of the games industry is not what it should be."
Great British
"A New Britannia shall rise!" Lord British, the game name of Richard Garriott, plans to get some of his old team together and start coding, according to an interview in Computer Games Online. Garriott's company, Origin, was taken over by Electronic Arts, but it was not a happy experience. EA recently dumped Ultima Online 2 and its development staff.
"We will pick up the pieces and start again. I believe that we have the right idea, the right time, and the right people to do it again," said Garriott. The American games guru also claimed to be "the world's only private owner of an object on a foreign celestial body". He bought Lunakod 21 from the Russians. It is on the moon.
The movie
Final Fantasy, the movie, will reach UK screens in August. The film is a photo-realistic animation based on the series of role-playing games, and is being puffed as a "cinematic breakthrough [that] heralds a new era in digital storytelling".
It "raises the standard by which all other animation films will be judged". The plot concerns the efforts of the few surviving humans to hang on (this is Earth, 2065). For a brief synopsis and a tiny trailer in QuickTime format, go to www.finalfantasy-themovie.co.uk.
Nose news
DigiScents, which planned to add smells to software, closed its offices in California last week.
The two-year-old private company has not shipped a product and has been unable to raise more capital, though it still plans to license its iSmell technology. Synthetic smells could have added a new dimension to a number of video games, including SimFarm and Sega Bass Fishing.
