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London lawyers demand £600 for game download

While Rock Star's GTA IV may have been a huge success, rival studio Zuxxez has set about proving that you don't need good publicity, good reviews or even a good game to make money. Instead you just need a crack legal team, as discovered by a PC Pro reader who is being sued for downloading an illegal copy of Two Worlds from a file-sharing site.

Jameslyd thought this might be a tad harsh: "If someone nicked a computer game from a shop and got caught what would happen? Would they get a caution? Prosecuted? Fined £600? We are always told that illegal downloads are stealing, if you stole something from a shop would you get sued for loss of earnings as well?"

PalMal found method in the apparent madness: "Count yourself lucky: If their 'teenage children' had been downloading child porn someone could have gone to prison. Is parental ignorance really an excuse? I agree a £600 penalty is extortionate, but maybe it will make us all think about what we or our children use the internet for."

krisjones2 wasn't having any of it though: "If I was the recipient of such a letter I'd write back saying I can find no trace of such a game having been downloaded and demand to see the forensic evidence (which must be produced before court proceedings). I'd say that unless they are prepared to supply such forensic evidence I wouldn't entertain their claim. That would at least give them an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their case."

Nvidia finally fends off 3dfx charges

Speaking of cases, this week also saw Nvidia put an old ghost to bed, as it finally wrapped up a six-year court case involving a 3dfx investor who believed the graphics

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giant had underpaid for 3dfx when snapping it up back in 2001. Ah, the halcyon days of 3dfx. All aboard the nostalgia bus. Next stop, the nineties.

"I remember inviting a friend over to play the latest Wing Commander game on my new 3dfx card," sighs jgwilliams. "When he fired off a missile he almost fell off the chair laughing, he just couldn't believe the realism."

bobbdobbs was equally dreamy-eyed: "I can remember watching a friend play the first Wing Commander with bitmapped graphics and thinking 'bleeding ell'. Unless true photorealism suddenly appears there will be no OMFG factor to graphics anymore."

ProfessorF - who takes this week's PC Pro prize for our favourite avatar image - disagreed: "I don't believe people want that in games. Maybe I'm wrong, but many games make huge boasts about the amount of trickery they get up to - none of which really serves to make things more believable. There's an odd psychology at work in games.

"I don't regularly see lens flares and halos around lights in real life, but load up most first person games and they'll be there in spades."

Perhaps, ProffesorF, the reason you've never seen these things in real life is that you've never visited a halo-shaped alien world populated by a marauding alien race you've had to dispatch by the barrelful with just a pistol and range of sarcastic quips. Or maybe you have, what do we know?

Malware hits 500,000 computers in seven days

This week also brought news that a new piece of malware had managed to worm itself onto around 500,000 computers in just a week. McAfee described it as "relatively benign", milliganp ... didn't.

"So if I go into a shopping mall with a gun, as long as I fire in the air I can say my attack is 'relatively benign'! The internet needs to develop a zero-tolerance approach to malware and spam."

Quite what that zero-tolerance approach would entail we may never learn, but the idea of flooding their inboxes with some serious name calling quite appeals.

Churchcat found blame elsewhere: "Going to sites and downloading and running anything is surely folly," he notes, earning brownie points for letting us bow out with the word folly.

See you all next week.