Tech Olive

A health expert by the name of Michael Torchia is suing Nintendo for the adverse health effects that come as a result of playing Wii Fit, in place of going to a proper gym or fitness center. According to Torchia, Nintendo is at fault because people use the Wii Fit improperly, without warming up before their exercises, which can lead to injuries.

“On the contrary, Nintendo is contributing to the epidemic of obesity. Young and old are putting away their gym clothes and shying away from going outdoors to play sports, because the addictive appeal to the Wii game products. Just as the tobacco companies created such a false image of their products and hid the potential dangers, so is Nintendo,” – Michael Torchia

The World’s Largest Torrent Provider, The Pirate Bay, will be on trial in just a few days in Stockholm, Sweden. This will be the largest court case in file sharing history and will also be broadcasted online by means of streaming audio and Twitter. Since the trial will be in Swedish, The Pirate Bay is recruiting translators to try to get the word out in as many languages as possible.

If you’re worried that The Pirate Bay will go down, they say that the site will stay online no matter what happens, and that they are confident about the outcome of the trial.

A new website which seems to have it’s sights set on what Steam has done with digital distribution has recently made itself known with an interesting promotion. This new place, AWOMO, are offering game downloads that supposedly take minutes rather than hours to fully download, assuming you have a fast internet connection. Also, you are able to play games that you are downloading before they finish completely.

“With Tomb Raider: Legend, a 7.2GB game, we can demonstrate that players on an 8 Megabit line can be playing the game within 11 minutes,” said exec type Roger Walkden. That’s “a staggering 11 times the speed of competing services and twice as fast as our previous beta test game”

The site, which is currently in a public beta stage, is offering a free download of Tomb Raider: Legend to anyone that signs up for their public beta. If you’re waiting to hear the other shoe drop, here it comes: The game is only free for you to play for a month, starting today.

All the car nuts will know of, and probably love, Jeremy Clarkson of the British TV show Top Gear. Today, our favorite TV show host takes a look at video games in the following opinion piece from the Sunday Times:

“I would dearly love, at this point, to launch into a tirade against stupid video games, and how their graphic violence is poisoning the minds of our precious children. But I love them. I spend hours chasing my kids around nuclear power stations, laughing hysterically when their arms and legs are blown off by imaginary hand grenades.”

The full piece can be found here.

We all know the one thing that the PlayStation 3 has in favor over the competition is its Blu-Ray player, right?

What if you could buy a video game with the movie based on that video game all on one disc? For example, you go out and purchase the new Iron Man 2 game and you get the movie as well. Seems like a good idea, doesn’t it?

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Jack Thompson is up to his old tricks….sort of. As of today, an amendment drafted by him to make the M-rating harsher in Utah was presented by Mike Morley. Thompson has changed his antics this time around by targeting the retailers rather than the games themselves.

G4TV interviewed Jack about the amendment and the result can be found here.

Intel has released many details about their upcoming 32nm processor line, codenamed Westmere. Intel will start manufacturing the new chips early next year. Steve Smith, Director of Operations for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, says that the new chips will basically be based off of the current 45nm Nehalem CPUs.

But Before the release of 32nm, expect more arrivals of new 45nm quad-core chips coming later this year. “We have a variety of products that we expect to be shipping in the second half of 2009,” said Smith.

We’ve all heard of how video game purchases are going digital very quickly. Even music purchases and movie rentals are going digital and services like Steam and Netflix make this possible. That said, will optical discs become obsolete? I believe that they are in fact becoming outdated. Ask yourself when the last time you used a disc was. I can personally say that my DVD drive has been starving and have no use for it other than to reinstall Windows. What are some examples that prove this, you ask?

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The three-piece array of i7 chips currently on the market will soon be seeing a bit of a performance bump with two fresh CPUs. A new Core i7 975 Extreme will be pushing the 965 Extreme out of the slot of Intel’s flagship processor. Previously, their top CPU, the 965 came in at 3.2GHz, whereas the new 975 model pushes 3.33GHz. The 975 is not the only new CPU from Intel. They also announced a Core i7 950, running at 3.06GHz, it will find it’s place between the i7 940 and the i7 965 Extreme (mentioned above).
At time of writing, no details have been released for pricing or when to expect these chips to hit the market.

Microsoft has announced that they will offer free, limited time access to Xbox Live Gold for owner’s of Grand Theft Auto IV following the release of its DLC expansion, The Lost and Damned. Gamers will get to play for free from Feb. 17-22. For more info about the event, visit the Xbox website.