As with many male teenagers, video gaming is a fun and enjoyable past time.  For one, however, video gaming was used as a tool to achieve “exemplary hand-eye coordination”.  A 19 year old Drone Pilot used his massive Xbox gaming experience to become “too good” of a drone pilot.  He dropped out of high school and joined the military simply to please his father.

After being turned away from being a helicopter mechanic, he was recommended to the Drone division of the military.  While overseas in Iraq, he was brought home for being “too good” for the field of battle.  He was then made into an academy instructor at the age of 19.

This young man just goes to show that gaming produces skills beyond anything imaginable  to the military.  Now, the military may rethink their belief in video game training.

Source: SK Gaming

A battle that has stretched across the WoW domain and was the deciding fate of a company known as MDY Industries, of wether or not they would stay in business with their MMO Glider product. On January 28th, 2009, the acting judge in the case — Judge Campbell ruled in favor of Blizzard in putting MDY Industries liable to pay the full extent of a 13 million dollar lawsuit that Blizzard originally had going against the Glider company

A response posted by MDY Industries Owner who is simply known as Mercury posted this in regards to the recent ruling:

I just wanted to get a quick reply up on this, since people are telling me that we’re shutting down in February, which is not quite true. That may or may not happen and the possibility of that happening is not something we can really measure. But I can lay it out and you can decide on your own. Here’s what’s going to happen:

1) February 13th, both parties file regarding injunction and whether/how we can continue to sell during the appeal process. He asked for this in his ruling on Wednesday this week.

2) Sometime after that, maybe a week or two, Judge Campbell rules. If he rules in our favor, nothing else happens – we’re good to go through appeal and this process ends. If he rules against us, then we go to step 3. We go to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and ask for a stay through appeal. They gave it to Napster in 2000 and we have some good arguments, but who knows. If they give it to us, we sell through appeal. If not, we don’t sell and Glider stops.

So we have two chances here. Different people give us different odds at each step. For example, I am not very hopeful that Judge Campbell will give us a stay, since he has pretty much smoked us at every turn so far and clearly considers me to be a Very Bad Person. So in my opinion, that’s maybe a 20% chance. Other people, such as lawyers outside of the team, think it is much more likely that he’ll give us a stay – he wouldn’t have asked for briefing if he had no intention.

Similarly, there’s no way to measure what’ll happen at the 9th CCA if we don’t get any mercy from Judge Campbell.

Consider it two coin flips and you need to win one. We’ll know on the first coin flip in about 3 weeks.

The battle is over, however, it is coming to an abrupt halt for MDY in the coming days. For those that are not familiar with what MMO Glider is; it’s a application that injects itself into World of Warcraft and will allow the player to be away from his machine while the program makes the character move. You can literally level, do battlegrounds, farm, repair without any assistance from the actual person. Sounds crazy? Well it’s actually illegal. More details will be added to this story as it develops.

The 15th season of WC3L will start on February 19th, this time with the new rule set. Among the participants we find teams like World Elite, SK Gaming and Meet Your Makers. Now there are many questions that need answers. Does this mean Grubby and Moon are on their way back to the team? Has ESL posted faulty news? Are there new players on their way to the organization?

The new rules are so called Davis-Cup rules where teams only need two players to play a match.

The twelve participating teams:

World Elite
Team Colorful
SK Gaming
MeetYourMakers
fnatic
mTw
Team Alternate
Raptor-Gaming
nGize
mousesports
EYE Sports
iGamesCentral

Danny Johnson, a 14 year old boy from Texas, broke the Guiness Book of World Record’s record for Guitar Hero and has been crowned the king of Guitar Hero.  Guiness held the World Record challenge in a Manhattan Best Buy earlier this week.  Danny, arriving only a day before the event, tried his luck against the former champions and beat the previous world record score by nearly 75,000 points.  The challenge was with probably the most infamous song of our time, Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce.  Danny managed to score 973,954 points while scoring a 99% on the song in the finals.

When asked about his record breaking performance, Danny simply stated “All I can say is, records are meant to be broken.”  Cocky, but successful – the mentality of a champion.

Source: NY Daily News

A site that has seen many competitions in its day, DreamHack Center in Göteborg Sweden will be one of most anticipated stops in the KODE5 event. Action kicks off April 10th and ends on April 12th, and will feature some of Europe’s toughest teams for Counter-Strike 1.6, including SK-Gaming. For those that do not know DreamHack is Europe’s largest LAN center and the 1st place winner will have a chance to represent Sweden in the KODE5 Global Finals in May of this year.

Chairman of the Board David Garpenståhl has this to say on the upcoming event:

We are looking forward to once again welcome several top teams to compete at DreamHack. KODE5 Sweden is a perfect fit for DreamHack Göteborg and our goal to provide high level of competition and e-sport entertainment to our audience. It’s a pleasure to be working with the DreamHack crew this season to bring the KODE5 Revolution to Sweden,” said Lester Lau, KODE5 Revolutionary-in-Command. “Thousands of gamers will attend DreamHack and they will all have a chance to be a part of the Revolution. It’s going to be an event that gamers will not want to miss. Best of luck to all teams!

Should be an exciting event with tons of competition.

Source: KODE5.com