This will be one of those things in history which will get a lot of coverage for the small thing that it is. However saying that, it deserves it, maybe not the book but for some the writer deserves alot. Jack Thompson, for those who dont know, is the man that has one of the biggest and most continual grudges against gaming, namely anything violent or sexual in nature. He's written books, held forums, and gone as far as threatening to sue a lot of people and companies, and then sued some.

In every law suit, theres always someone who doesn't like either party and in this case hatred for Jack is greater. Someone by the user name 'charitablekarma' has listed Mr Thompson's book on eBay, but you're not bidding for the book, no, you're bidding on how it will meet its death. You can be as creative as you want but the seller says:

"The only exceptions to this are nothing involving genitalia, bodily functions, fluids, wastes, and I will not make anyone or animal consume it. Have fun with this, but keep it SFW (safe for work)."

Bidding on this item doesn't fund the auctioneer in anyway, instead, all money goes to Get Well Gamers, an organisation which goes to help children at hospital by supplying consoles. Expect alot of coverage of this item and already bids remain at $75, and is expected to go well into 3 figures. Lets hope this act of destruction gets a lot of money for the needy organisation.

Thanks to m0dem  for the heads up...

OK, this wont be a case of better luck next time, simply because I doubt many of us can afford the $10'000 price tag that went along with this. But this machine shaped the desires of many peoples minds and hearts and you want to know why? Well let's start with the exterior, the paint job was a custom flame effect, done by none other than Mike Lavallee, the famous automobile custom painter. Carrying on, the juice is on the inside, and what a punch this thing holds. It doesn't run on dual graphics cards, or three for that matter, it contains a whopping four GeForce 7900's running in SLi for 2GB of graphics memory. Its processor doesn't go a miss either, it runs on a factory overclocked Intel Extreme Core Duo boosted up to 4.26 GHz! RAM is courtesy of 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, and sound is pumped by a Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty. Physical memory is supplied by 320GB of 10'000 rpm Raptor's and a 400GB Western Digital 7'200rpm HDD. Unfortunately for us we dont know how many units were made, but put it this way, whoever brought these has got themselves a future proof system for say, the next couple of decades. Yes there are people out there who are going to say that they can build a faster and beefier machine, but can you make something with the looks and feel of something like this?

Pearl Research, a San Fransisco based consultation and intelligence firm, have released an interesting article on the future for the Chinese gaming market. They expect that on the current trend, the games market should pass in excess of $760 Million by the end of 2006. The firm also state how the market will continue to grow to an expected $1 Billion mark by 2009. This will be aided by the increase in the economy and spending power on games.

China has a booming economic market which is making many of the middle class affluent, which therefore means they have more disposable income. More and more of this income is being spent on either internet or games, but increasingly so, on both. Pearl Research state that of the $760 Million or so, up to 95% of the growth will be down to the boom shown in online gaming. As things stand, 3% of the total population play games, that's 25 Million people, whereas 9% (111 Million) are involved with the internet. For this reason analysts show that the high number of broadband internet users is fueling the demand for online gaming.

This survey hasn't shown anything unexpected, as it is well known that many companies aim and target their online gaming at China. Nintendo for example brand themselves under the iQue brand, and many think that they are branding the Revolution towards them too, by offering cheap downloadable games, their plan might succeed.