Well, while authorities are still lax to crack down on people who are modifying their personal game players, they are certainly getting stringent on folks who do this for a living. Modifying game consoles or "chipping" is a criminal offence and so is the mere posession of the same says Michael Rawlinson, the deputy director of ELSPA (A British trade organisation). David Hoang, who was found to be guilty thanks to the help given to police by ELSPA has been prosecuted for handling stolen goods, and for having modified game console chips. His total sentence comes to about 18 months.

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Could be if what Businessweek says is true. The Digital Music market has not been kind to Microsoft, Apple has taken the lead and is maintaining it over all its competitors. Then again, Microsoft was never really in this game and no other company knows how to trounce competition the way Microsoft does.

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EA SPORTS Rugby 06 will challenge gamers to compete in a host of the World's most prestigious rugby competitions including the Six Nations, Lions Tour, Tri Nations, Guinness Premiership and the Super 14. EA SPORTS Rugby 06's exhilarating gameplay now mirrors the real thing closer than ever before, with new moves such as off-load passes, quick line-outs and quick penalties that encourage attacking, momentum-driven rugby. Gamers can also dictate play with their star Impact Players and can choose from a legion of new set plays to pile on the pressure and keep their opponents firmly on the back foot.

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Nearly a year on since the November 9 release of Halo 2, one of the bestselling games on the Xbox, Bungie has provided a set of statistics detailing how much the game has been played over Xbox Live. Though figures released by Microsoft indicate that a relatively small percentage of the Xbox's userbase goes online, the total number of Halo 2 games played over Xbox Live has still reached 324,362,454. However, if one were to count each player's game in all of the above matches separately -- five "games" for one five-player match, for example -- the number would reach 2,189,713,936 games altogether. The total number of hours players have spent playing Matchmade games over the service is 184,137,245, which equates to just over 21,000 years. The longest amount of time a single player has spent with the game is 14,929 games, or about six hours and 71 games per day.

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Xbox Live will be upgraded Monday (10/24) and will be unavailable. In addition, Xbox.com and the official Xbox forums will also be offline as they are also being upgraded. It’s important to note that when Xbox.com come back online (with Xbox Live) it will have an all new look, but all the “My Live” web features and the official Xbox forums will be offline for a few extra days.