Kotaku: netherlands

Netherlands Hospital Blackout Blamed on Silent Hill

Owen Good — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:00:00 MST

A psych ward patient in Holland skated on an insanity plea after he killed power to an entire hospital thinking he was solving a puzzle in Silent Hill.

You might have heard of this, but a month ago or so, Jan H., the patient, shut down power to Sophia Hospital in the Netherlands thinking that by doing so he could acquire a toothbrush that would complete a puzzle. The hospital lost power for 45 minutes, stranding some folks in elevators and forcing doctors to resort to manual efforts to keep intensive care patients breathing. Noone was hurt. (Poor Noone.)

Turns out Jan H. skated on - what else - insanity. A court ruled he had "no idea of the true consequences of his deed."

Man Found Not Guilty After Blacking Out Hospital [24 Oranges via OffGamers]

Dutch Retailer Refuses To Sell PSPgo

Luke Plunkett — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:00:00 MDT

According to a report on Eurogamer, Dutch chain Nedgame - the country's largest specialist games retailer - are refusing to stock Sony's PSPgo.

Why?

Nedgame (and, apparently, other retailers in Holland and Spain) aren't happy with the console's price, believing it to be too expensive to bother stocking. A beef, then, but not their main beef.

No, their t-bone is the system's lack of a UMD drive, which they feel robs the store of their main source of income; namely, the mark-up on game prices. With PSPgo games bought directly from Sony via the PSN, and the console more expensive than the existing one, it's not hard to see their point.

Biggest Dutch retailer boycotts PSPgo [Eurogamer]

A DS In The Red Light District

Luke Plunkett — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:30:00 MDT

Simon Parkin's written a piece over on GameSetWatch about a little trip he took to to Amsterdam. Nothing saucy or inhaled, mind you, just a bunch of impressions of one of the city's more adult tourist attractions. That and the brief tale of a walk past a young girl, in one of said attraction's shop "windows", and her dalliances with a Nintendo DS. Nothing newsy there, no screenshots or video clips for you to pore over, nothing that you can feverishly pass on to 100 friends as the latest "internet thing" for the day. It's just a really nice piece, about a girl and a DS.

COLUMN: Chewing Pixels: 'Sex and Tetris' [GameSetWatch]

Rockets, Riots, Yeah, This Is A Rocket Riot

Luke Plunkett — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:30:00 MDT

First announced last October, Rocket Riot, being developed by CodeGlue and published by THQ, is looking great. Slated for release sometime later this year on Xbox Live Arcade, here are some early screens of the game in progress, which show that, hey, you can make a Worms clone look interesting.
Rocket Riot [Codeglue]

Gamers: 1, Soldiers: 0 (For Now)

Maggie Greene — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 12:30:24 MDT

Militaries using games as training tools is nothing new; but here comes one account of a group of five gamers taking on five soldiers from the Netherlands in 'Virtual Battlefield System 2,' and scoring a resounding win (the author points out that the gamers were way ahead the soldiers in terms of familiarity with the software, which helped). It's entertaining, but also contains some musings on the future of such war games and gamers and the military. If you can forgive the typos, it's an interesting little piece on current applications and perhaps where this might lead:

Many people have been saying this for a long time, and i think we approach the point that more armies will see that 'Gaming' is not only fun to do. you can learn from it. - just like we did today. In the last years, technology has taken an enormous jump. the current weaponry has been benefiting from this fact, and its inevitable that normal troops will be trained with special simulation equipment. this can vary from radar observance to real field duty procedures. Gaming has been around us for many years for our pleasure. But yet since a few years, many countries have learned that gaming could be more than just recreational fun.
While real exercises are very expensive, simulations are quite cheap in comparison. Although today's artificial intelligence is possibly not sufficient for proper training, todays available simulations tecnologies are hard to neglect.

Field report : Gamers fight real Soldiers in VBS2. [ArmedAssault.eu]