$39.559 billion.

$231.374 duoquadragintillion.

$406.453 novemdecillion.

$4.39 quattuorquadragintillion.

All of these are numbers I encounter on a daily basis, thanks to my habit of leaving AdVenture Capitalist [official site] running in the background, but a few days ago they suddenly prompted me to actually think about the numbers and their names rather than letting them drift past, sextillions expanding into septillions, into octillions, nonillions and beyond – far beyond anything we encounter in real life.

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“It’s not really a place, it’s a feeling,” biker icon James Hurley once said of his dream destination. “Sometimes riding at night, I punch off the headlights and roll the throttle in just rocket blind into the dark.”

But some bikers are dirty boys. They cuss, smoke cigarettes, refuse to tuck their shirts, and don’t even kiss their mothers goodbye. These rough tough scruffs congeal into gangs, roaring down the highway honking their hogs and yelling e.g. “Hey you, go on, get out of it!” Don’t you find that secretly thrilling? If so, watch for the next major Grand Theft Auto Online [official site] update, which will focus on bikers and bike gangs.

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This is some kind of sick joke, isn’t it?

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This morning I was wondering whether I should have booked time off to play Rise Of Iron, the new Destiny expansion. Watching Twitter I’m currently glad I didn’t because the servers appear to have completely fallen over, an army of error codes followed by a queuing system which has placed my partner (who did take the day off) about 100,000th in line to play. It’s like a deli counter from hell.

But what it did do is remind me of how weirdly fond I am of Destiny’s error messages. You don’t get an unmemorable scramble of letters and numbers to jot down or that nerve-shredding ping noise that Windows makes when it pops up an error. Instead, you get animals and fruit and musical instruments and, my word, I wish there was more of that on PC.

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Battlefield 1 [official site developers DICE have announced a few tweaks and changes they’re making to their World War 1 FPS following its open beta test earlier this month. Sorry, jockeys – the news isn’t good. Along with stripping horses of their adamantium plating, they’re changing scoring in Conquest mode and fiddling with more. Oh and hey, if you didn’t get to play in the open beta to discover how it runs on your PC, hey, DICE have finalised the system requirements now.

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BioShock: The Collection [official site] on PC is good-lookin’ but, it’s fair to say, A Bit Dicky, pulling off the impressively bungled trick of both recreating some of BioShock’s original issues and throwing a clutch of new ones into the mix too. Take yer pick from enforced mouse-smoothing, no 5.1 sound, messed-up 21:9 support, limited FOV, no graphics settings outside of antialiasing, anistropic filtering, resolution, vysnc and a clutch of crashes. Many of these, though not the crashes, can be resolved via ini file editing (a guide to that is here), but in this, the third consecutive Year Of Luigi, we should not be expected to dirty our hands so.

The good news is that 2K are planning to grab a five-iron and bludgeon most of the major problems into submission. The bad news is that it doesn’t look like we can expect a full settings menu any time soon.

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Riot have announced Mechs vs Minions – a co-operative boardgame based on their mega-popular MOBA, League of Legends [official site]. The game will launch in October (October 13th, to be exact) which makes sense given October is the month of the League of Legends World Championships so millions of eyeballs are on the game at that point. But what does a board game that riffs on Summoner’s Rift look like?

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Every week we dispatch Brendan to scour the post-apocalyptic wastes of early access and scavenge whatever games he can find. This week, he returns with multiplayer car combat game Crossout [official site].>

Crossout is an action game about building a terrifying car made out of swords and skulls and then driving around the wasteland, pumping other drivers full of lead. It has a soundtrack made up of gentle guitar.

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Two men have become the first to be charged under UK gambling laws for promoting gambling with a videogame currency on YouTube. Craig Nepenthez Douglas, 31, and his off-screen business partner Dylan Rigby, 33, have been charged at Birmingham magistrates’ court with promoting a lottery and advertising unlawful gambling, while Douglas also faces the charge of inviting children to gamble.

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Working on the remastered version of The Silver Case gave Suda 51 an opportunity to come face-to-face with a young Goichi Suda. They are one in the same, of course, but it was the 1999 release of The Silver Case that set Suda 51 on the path to becoming the game developer he is today.

The game was made by the young Suda, he told me at the Tokyo Game Show. I wasn t Suda 51 at that time. It seems like I m producing my younger self.

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