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The importance of nerdom in public society has increased exponentially in the past decade, with the video game industry now producing over $25 billion in annual revenue alone. Ask any random group of cosplayers at San Diego Comic-Con what the above completely customized, electronic Halo MJOLNIR Assault Armor suit is worth, and they'd probably guess in the thousands. According to the experts at History Channel's Pawn Stars, they'd be wrong.

This Halo fan is hoping to score a humble $2,000 for his spectacular suit, but the Pawn Stars won't go a cent over $200, crushing his dreams and possibly losing him a girlfriend. We salute you, Halo Hero, for testing the waters in popular society for nerds everywhere. We'll be sure to keep our fetishes in convention halls and caves -- for now.

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The importance of nerdom in public society has increased exponentially in the past decade, with the video game industry now producing over $25 billion in annual revenue alone. Ask any random group of cosplayers at San Diego Comic-Con what the above completely customized, electronic Halo MJOLNIR Assault Armor suit is worth, and they'd probably guess in the thousands. According to the experts at History Channel's Pawn Stars, they'd be wrong.

This Halo fan is hoping to score a humble $2,000 for his spectacular suit, but the Pawn Stars won't go a cent over $200, crushing his dreams and possibly losing him a girlfriend. We salute you, Halo Hero, for testing the waters in popular society for nerds everywhere. We'll be sure to keep our fetishes in convention halls and caves -- for now.

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Andrei Dumitrescu: I have been away for the final days of the last two weeks so I did not offer any information on what I was set to play during the weekends.I was on holiday because I wanted to be able to watch the most exciting mountain stage of Le Tour de France from start to finish, taking in all the sights, watching all the big attacks and commenting on the race strategy with some virtual friends while the cyclists tackled legendary climbs and dangerous descents.

So it made sense to play some more Pro Cycling Manager 2011 while watching the race, this time trying out some of the mods that the community has been putting out, including the beta version of the highly regarded PCMDaily database.

I also got back into some Civilization IV, enjoying the latest version of the excellent Dune mod, and I also got some more Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II ? Retribution time under my belt, including some Last Stand cooperative action.

Andrei Dobra: This weekend is pretty much dedicated to getting ready for a well-deserved vacation, but, as always, I'll probably find some time to indulge in a few games, in between making sure I won't forget anything at home and jumping on top of suitcases.

First up, I'll probably spend some more time with Defense Grid: The Awakening, the great tower defense game from Hidden Path Entertainment, and try to unlock some of the achievements that have eluded me up until now, while winning the gold medals on the maps in the title.

When I won't try to kill aliens with my impressive strategy skills and the array of different towers that I can build, I might jump back into The Witcher 2, a game that I've overlooked for quite some time because I was busy with newer ones. I'm still pretty early in the story, so I'll also indulge in some of the downloadable side-quests that have been added by the developer of the game, CD Projekt Red.

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Brink is certainly one of the most striking looking shooters coming in 2011, but it's also going to sound amazing. The attention to detail on the aural side of things is staggering, and the lion's share of the credit goes to Splash Damage's Audio Director Chris Sweetman, who has gone to great lengths to create a layered soundscape, as you'll find out if you read on?

IGN AU: You started out working in film ? how different is the approach to directing audio in a game as opposed to film?

Chris Sweetman: If I'm honest, the process of actually designing the sounds is really no different. The big difference is the non-linear approach video games take instead of the linear approach you see in film, plus the implementation of sounds and music within memory constraints.

In film, you will generally approach it scene by scene and multiple sound editors will work on different scenes. The supervising sound editor will manage these teams and make sure that the sound is consistent through the reels in collaboration with the director. This process will normally take around four months.

AAA video games are worked on for upwards of two years, so the process is much more iterative. You might also find that certain features won't arrive until the last six months (such as cinematic or dialogue recording). Implementation is the big difference with us having to orchestrate thousands of sounds in real-time over the course of play!

IGN AU: How did the transition across to games come about? What appealed to you about working in this medium?

Chris Sweetman: When working in film during the early 90s I began to feel that the video game industry was pioneering in a lot of areas, and I figured that eventually the audio would follow a similar model to film. In my opinion everything had been done in film audio that could be done, but interactive audio excited me, and I've been passionate about it for over 15 years now.

In film you don't tend to have one person doing all the audio - you play to individuals' strengths and experience by having specific roles, such as sound designers, dialogue editors, foley editors and so on. The games industry hadn't started doing this in 1995, so there were practically no specific roles as "Sound Designer" when I began looking for a way in.

Luckily I met with a like-minded chap called Pat Phelan who was the audio manager at Gremlin Interactive. He was as forward-thinking as I was, and I had a job!

From films like Goldeneye to games such as Burnout Paradise, Sweetman has worked his audio magic on some cool projects.

IGN AU: What are the challenges of working with sound in an active soundscape where you don't have complete control?

Chris Sweetman: It can be a real challenge, but we do have control over most aspects of audio playback.

One of the biggest challenges is creating space so that every sound can be heard properly, especially in first-person shooters when you potentially have 16 characters all firing their weapons at the same time! We use many tools at our disposal to make sure that when this does happen -- and it will -- you are not faced with a wall of cacophonous sound!

One of my processes is to look at how to create harmony very early on in the development cycle by making sure that three main focus areas are all designed with that in mind. In the case of Brink, these were Weapons, Explosions & Foley:

Weapons:
I made sure that each faction would have different weapon sounds even if they were using a re-skinned version of the same weapon. Each faction's weapons are designed as different timbres (kind of like voices in a choir). This means that when you hear lots of weapons being fired at the same time in the game, your chances of it sounding harmonious are greatly increased.

Explosions:
We designed the explosions so they were different timbres to the weapons, which in turn means that they don't occupy the same sonic space as the weapons.

Foley:
Each character class has its own set of footsteps and Foley. This even changes depending on how much clothing you are wearing, again meaning that the chances of the sonic landscape cluttering up are limited.

It's like betting on a horse race while knowing which horses will cross the line first.

IGN AU: In a game like Brink, where there are multiple class-types, is an effort made to make each one sound distinctive? Could a trained-ear tell the difference between classes on the battlefield just by listening?

Chris Sweetman: For Brink I decided to let the dynamic mission auto-chatter handle most of that work. For instance, the Medic is the only one who will hear people shouting for a Medic, while an Engineer is the only class who hears "I'm stuck on a mine."

Aside from that, each body type has different sets of footsteps, so it is possible to tell what size of character is coming around that corner up ahead.

Your footsteps betray you, Luke. Oh, sorry, n00bpwner69.

IGN AU: One aspect of sound creation that is generally overlooked is Foley work. How much detail did you go into to try and achieve realistic sounding movement for all the physical abilities at the player's disposal? Are these sounds distinguishable enough to know whether someone is sliding towards you or vaulting over your head?

Chris Sweetman: I'm really glad you guys picked up on this, as I wholeheartedly agree.

For me Foley is the undiscovered country in video games. It can be so powerful in aiding the player experience, but sadly it's never given the attention it deserves in most titles. Foley was a massive focus for me on Brink; we spent three days at Shepperton Studio recording every footstep, every gun rattle, and every slide, so that we could really go to town on the Foley detailing. Each of our three different body types has its own set of footsteps, scuffs, stops and starts on every surface in the game.

Weapon Foley was another big focus, with each weapon having its own set of weapon movement. -- for example, the sounds change depending on if you are walking or using the SMART system. We also have sets of sounds for mantling, wall jumps, climbing and sliding.

I've taken an unusual approach with particular sounds in Brink. One such example would be the sliding, where you can actually hear the slide further away than you would normally. I felt it was an important gameplay choice, and made sure that even from a fair distance away you would hear it.

So yes, you can definitely hear if someone has just vaulted over your head or is sliding around a corner!

IGN AU: Your game features different ranges of sound depending on how you're shooting and how close you are to another player's gunfire. How did you achieve this and do you feel it will make the sound effects stand out significantly?

Chris Sweetman: The major difference with Brink is that we change the sound when aiming down the sights and focus more on the mechanical aspect of the weapon. The reason for this is twofold: first, it really allows the player to focus on the target without a huge weapon sound creating a distraction, and second, it also permits me to play with the style aspect of the weapon sounds. The iron sights are designed specifically for each weapon, and sit underneath the main weapon sound. When the player moves into iron sights, we lower the normal weapon sound in volume and add the mechanical layer in real-time.

In regards to the other player's gunfire, we use varying stages of distance from the player to play back different sound content. There are three distinct stages - near, mid and far - and the engine crossfades these samples depending on how far the other player is away from you. The great thing about this method is that it fills out your background ambience with an interactive battle. Every weapon sound you hear is what is happening on the battlefield right now!

On top of that, we also filter the ambience of each player through our auto chatter system, so when you get a message from another player over the radio, the soundscape at their location can be heard in the background.

Auto chatter sounds awesome, but can it also filter out foul-mouthed 12 year olds? Now that would be valuable tech.

IGN AU: How do you achieve clarity of sound when you have up to 16 players in an area, all running, jumping, speaking and firing at the same time?

Chris Sweetman: We decided early on that achieving sonic space was the most important thing for us to solve, and our Audio Programmer Simon Price and myself spent months on working out different systems to cull sounds.

Eventually we settled on various solutions. One of the big ones was Simon creating our version of HDR (High Dynamic Range) audio, which at its most basic is an automatic mixing system that scans the volume of a WAV file and decides what the playback volume should be based on the distance from the player.

Alongside HDR we also have a snapshot mixer system which ducks groups of sounds dependent on game states that we set up. For instance, when one of the commanders is speaking to the player about pertinent game information, we duck all other sounds in the world by about 30% to allow him to be heard.

IGN AU: What aspect of your work on Brink are you most proud of? What should we strain our ears to hear when the game comes out?

Chris Sweetman: I'm most proud of the Foley and sonic clarity that we have in Brink. You can hear every sound -- and when you have massive battles raging that's a real bonus!

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If you ever felt being earth-bound really put a damper on your homicidal rampages in GTA, and if you have a taste for irony, this if for you. This one has nothing to do with photorealism ? it?s about unadulterated fun. PC Gamer brought to light a combination of two mods that will allow you to both look like Superman and fly through Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 4. Getting the mods to work is a bit of a hassle, but the results speak for themselves. Check out these two videos:

Hey Superman, better lay off the sauce. You may be more powerful than a locomotive, but the people you crash into are just human. Who do you think you are, Hancock?

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These are dark days for PlayStation 3 gamers. The PlayStation Network has been out of commission since Wednesday evening, and ever since then, access to the PSN and the PlayStation Store has been cut off. That means that you can't download titles, sync your Trophies, or even play online multiplayer.

Can you imagine how gamers who this week eagerly purchased Portal 2, Mortal Kombat or SOCOM 4 feel? But beyond that, what about the rest of us?

In a sense, outages like this should be expected with the PlayStation Network. It's a free service (unlike Xbox Live) and as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. But this lack of a financial stake for customers seems to equate to the lackadaisical response from Sony itself.

Other than inexcusably vague, inconsistent and brief updates from the PlayStation Blog, tangible information about what's going on with the PlayStation Network is non-existent. There seems to have been no attempt to answer the fundamental questions millions of PlayStation 3 users have right now, such as what the problem is and when the problem will be fixed. Heck, as IGN's News Director Jim Reilly brought up on his Twitter account, Sony hasn't even answered a question as fundamental as if users' credit card information has been compromised.

All Sony has said since Wednesday is that the PlayStation Network is down, that the company knows the problem was external to the Network itself, and that Sony is investigating the cause.

All of that's great, but what are they going to do to make it up to us?

Yes, the PlayStation Network is free. But when I purchased my PlayStation 3, part of what I paid for was access to the PSN. Without it, the PS3 can do about as much as my NES can -- play games that I put into it (and, in the PS3's case, games already downloaded to it). I'm not a huge fan of online multiplayer, but I do like accessing leaderboards, syncing my Trophies and checking up on my friends. I barely have the will to play PS3 without its online functionality, and I know there are millions of gamers that feel the same.

And moreover, unlike the PSN, time isn't free. Many gamers use the weekend (especially a long weekend like this one) to chip away at their backlogs. As I mentioned earlier, three huge games came out this week and all have a varying focus on online play. This means that none of these games can be played in the way they were intended, and that's ignoring all the games that came before them that people also can't play.

You're an army of one in SOCOM 4 this weekend.

Heck, can you imagine the small developers who have released games recently on the PSN, losing precious money with each PSN-less hour that goes by? I can only imagine that there are more than a few developers flipping out over this outage out there.

I understand that an attack external to PSN isn't Sony's fault. But the reasons for this extended outage haven't been well-communicated to the PlayStation 3 community whatsoever, and frankly, keeping the PSN offline for an extended period of time while an ongoing investigation is conducted into what happened bodes poorly for the extent of the attack and the damage it may have caused.

So what do you think Sony should do to make this extended outage up to PlayStation 3 gamers? Should you be able to log-on to the PSN when it's back up with a few extra dollars in your PS Store wallet? Should you get a free PSN game, PSone Classic or PlayStation Mini? Or should nothing be done at all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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