Following on from the trial and jailing of one Youtube prankster, others associated with the same channel have now been jailed for their part in similar pranks.

The group of men, part of the Youtube prankster group Trollstation, staged numerous ‘pranks’ including fake ‘robberies’ that one member of the group has already been jailed for at the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Gallery.

CCTV footage has been released of the prank from the National Portrait Gallery where on July 5th 2015 shortly after 3:30pm five men burst into the building with covered faces, yelling and screaming at nearby patrons before leaving with prop framed artworks to give the impression that there had been a public armed robbery of the Gallery. The same stunt was pulled off at the Tate as well later in the same day.

Four of the five men were arrested on the day of the incident and were charged with public order offences; pleading guilty to an offence under Section 4 Public Order Act 1986, namely causing fear and provocation of violence. They were all jailed today for their parts.

Daniel Raymond Marcus Jarvis, 27 of Gravesend, Kent was jailed for 20 weeks for his role in the National Portrait Gallery incident and eight weeks for his involvement in the Tate Gallery offence. Both will run concurrently.

Endrit Ferizolli, 20 of , Brent was jailed for 16 weeks for his role in the National Portrait Gallery incident and eight weeks for his involvement in the Tate Gallery offence. Both will run concurrently at a Youth Offending Institute.

Ebenezer Mensah from SE15 was jailed for 18 weeks for his role in the National Portrait Gallery incident and eight weeks for his involvement in the Tate Gallery offence. Both will run concurrently.

Helder Gomes, 23, of Lambeth was jailed for 18 weeks for his role in the National Portrait Gallery incident and eight weeks for his involvement in the Tate Gallery offence. Both will run concurrently.

Trollstation is just one of many ‘prankster’ channels that have recently become popularised upon Youtube, with channels seemingly competing to gain viewers with ever more daring stunts. While some know where to draw the line, a worrying number of stories similar to this one have been surfacing recently of pranks that could cause worry or distress, with a few extending to much worse matters.

The town of Lawrston was once a peaceful place to live. Until the summoning tore it apart. Risen from the depths of the utmost evil the ancient celestial monster, Bob, has possessed the town. Using his new army, Bob, plans to turn all of humanity into his evil servants. All that stands between Bob and his plans is one man, cranky from a double shift and with no evening plans. That man is Ernie, the sales manager for Meat N’ Things.

As you can probably tell by the games intro, this is another in the long line of zombie games on the market, so what makes this different… Well, lets take a lookie shall we?

Ernie Vs. Evil is, at it’s core, a shooter defense game, in some ways similar to something like Plant’s Vs. Zombies (seeing a theme here), but in many important ways, VERY different!

Goodnight Games (‘ello chaps, do you ever sleep?) have gone with simplisity in Ernie Vs Evil, that makes it the perfect game for a quick blast, OR a prolonged bathroom mobile phone game session… c’mon, this is where we really play mobile phone games, anyone who says they don’t, reads encyclopedias and won’t be reading this review anyway.

What stands out straight away is the control system, or as I found, the lack of one, this game is as simple as clicking on the screen to shoot and at the level you want to shoot at. All the while, various enemies come at you from three levels and in waves of difficulty.

One of the interesting touchs though is the weapon upgrade system, there are more upgrades than i thought there would be and you can get some really cool things going on during the frantic gameplay, plus being able to selct different load outs changes up how the game plays a little, not much, but as you can see in the pic below, it can get crazy.

The game looks gorgeous, as you can see in the trailer and screenshots, and the number of enemy types is incredibly good.  From cute little bats, to evil zombie cheer leaders that take far too many shots to kill (maybe the goodnight team had cheer leader issues in school, I hear thats a thing)

The levels are quick and can get very frantic, but you do feel like you are defending your base as they happen.

We had to borrow an iPhone to get this review done (tech issues and the Dragon was loathe to let me use hers), but we are still loving the game here at geek towers and would highly reccomend it!

A gnawingly good 8 out of 10! Would bite again!

Ernie Vs. Evil is available on iTunes and Google Play right now!

Recently a lot of companies have been getting stricter with players found cheating in their online multiplayer games. For example, after some well-publicized exploits within the new game The Division Ubisoft not only implemented some new detection methods but upped their ‘first offense’ penalty while keeping the ‘second offense’ the same as it had always been – perma-ban.

Now Blizzard have come out saying that anyone found cheating in their new game Overwatch will get a permanent ban as well. Difference is, Blizzard aren’t messing around and have said they will do this upon a player’s first offense.

To be totally clear the quote from the post about cheating on the Overwatch forums says that Blizzard will slap this ban upon any player “found to be cheating—or using hacks, bots, or third-party software that provides any sort of unfair advantage”. It then goes on to inform players about how they can report cheating as well as the guidelines for doing so.

Blizzard have a small history of this, having tackled cheaters in Diablo the same way back in 2012 and also banned botters in Hearthstone during 2014; although that occasion saw the bans only being temporary ones.

Check out the topic here for the full details. And make sure you behave in game when Overwatch releases on May 24th. Wouldn’t want to see any of you banned for not playing fair. 😉

In a surprise move for an age in which release dates are constantly being pushed back, Titanfall 2 has been announced to be releasing months before its previously estimated release date of before Match 2017.

While that usually means we’d be looking at maybe an early 2017 release window, GameSpot has seen an earnings report from the publisher EA in which the release date has been narrowed down to be launched during the third fiscal quarter of the year. In other words, around October to December.

This probably means that for their big sequel EA are aiming to get Titanfall 2 out just around Christmas towards the end of that quarter. They’ve another game coming out too that is similar, with Battlefield 1 having a release date of October 21st and Call of Duty’s latest incarnation Infinite Warfare from rival Activision releasing on November 4th. EA will probably want to avoid releasing too near either for the risk of losing sales due to players having to choose just one shooter genre game at the time.

Of course, this is far from a confirmation of any release date, but it’s a fair bet we’ll see Titanfall 2 being advertised as a gift for this Christmas, and it’ll be available on both Xbox One and PS4 along with PC so it’s hitting the three major platforms as well.

Hopefully it’ll be just as attention grabbing as the first game, but maybe have a little more longevity.

So, the sixth installment to Sid Meier’s Civilization series has just been announced, and unusually for a game that’s just been announced we know quite a bit about how the game’s going to work. That’s mainly because the announcement also contained the release date which is actually not that far away: October 21st 2016. It’s even already up on Steam for pre-purchase, along with a few bundles.

It’s going to be the same civilization builder type game, but with some key differences. Firstly the way cities work in Civ 6 will follow the same ‘unstacking’ rule that happened to units in Civ 5; instead of having all buildings in a city ‘stacked’ atop each other they’ll be spread out across the city’s territory via districts – the bigger the city, the more districts it’ll be able to support up to 12. This means that cities will now be made more specialised from the beginning. Districts will have specialisations that are affected by certain terrains, such as mountains giving religious and scientific bonuses to those particular districts. Map pins are also being introduced so that you’re able to plan out what you want your next district to be once your city has grown that much.

Because of this, sieges in cities have changed too, allowing for enemies to sack and loot districts outside of the city without taking the heavily defended city centre, weakening the empire it belongs to. Of course, if the centre is taken it once again flips ownership to the conquering army.

Combat is also getting an overhaul, with previously consider ‘military units’ such as catapults now being assigned as ‘support units’ that can stack onto the same tile as ‘military units’ to stop battlefields being so congested. Military units will also have an added layer of customisation now and units of the same type can be combined into a unit, further reducing the numbers on the board.

Research now also gains some bonuses depending on where cities are located, with a city on the coast having a boost to their researching of Sailing for example over land-locked cities. This means that your actions and playstyle compliment just how fast your chosen civilization will be researching and developing some technologies, to better tie it into the game and not have it feel as divorced from proceedings as it previously did.

Other civ leaders will now have their own agendas, tied to how their historical counterparts acted in real life. For example some actions will make some other leaders like you, while it might anger others. In this way it will be possible to potentially set them against each other as opposed to just against you in the game. For once the AI will attack the AI! This adherence to the historical counterparts doesn’t mean that they won’t act counter to that though; after all, Civilization’s greatest in-joke is Nuclear Gandhi and Firaxis have confirmed that they’ve not forgotten about that amusing little bug-come-feature of the series (although they didn’t go into details obviously).

Finally, one of the biggest complaints about Civ 5 was that multiplayer sessions could take a while. You’d often have games running over several sessions and Let’s Players could literally make a series out of a single 5/6-player session. Now Firaxis have said they’re going to introduce some pre-made multiplayer sessions that will let you “cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.” They’ll also be available as single-player games too. I see an opportunity here ripe for the Steam Workshop developers.

Of course, there’s more to find out yet but given that it’s just been announced, this is quite the treasure trove of info. I’ll leave you now with the game’s trailer as we await more news.