GameSpot UK's editors are in Japan getting ready for the Tokyo Games Show along with the rest of the global GameSpot team. Guy Cocker has been out and about with his video camera to give you a closer look at his journey, the city of Tokyo and all the things he can find to point a camera at! Take a look at Guy's blog for all the Tokyo videos you can handle!

You can also find all our coverage of the Tokyo Game Show here.

Last week, GameSpot UK visited Italy to take a look at System 3's Ferrari Challenge. We played the latest build on PlayStation 3 and DS, toured the Ferrari museum and took a spin in some of the cars from the game. Here are some of my photos, and you can check out the PS3 and DS previews on the site.

UPDATE: Now with video footage of driving ace Bruno Senna playing the game on PlayStation 3.

Guy's out in Italy at Ferrari's Mugello test circuit having a world-first look at Ferrari Challenge for DS and PS3, from System 3.

The licence was only announced at Leipzig, so we've not had much time to form an opinion about the game, but it's actually looking rather good.

Guy' taken a few minutes off from being thrown round the track at ludicrous speeds in meatspace and in the virtual world, and has managed to write down his impressions and even send back a video... so check out his PS3 hands-on, his DS preview, and his video interview with one of the game's producers.

And this time, it's enhanced (if you want it).

The latest GameSpot UK Podcast is now live and working properly. This week, Guy, Emma and I are joined by Drew, video producer extraordinaire and member of the intrepid Leipzig crew, and talk about the highs reached at Leipzig, the lows plumbed by David Cameron's speech-writing team and the general violent apathy that met the resurrection of the N-Gage brand... and more, including a competition that could see you on an trip to London, courtesy of 505 games, to bowl with the GSUK team and other UK gaming luminaries.

Oh yes. You get to roll with the best. What more could you possibly want? Let us know here or on the podcast page and we will do our best to bring it to you.

As ever, you can just listen to it on the page (here), or subscribe through iTunes. Also, as a special bonus for iTunes users there's a new enchanced version of the podcast, featuring links and images to go along with the normal audio content... just choose the enhanced option next time you're searching through the directory (but be warned, this might not work straight away, as it takes a bit longer to process than the normal audio file... but there shouldn't be that much of a delay).

Enjoy.

Woolworths has sent us an announcement about a PlayStation 3 price cut for the Bank Holiday weekend - it's reduced the price by £50 to £375 - and the console is bundled with two free games, two free Blu-Ray DVDs and an additional controller. This bundle can be picked up both in stores and online.

Given that the Xbox 360 Elite comes out today and the price of a Xbox 360 Pro falls to £249 (£179 for the version without hard drive), it's looking like a cracking weekend to buy a console!

And for once you can thank the great British summer. According to Woolies, "This summer's indifferent weather has meant shoppers turning to indoor pursuits instead of going to the beach or a barbecue. As a result games sales at Woolworths have hit record levels for this time of year."

The PlayStation 3 price reduction ends on Tuesday according to Woolworths' press office.

Check out some Wii-mote swinging Table Tennis action, straight from the Leipzig show floor.

This is the first of the office tours we'll be filming, and this should give you a good idea of where we do our work. If you'd like to see anything in particular in the next episode, then please give us a shout.

In September of 2005, something changed. A 'disease', for want of a better word, started spreading across World of Warcraft servers across the world after the introduction of a new high-end monster in a recently created zone. This rapidly became news, and was reported as such by sites such as BBC News, among others. While this wasn't the first time such an event had been reported by news sites (As a quick search reminded me of the now-infamous Sims Guinea Pig Incident), it was the first that I remember being reported as news for the event itself, rather than due to the upset and protest it sparked.

Now, two years on, things have moved a step further: according to the BBC (again), a paper has been published in medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases analysing the outbreak and seeing what can be learned.

For those that don't remember the incident, it went like this: Blizzard introduced the new 10-player dungeon of Zul'Gurub, for players who had reached the then-level-cap of 60, with an all-new version of Hakkar (a massive winged god) awaiting those who cleared the rest of the instance (or at least most of it). One of his abilities was to infect players in his immediate vicinity with a virtual disease called corrupted blood, which caused significant damage to the high-level players attempting to defeat him, and spreading from player to player in the group.

Some clever chap (assuming it was a chap) realised that there was some fun to be had here (it would appear) on seeing that his pet became infected with this disease, and promptly dismissed it still infected. The important thing to note here is that at the time you could freely dismiss and recall pets, and their state would not change in the meantime -- they would essentially vanish, and go into suspended animation, to then reappear when resummoned. The player in question then teleported himself back to the Orc capital city of Orgrimmar on the server of Archimonde, went to a crowded area, and summoned his freshly infected pet. At this point, all hell broke loose. The disease, which was meant to be a serious inconvenience for some of the game's toughest players, was suddenly infecting many of the weakest, and killing them in the space of seconds. The streets of cities were littered with corpses, and many of those resurrecting themselves were instantly reinfected by those who had survived, and by various non-player chracters who had turned into carriers of the disease, by virtue of being infectable but much, much harder to kill than players.

The reason this is of interest to the author of the piece from LID is that they feel that the way that WoW players reacted offered valuable insight into the way that actual massive disease outbreaks can or could be handled by the populace. Some players acted selflessly, trying to heal others or cure the disease (as certain classes have the ability to remove such effects from others), others just ran away, and others made it their mission to keep the infection alive and continue the mayhem.

The report's author, researcher Professor Nina Fefferman from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: "Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game."

According to the BBC, she did also acknowledge that the fact it was just a game and the people in question were not risking any harm to anything other than their in-game bank balances, but felt it was still as valuable a tool as we have for assessing some of the possible reactions to a major real-life outbreak.

It was also noted that the human factor is the least understood of disease-transmission variables, but also the hardest to study given that you can hardly infect a city full of people just to observe the ensuing panic... but that it is, in theory, possible to do so virtually.

I shall try and track down the paper itself, but even the BBC's precis on it gives food for thought. Do you think that such virtual studies could be useful? Do you think it would be ethical to induce changes in gameworlds for real-life research, without informing participants, as part of the game experience?