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War has been declared on lag, and it’s about goddamn time. After the resounding success of the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on war, we can expect to be free of the menace of lag any day now.We received the first glimpse of our impending liberation at this year’s GDC, where every street corner in a 50 block radius was manned by men wearing confidence inspiring white labcoats and bearing END LAG NOW signs. A quick look at the endlagnow.org website revealed an enlightened, altruistic movement to free us from the scourge of latency. Oh, and increase our awareness of Bigfoot’s Lag and Latency Reduction technology, which will take the form of a networky cardy thing that will eliminate lag with the power of unicorn farts and children’s dreams.

But that’s not all. This week they’ve unveiled the latest, greatest tool in the war against our invisible enemy, the LagMeter. This free utility tracks not only the usual statistics like ping time and FPS, but provides us with a “Lags per Second” statistic, which sounds much less intimidating than things like “packet loss” even though we have no idea what it’s actually measuring.

We took it for a spin on one of our office machines, revealing that hey, our office network kicks whole bunches of ass. In the interests of science, however, we decided to test the software by playing Enemy Territory with a dozen porn torrents running in the background. This caused the little bars to go up, which is probably bad. Disappointingly, this didn’t cause the meter to return a “Hey, knock off all that porning” message.

It did, however, summon some of 1UP’s tech people from their secret warrens, who then interrogated us about what we were using all that bandwidth for. We told them that it was okay because, after all, it was for research. We were likewise reassured that the multiple stab wounds to our torsos were okay, as they’re just part of their job.

Look for further updates in the future when we actually get our hands on LLR cards. Our editors will be testing them alongside more traditional lag-reduction technology like tinfoil hats, pennies under our tongues, and little glow in the dark plastic statues of Jesus on top of our monitors.

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