Armchair Diplomat

OK, I'll admit it, I came

Hot off the LucasArts Twitter feed today, most likely in conjunction with some variety of GDC announcement, comes the news that The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge will be undergoing the Special Edition treatment that we all drooled over previously.  There ain’t much to it, but here’s the word for word:

Oh yeah, another thing: LeChucks Revenge: Special Edition is official! New puzzles, new enemies, new hair!

-LucasArtsGames, just forewarning my wallet

So that’s another $15 or so that I’ll be giving LucasArts unquestioningly.

But there’s something that has me confused.  Maybe it’s just a poor choice of wording, but this tweet would appear to suggest that new puzzle elements are going to be included into the game, something I don’t think I’d be so keen on.  Part of the beauty of the original Monkey Islnds: Special Edition was that it was a straight port, preserving the original game for a newer generation.

They’ve also posted up a (somewhat blurry) photo of the game’s new cover art, feel free to ogle.  I guess we can all feel assured that in that photo we can clearly spy a (somewhat blurry) beard on Guybrush.

Update: LucasArts have also opened the game’s official website, which sports some great looking in-game screenshots.

Also also, apparently I’m not the only person to start bitching and moaning raising genuine concern about the “new puzzles” phrase.  Since the announcement above they’ve fielded a flurry of questions and decided to put all of us at ease:

[New puzzles?] … not new for Monkey 2, I just know how all of you reacted to the first Special Editons Hair

Good to hear, because any change to Monkey Island 2 would be like callously beating my childhood with a frozen cactus.

… Metaphorically I mean.

… Probably.

Mad Moxxi, the ... titular character

Amongst it’s many other accomplishments (well, depending who you ask I guess), Gears of War 2 can be lauded for the popularisation of the “Horde” style of multiplayer.  Allowing players to team up against a superior-numbered AI controlled enemy force managed to hit a real chord with shooter fans everywhere, and has since spawned many similar modes amongst the FPS genre.

Borderlands: Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot puts it’s hand up and declares “us too”, by adding a completely new area based upon wave-style arena combat.

As the story goes, Mad Moxxi (the Underdome’s well-endowed, carnival-themed owner) has made her way through three husbands, all of whom didn’t seem to survive the relationship.  In the search for a suitable suitor for her fourth wedlock, Moxxi has constructed the Underdome, three huge arenas based upon different areas of Pandora.  There adventurers pit themselves against hordes of enemies, while the crowd watches on in the happy knowledge that, win or lose, violence will be plentiful.

The back-story sounds entertaining enough, but truth be told there’s surprisingly little Mad Moxxi to be had in Underdome.  After her introduction, she’s basically consigned to her role as announcer.  And although much of her commentary is amusing enough, it can grow old quite quickly for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Read more

Welcome to our new running series where we keep you, our beloved readers, up to date with the games that are due out in Australia in the coming week.

Our inaugural edition is brought to you by the Gamer’s Buddy range of couch protectors.  They’re manufactured from durable PVC and come in a range of sizes so that your couch can be protected from any unintentional spillage or seepage that may occur when you’re playing, say, survival horror games or something from the Dead or Alive series.

Anywho, on with the releases!

• Final Fantasy XIII (March 9 – 360 / PS3)
• Tony Hawk: RIDE (March 10 – 360 / PS3 / Wii)
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (March 11 – PS3)
• Boot Camp Academy (March 11 – Wii)
• Chronicles of Mystery – Curse of the Ancient Temple (March 11 – DS)
• Sonic Classic Collection (March 11 – DS)
• Welcome to Violence* box set (March 11 – Wii)
• Yakuza 3 (March 11 – PS3)

Also due out on March 11 is the Black Wii.  Say that aloud and out of context and see what kind of looks you get!  It’s the same as a regular Wii, just black, and has been available in overseas markets for a few months.  I hear EB Games are offering some VERY fair deals on trading in your operationally identical white Wii towards the purchase too.

And if that sounds like a good idea, then I’ve got this tiger warding rock you might be interested in buying too.

* Nobody tell Michael Atkinson, kthx

Announced in the hush of early morning here in Oz, but broadcast loudly to the lands of the awake is the oft-discussed news of Portal 2’s release! Set for October 26 in the USA, it’s been a weird ride just getting to this point.

Layer upon layer of clues have been left over the last 6 months or so, but it all started jumping again with a patch that altered the ending of the original game, which came out on March 3 from Steam.

Good to know Chelle assumes the ‘Party Escort Submission Position’, because who knows how awkward that could be if she opened up a portal in whatever freaky robot drone just started dragging her off. After the patch, came the press release:

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.

Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007’s Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.

Randomly underlined things! Which spell out… dreattmannh0nee.

Then there are the bizarre ASCII files and clues which can be found over at Kotaku. There was some seriously hard work done to just get and decode this information, which includes pictures of GLaDOS and what looks like still shots from inside Aperture Science. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, some clever cookie has provided some deciphering. There’s also some interesting tidbits from Aperture Science’s founder Cave Johnson. My favourite?

“…remind you that Aperture Science is built on three pillars. Pillar one: Science without results is just witchcraft. Pillar two: Get results or you’re fired. Pillar three: if you suspect a coworker of bin’ a witch, report them immediately. I cannot stress that enough. Witchcraft will not be tolerated.”

And then there’s the April cover of GameInformer. I feel like I should be saying ‘Good news everyone!’, but we never did discover if the cake was indeed a lie. Also, that looks suspiciously like a reformed GLaDOS…

WITCHCRAFT!

Jesus face-palm

I know I use the term “facepalm” a lot, but there’s really no other way succinct way to sum up the ongoing debate over R18+ games in Australia.

The newest meeting of hand and forehead comes courtesy of a story published today over at news.com.au, which revealed that everybody’s favourite state attorney Michael Atkinson has donated large sums of money to the Australian Council on Children and the Media.

The Australian Council on Children and the Media, also known as Young Media Australia, are the fun-loving sorts who claimed earlier in the week that video games are more closely linked to youth crime than smoking is to lung cancer.  Even though their own written submission states the connection is tenuous, unlikely to cause harm in any case and is based on a study that examined all media, not just games.

For what it’s worth though, this same group also believes that Bananas in Pyjamas is too violent for small children to watch because slapstick comedy is bad, m’kay?  Atkinson has made donations (reportedly in excess of $30,000) to the council’s “Know Before You Go” campaign, which seeks to inform parents of the dangers of letting their children watch G-rated movies like Finding Nemo*, Alvin and the Chipmunks** and The Tale of Desperaux.

What’s a little odd about all this is it’s usually groups like the Council giving money to politicians, not the other way around.  I don’t think it’s anything we need to be too concerned about, it’s just interesting that the two stupidest things ever said in this debate are linked by a five-figure donation.

* They also warn against letting small chilren watch the G-rated Ponyo.  I’m smelling a bias against cute animated fish here…

** The Council and I are actually in agreement on this one, though likely not for the same reasons.

Surprisingly few rats!

Let me preface this review: I’m not really a fan of this kind of game. In fact, frequent readers have probably heard/read about my flailing hatred of the RPG genre in general. Having watched Matt and various others walk through mindnumbingly boring landscapes, interact with dull voiced peasants while constantly being ’surprise attacked’ by various rats/mutant rats while searching for armour made out of a glass, for what seems like days on end, I have nursed extreme prejudice against all games of their ilk. I’ve tried playing them, but I can never get more than a couple of hours past character creation.

The one exception was Knights of the Old Republic, and even then I ended up quitting half way through because it was easier to watch Matt play than slog through leveling up and grinding. All I wanted to know was who the main character was, whether Bastilla was good or not and if you could hook up with Carth. This lead to my standard game playing trick of ’set it to baby-easy, play through, auto level up’. Weak as piss, right?

That’s probably what kills me. These games are meant to be immersing you in an interactive storyline that compels you to keep playing to find out what happens next. Nothing is more tedious to me than three seconds of storyline followed by twelve hours of collecting the hides from seventeen rats to make a rat blanket to warm a peasant who turns out to be a rat god with acne. Fucking … I don’t know. I just can’t justify putting in time into such a fruitless exercise. How does this help the story? It doesn’t, so I’m not interested. But obviously that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. I’ve seen Matt play Elder Scrolls: Morrowind for thirteen hours straight, with very little idea of what is going on around him, so it must be engaging on some level. There’s some kind of ‘hook’ that allows days worth of time to be squandered on finding every candle in the map and putting it in your house.*

Finally, with Dragon Age: Origins, I think I’ve found what that hook is.

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Every copy of Imagine Horsez is doing a completely different kind of damage

Just when you thought this debate couldn’t get any fucking sillier…

First it was gamers being more dangerous than outlaw bikie gangs.  That was pretty hard to believe, right?  Well steel yourselves, because (a drumroll please) apparently the link between gaming and youth crime is even stronger than the link between smoking and lung cancer.

The abovementioned claim is made by Dr Wayne Warburton of the Council on Children and the Media in this news story aired on Channel 10 last night after he addressed a parliamentary inquiry on street violence.  He quotes a study claiming that “the average child in their childhood sees 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence”.  From this, we’re apparently meant to make the leap that games are more strongly linked to youth crime than smoking is to lung cancer.

If you go digging for a bit and pull out the Council on Children and the Media’s actual submission to the inquiry, however, you’ll find that the “gaming is worse than smoking claim” comes from one study done by an Amercian researcher that refers to violence in all media (TV, movies and music), not just games.  In fact pretty much every source Council references in their submission talks about television or the media as a whole, not games.

We also find that the claim about children “seeing 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence” is from another American study which refers specifically to television, not games.

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Before you ask, no, he doesn't kill people using origami

Low Level Spoiler Alert: While Heavy Rain can be quite easily ruined by someone telling you about plot elements before you get the chance to experience them first-hand, it’s almost impossible to give you my impressions without stating the situations to which they apply.  To this end, this review will bring up a few in-game situations characters find themselves in, but I’ll keep the character names and motives to a bare minimum.

I’ve found myself a little confounded at how best to explain Heavy Rain to anyone who hasn’t played it.  Quantic Dream’s new “interactive drama” for the PlayStation 3 manages to confound a great many base assumptions about games and on what level we judge them.  It’s probably easier to rule out a few things that Heavy Rain isn’t, rather than try to explain what it is.  It’s not an adventure game, as most problems that the game presents to you need little in the way of working out.  It’s not, in the traditional sense, an interactive movie, as characters rely on the player for both physical and psychological guidance.  It’s certainly not as revolutionary or as innovative as Quantic Dream head David Cage would have you believe, either.

Nor is it, as Sony head Jack Tretton may have you believe, completely unique style of game.  To better prepare myself with David Cage’s body of work before trying Heavy Rain, I purchased and completed Indigo Prophecy (also known as Farenheit) a few weeks ago to get myself in the mindset.  For anyone who wants to find out if they’d like Heavy Rain without the hefty price tag, I’d suggest doing the same.  For those of you who have played it, Heavy Rain is easily described as Farenheit HD.

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I just wanted to make this joke before anyone else did.  In other, less hilarious news, your original PS3s asplode…

Pfft, hoverboards don't work on lava ... unless you got POWA!

BioWare announced the next DLC pack coming to Mass Effect 2 today, and after long weeks of speculation it looks as if we’ll finally be getting our hover-tank on.  The “Firewalker” content package will include five new missions for you to explore, all utilising your new hard-fightin’, hard-drinkin’ hovercraft.  According to the updated Cerberus Network page:

The Hammerhead is a heavy assault vehicle that hovers over the battlefield at up to 120 kilometers per hour and features a guided missile system ensuring accuracy even during aggressive maneuvering.

I’m not certain what kind of “aggressive maneuvering” the new content hopes to contain, but if I understand this correctly you could be doing doughnuts in a Seven-Eleven carpark and still blow up your target with this baby.  Heck, Sherpard could be sans-pantsing the local cops out the window at the same time if he wanted to.

This might, however, just be a way of reassuring owners of Mass Effect 1, for whom “aggressive maneuvering” could entail driving upward at an 85 degree angle while trying to swivel the Mako’s turret.

Whatever’s in store, the Firewalker pack is due out late March, and will be free to those with Cerberus Network subscriptions.  Nice.  Head on over to the Cerberus page for official info and some more pretty pictures.