Team Gaming Journalists Have Incompetent Hairlips

This week’s update will be our final one for the month of Movember.  That’s right, the end is almost nigh for our epic fundraising and awareness raising journey.  Gaming Journalists Have Incompetent Hairlips have raised $715 at the time of writing and with just one day to go there’s still a little time to help us get that total higher.

All funds raised go to a very good cause.  The Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and Beyondblue, the national depression initiative, both put the money to very good use.  You can donate to the team, donate to Matt or donate directly to me.  Thanks and much respect to those who have already donated – you’ve done a very good thing.

Since technically this is still supposed to be a gaming site, here’s some gaming content.  The following games are due in stores this week:

• Nail’d (Movember 30, PC)
• Death Spank: Thongs of Virtue (Movember 30, PC / Mac)
• Super Meat Boy (Movember 30, PC)
• Swords and Soldiers (December 1, PC / Mac)
• Buzz! Ultimate Music Quiz (December 2, PSP)
• Donkey Kong Country Returns (December 2, Wii)
• Pac Man Party (December 2, Wii)
• Rune Factory 3: A Harvest Moon (December 2, DS)
• Splatterhouse (December 2, 360 / PS3)
• Sports Island Freedom (December 2, 360)
• Sly Cooper Collection (December 2, PS3)
• Zumba Fitness (December 2, 360)
• Blazing Souls: Accelerate (December 3, PSP)
• Dance Dance Revolution (December 3, PS3)
• Karaoke Revolution: Glee (December 3, Wii)
• Knights in the Nightmare (December 3, PSP)
• Mario vs Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem (December 3, DS)
• NBA Jam (December 3, 360 / PS3)
• Prince of Persia Trilogy (December 3, PS3)

This week’s Australian releases are brought to you by the ongoing struggle between Canada and Australia in the Movember fundraising stakes.

Australians responded well to our call to action last week, donating about $3.5 million in the past week to take our national total to $10,714,292 at the time of writing.  These Roughriders aren’t to be underestimated though – Canadians donated almost as much as Australians this week, taking their total to $12,044,788 at the time of writing.  Australia has closed the gap by almost $40,000 from last week but we’ve still got a ways to go.

It’s also been a good week for our team, Gaming Journalists Have Incompetent Hairlips, as we’ve passed the $500 mark.  Yay us!  If you want to aid in our quest for glory you can donate to me, donate to Matt or donate to the team as a whole if you’re crippled by indecision and love us all equally.

All the money goes to a truly excellent cause – supporting men’s health in areas such as prostate cancer and depression.

If you can find time away from watching the Movember fundraising race you might want to play some games.  The following titles are due on Australian shelves (real, virtual or otherwise) this week:

• Poker Night at the Inventory (Movember 22, PC – FINALLY.  Review soon)
• Crossboard 7 (Movember 25, 360)
• CSI: Fatal Conspiracy (Movember 25, 360 / PC / PS3 / Wii)
• Dance Evolution (Movember 25, 360)
• Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth (Movember 25, DS)
• Doctor Who: Return to Earth (Movember 25, Wii)
• Epic Mickey (Movember 25, Wii)
• Gran Turismo 5 (Movember 25, PS3)
• Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom (Movember 25, 360 / PS3)
• Michael Jackson: The Experience (Movember 25, DS / PSP / Wii)
• Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga (Movember 25, Wii)
• Football Manager 2011 (Movember 26, PSP)
• Megamind: Mega Team Unite (Movember 26, Wii)
• Megamind: The Defender (Movember 26, DS / PSP)
• Megamind: Ultimate Showdown (Movember 26, 360 / PS3)
• MX vs ATV Reflex (Movember 26, PC)
• Penguins of Madagascar (Movember 26, DS)
• Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare (Movember 26, 360 / PS3)
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (Movember 26, Wii)
• Tron Evolution (Movember 26, 360 / DS / PS3 / Wii)

This week’s award for game least likely to actually be epic goes to Epic Mickey, by the way.  See y’all next week when I’ll be just about ready to shave this moustache off and leave upper lip hair to the everyday heroes like Matt.  Ciao!

The OnLive MicroConsole(TM) adapter and controller

Living in Australia is a wonderful thing – it’s sunny, we’re allowed to start drinking, smoking, gambling and driving all on the one day and we get to ride kangaroos to work.

There are some things we miss out on though.  Bands take forever to get around to touring here and our video game ratings system is a little dodgy.

Cloud gaming is something else we miss out on thanks to our shoddy internet speeds*.  Americans have been using the OnLive service since March 2009 to play games on their PCs and Macs using nothing but their internet connections – all the processing is done by remote servers and the output is just streamed to your screen meaning the game doesn’t care what video card you have or how many RAMs may or may not be jammed into your motherboard.

The company is set to launch its next product at the start of December - a little black box that connects to your TV and lets you play games without even needing a computer or console.  The list of games isn’t huge and high-speed internet is obviously still a prerequisite but at only US$99** the price is going to be right for a lot of people.

Time will tell if the concept takes off and obviously it’ll be years before Australia has the internet speeds to even contemplate such a service.  On top of that, the country as a whole might have to do away with the idea of a data usage quota considering that OnLive apparently sucks down over 3gig of bandwidth an hour.  But those trifiling points aside, I’m thinking and a “console” smaller than its controller is going to raise more than a few eyebrows at the the companies who’ve madly been slapping words like “slim” on the end of their console names in recent years.

* The relative infancy of the industry obviously has something to do with it too, but I wouldn’t want to miss a chance at getting the boot into Australian interweb services

** That’s about $17 Australian now, yeah?

Only live people signed this petition ... it's official!

Remember more than six months ago when the Australian people definitively told the government that we want an R18+ rating for video games?  Well … yeah, they’re still ignoring us.  I guess things like feigning indignation at banks for raising interest rates are more important.

Which is a pity because there’s yet more proof that a hell of a lot of people care a hell of a lot about this issue.  Video game retailer Game and PALGN ran an in-store petition earlier this year that drew even more signatures than the 2005 online petition to ditch the Howard government’s grossly unpopular Workchoices legislation.  No mean feat given this petition involved actual people turning up to an actual store and using an actual pen instead of just clicking a box online.

Of course, all those signatures can be ignored because they’re not from an independent source, right?  Nope, they can’t be – or at least they shouldn’t be.  Super-credible bean-counters BDO have just finished auditing the results and they’ve confirmed that 89,210 people really did sign the petition.

Congratulations to Game and PALGN on this fantastic result and for their great work on this issue.  The earliest we’ll know if we’re getting anywhere will be the Standing Committee of Attourneys-General meeting on December 10th, and while I don’t think anybody’s holding their breath just yet, hopefully this will get us one step closer to an intelligent resolution.  Click here to learn more about what Game and PALGN are doing on this issue and see a copy of the official audit results from BDO.

It's alive this week!

This week’s Australian new releases list is brought to you by the number 1,368,926.

Why a million and a third and a bit, you ask?  It’s because that’s how far Australia is behind Canada in the Movember fundraising stakes.  In just two weeks 119,947 Australian mo-bros and mo-sistas have raised $7,267,467.  13,000 fewer Canadians have managed to raise $8,636,393 though.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that’s a shitload of money that’s being put towards a very good cause, supporting men’s health issues such as prostate cancer and depression.  But nobody said we couldn’t play for bragging rights as well as a good cause, right?  Australia is in second place right now, a few million ahead of the UK and there’s daylight back to the USA, Ireland and New Zealand.

There’s still a good few weeks left in Movember and with your help Australia could still claim the top spot.  You can get the dual fuzzy feelings of charity and patriotism.  You can donate to Matt, you can donate to me or you can donate direct to our team of crack gaming journalists if you don’t want to play favourites.  Or you could donate to someone else, I guess.  Just remember, our nation’s pride is at stake!

When you’ve done that I guess it’d be OK for you to go to a games store and pick up one of the following titles that should be arriving this week:

• Sesame Street: Cookie’s Counting Carnival (Movember 17, DS / PC / Wii)
• Sesame Street: Elmo’s A to Zoo Adventure (Movember 17, DS / PC / Wii)
• Adrenalin Misfits (Movember 18, 360)
• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Movember 18, 360 / PS / PS3)
• Beyblade Metal Fight (Movember 18, DS)
• Biggest Loser Challenge (Movember 18, Wii)
• Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout (Movember 18, 360)
• Brunswick Pro Bowling (Movember 18, 360)
• Dance Central, Dance Masters, Dance Paradise (Movember 18, 360)
• Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos (Movember 18, PS3)
• Disney All Star Party Games (Movember 18, Wii)
• EA Sports Active 2.0 (Movember 18, 360 / PS3 / Wii)
• Fighters Uncaged (Movember 18, 360)
• Get Fit With Mel B (Movember 18, PS3)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Movember 18, 360 / DS / PC / PS3 / Wii)
• Kinectimals, Kinect Sports, Kinect Joy Ride (Movember 18, 360)
• Motion Sports (Movember 18, 360)
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Movember 18, 360 / PC / PS3 / Wii)
• Sonic Free Riders (Movember 18, 360)
• We Sing: Robbie Williams (Movember 18, Wii)
• Your Shape: Fitness Evolved (Movember 18, 360)
• Dora’s Birthday Adventure (Movember 19, DS / Wii)
• Go Diego’s Build and Rescue (Movember 19, DS)
• Ys – The Oath in Felghana (Movember 19, PSP)

Holy long lists Batman!  As you might have gathered from the veritable landslide of casual/fitness titles the Kinect is also due to land in Australian stores on the 18th and a good chunk of the Xbox 360 titles on this list are Kinect-only.  Play safe kids!

Come on sweetie, we'll bludgeon him to death with a shovel together

It’s been four years since we initially wandered the Willamette Parkview Mall in a dress, guzzling orange juice while gleefully slapping hockey pucks into crowds of zombies, and in four years the world of Dead Rising hasn’t changed dramatically.  Although the zombie infection in Willamette was just the first in a series of large-scale outbreaks, the world has rolled with the punches and simply absorbed the undead threat as a part of everyday life.

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is our first introduction to the series’ new protagonist Chuck Greene and his daughter Katey.  The pair are fleeing a zombie infested Las Vegas, trying to reach a safe distance before the military cordons off the surrounding area.  Katey has been infected by a zombie bite and now requires a dose of the suppressant drug Zombrex every twelve hours to keep her turning.  If the military manages to close of the area, Katey will be screened and taken away from Chuck as a potential zombie threat.

The escape plan hits a snag when they stop at the small town of Still Creek (population 758) to refuel and someone steals their truck.  This not only leaves Chuck stranded, but also robs him of the supply of Zombrex he’s accumulated.  With the military closing in Chuck has twelve hours to find a way out of the zombie populated Still Creek, while making sure Katey gets her next dose.

(more…)

Write protect tabs, the original DRM

Remember tape? You know, that cutting edge media format that played music? Come on you know, before we became entrenched in the land of handheld gigabyte warehouses? Tapes were the beginning of piracy. We all remember the awful VHS piracy warnings on rental videos, but it was the audio cassette that really started it all. As a child every piece of music I owned was pirated, from my brother or my father or a friend; it was “taped” from the original vinyl or taped from another tape. We didn’t burn a copy we taped one, it was all very innocent, in fact I had no idea that what I was doing was in fact a nefarious and illegal activity.

I may be teetering on the edge of glibness with my loaded statements regarding the triviality of piracy; certainly the prevalence of piracy has skyrocketed in tandem with the ease at which digital data is copied. I got my first PC right on the lip of a breaking wave caused by the Doom (the 1993 one) revolution. I was given a copy of the game, freshly zipped onto six 1.44 inch floppies, from a friend; without a second thought I installed it and started playing, and it was great. That was the first of many games that were copied, installed and played without even considering that what I was doing was wrong, or even illegal. The idea that data could be stolen through duplication was so foreign to me because just like music, data is intangible and therefore in a very real sense it doesn’t exist, at least not in a “holding in my hand” sort of way that a thirteen year old understands.

(more…)

Bearded Black Mage courtesy of vanjamrgan.blogspot.com

This week’s Australian new release list is brought to you by the pathetic excuses for moustaches that Matt and I are now sporting.

That’s right – we look like we flunked out of Facial Hair High School but it’s all for a good cause.  We’re raising funds and awareness to support men’s health because, as we discussed last week, men are a bit crap when it comes to things like going to the doctor to get things checked out.  Apparently a lot of us are scared of a hospital visit or are just a bit too embarrassed to talk about our health problems with qualified medical professionals… which seems a little silly and trivial when you consider the risks we face by ignoring problems like prostate cancer, depression and heart disease.

So far our team of intrepid gaming journalists has raised $180 in support of the cause.  Track the progress Matt and I are making on our personal pages or donate to our team, Gaming Journalists Have Incompetent Hairlips.  Don’t forget that pity for our sad, laughable facial hair growing efforts is a perfectly valid motivation for donating.

As an afterthought to this rant, the following titles are due in Australian stores this week:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops (Movember 9, 360 / DS / PC / PS3 / Wii)
• Time Crisis Razing Storm (Movember 9, PS3)
• Fist of the Northstar (Movember 11, 360 / PS3)
• Monopoly Streets (Movember 11, 360)
• Move the Fight (Movember 11, PS3)
• Sonic Colours (Movember 11, DS / Wii)
• The Sims 3 (Movember 11, Wii)
• Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2 (Movember 11, PC / Wii)

Of course, we stress that the above are Australian release dates and therefore vague as all get-out and subject to error margins of up to six months or more.  Call of Duty: Black Ops receives this week’s “This is the game we’re most confident is actually going to be on shelves” award though.

Also, for those eagerly awaiting its release, Telltale are now confirming that Poker Night at the Inventory will be released some time in November.  Dunno about you guys but I’m warming up my ICM calculator in anticipation …

NFS: Hot Pursuit promises hot cars pursuing each other. Nice.

The pendulum of driving game responsibility has swung again – Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is due to hit shelves in a few weeks and for the first time in years we’re back to a proper street racing theme.  The demo version is out now and since Matt went to the trouble of downloading it I couldn’t resist taking it for a spin.

The story that the demo hints at is as preposterous as it is thin - the city of Seacrest has become a street racing mecca and in response the police force have kitted themselves out with Bugatti Veyrons and other such high-end automotive porn.  Still, a healthy disregard for any kind of proper story in these games really just means less C-grade acting so I’m chalking this up as a positive.  I’m also going to ignore the unimaginative title (which the series has used before).

The demo lets you drive one race each as the cops and the racers.  The racing course is pretty straightforward, just get yourself across the line first, and it’s pure arcade hilarity.  That’s right folks, we’re talking recharging nitrous bars, shortcuts, banging soundtracks and loads of powerslides.  Brakes aren’t there to slow you down for corners, they’re just there to help you initiate the all important powerslides.  This required a quick period of realigning for my F1-addled brain but I soon had it worked out.

(more…)

Bearded Ro-bro Cop courtesy of vanjamrgan.blogspot.com

This week’s new releases are brought to you by the naked chins Matt and I are sporting.

That’s right, it’s the first of Movember and we’re on an epic quest to raise money for men’s health, which we’re going to do by growing terrible facial hair.  Men in Australia have a lower life expectancy than women (78, vs 83 for women), one in eight of us will experience depression in our lifetime and more than 3300 men will die of prostate cancer in 2010 alone.  Men suffer higher death rates than women across all of the 10 leading causes of death in Australia and the worst part is that lack of awareness is one of the biggest factors.  When it comes down to it, we suck at going to our doctors for help.

Which is why* Matt and I, along with a team of intrepid gaming journalists from publications like PC Powerplay, Critical Damage and Hyper are growing moustaches for men’s health this month.  We’ve shaved off our usual facial hair (to my wife’s dismay) and we’re inviting you all to follow our progress, laugh and cry with us and, most importantly donate and raise awareness about men’s health issues.  Money raised goes to the Movember Foundation.

You can donate to our team, Game Journalists Have Incompetent Hairlips, or if you just despise the idea of people working as a team, you can also donate straight to myself or Matt.

Of course if you’d rather spend money on games instead of donating to this incredibly worthy cause this week, you might find the following titles on a shelf near you:

• Goldeneye 007 (Movember 3, Wii)
• James Bond 007: Blood Stone (Movember 3, 360 / PC / PS3)
• Battle Chess (Movember 4, DS / PSP / Wii)
• Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2 (Movember 3, 360 / PS3)

* Y’all thought it was because our wives wouldn’t let us grow moustaches without an excuse, right?