Don't look in his eyes, he can smell fear

Panic in the streets today, as a recent study undertaken by the University of Rochester has found that people who play first-person shooters make decisions up to 25% faster than people who play more family orientated titles.

The study took a test group of 18-25 year olds and split them into two groups.  One group clocked 50 hours of fragging in Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 2, while the other group spent an equal amount of time playing The Sims 2.  After gaming, participants were given a series of audio and visual perceptual tests.  While the ratio of correct answers was around the same, participants in the action gaming groups came to their conclusions consistently faster than their simulation gaming peers.

… researchers found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn’t just make them better at playing video games, but improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities …

-University of Rochester, confirming our fears

Note the results of this study too.  It’s not that action gamers answered more questions correctly than other gamers, just that they were quicker in making up their minds.  This effectively means that if an action gamer makes a bad decision, he makes it far faster than a mere Joe 12-pack could.

And if that’s not enough reason to be shitting your pants in terror, this is the same university which claimed in 2007 that playing action video games sharpens gamers eyesight by ~20%.  So not only are gamers more prone to violence (something which incidentally they’re completely desensitized to) but they can decide to be violent 25% faster and use their hawk-like eyes to carry the violent act out.

It’s the clear the only response governments around the world can now take is to quietly mobilise their respective military forces, and scatter Cheetos in front of key staging areas with the hopes of delaying the hyper-aware yet hopelessly snack food addicted hordes.

How can people continue to ignore the warning signs?  Science is telling us to remain ever vigilant against this menace, friends!  Or at least try and limit your gaming to titles like Pony Friends 2 and Imagine! Babbies!

Is Bill Pullman in any video games? Because he should be ...

Here’s a quick wrap of some of the stories you might have missed in our absence – because we know you’re all super-loyal readers and wouldn’t bother going anywhere else for your gaming news fix while we’re away!

Firstly, Australia had a shambles of an election.  It was being reported just before the election that Stephen Conroy’s Insane Internet Filter(TM) had been killed and a Green balance of power in the Senate means it’s unlikely to come back any time soon.  Let’s all have three belated cheers for sanity prevailing.

The owners of Mana Bar in Brisbane have announced that they’re brining their video-games-and-booze concept to Sydney, Melbourne and beyond.  Expect our first ever bar review when they open in Melbourne, which we’re told will be before the end for 2010.

Gamers will get to drive the virtual version of the Korean Grand Prix track before the real Formula 1 drivers even get a crack at it thanks to F1: 2010.  That excites F1 nerds like me, even if it does nothing for the rest of you.

Telltale are releasing a single-player poker game for less than a $5NL buyin and nobody’s really sure why.  But since I’m a poker nerd when I’m not being an F1 nerd, expect a review shortly where I’ll try my best not to use phrases like “unbalanced three-bet range”.

Finally, Gearbox have announced at PAX that they’ve taken over the reigns of Duke Nukem Forever, scheduling it’s release for 2011 and effectively ruining the gaming industry’s longest running joke.  Oh well, I guess there’s still Half-Life 2: Episode 3.

I knew Koreans loved their Starcraft a lot but … well, the picture probably speaks for itself:

Thanks to my mate Dave, who snapped this photo on his way to Sonisphere in the UK – I’m jealous!

Your Kinect unit will travel to you in style, international gamer!

Microsoft Australia today delivered the official pricing plans for their upcoming motion controller Kinect (nee Natal).  EB Games have had the RRP estimate at $199 AU for a while now, and this announcement now makes that number gospel.  Still no release date available, but as the press release makes a big deal of talking about Christmas trees, so you can probably assume November/December sometime.

The standalone Kinect bundle will include the Kinect Adventures game, which is good news considering I’d have expected to pay a lot more for a game that lets you go anywhere you want.

America have lead the pricing announcements, stating that Kinect will retail over there for $150 US.   Which I guess leaves only one question for us non-US gamers to ponder:

Why the fuck is it so expensive for us?

Apparently Microsoft care so much about the release of Kinect later this year that they’re going to be shipping each Kinect unit in it’s very own air-conditioned shipping container covered in solid gold.  Or at least I assume that’s what they’re doing, because how else do we explain the ~$30AU price hike that seems to have attached itself to each Kinect somewhere over the Pacific Ocean?

I guess we should be used to it by now.  After all, we are the continent that’s expected to pay ~150% of a game’s original US RRP.  I suppose at the very least we can be thankful that we’re not the UK, who’ve been given the stunningly inflated RRP price of 130GBP, the equivalent of around $200 US.

So with prices this artificially inflated consumers better take heed of Xbox AU’s David McLean advice, and “will definitely want to pre-order at their retailer of choice to secure their Kinect”.  Unless of course we discover there is no region locking for the Kinect, in which case I’m sure we can always find less lavish ways to ship ourselves a unit from the States.

Check out the full announcement over at InsiderX, and don’t forget to pre-order! We don’t want to all gouge ourselves stupid at once and cause a shortage!

Grab Fractal for $5!

… TO A BIGGER OFFICE.  Yes, the groovy team at Cipher Prime are making their way into a bigger and better building, and to offset the cost of packing, shipping and hiring lazy teamsters they’re having themselves a fundraiser sale.  From now through until the end of July you can get your hands on both the award winning Auditorium and the recently released Fractal for just $5 apiece.

Having played both games (Fractal review coming soon, I promise I’ll get around to it), I can tell you this is a great deal for puzzle game fans.

People picking up the games during the sale will also recieve one song off the soundtrack off each game: “Iterate!” from Fractal and “Autumn” from Auditorium.  If you already own both titles, you can buy each track for a dollar to help raise funds.

It’s a worthy cause, readers, so if you’re yet to try out either game then head over to the Cipher Prime site!

Screenshot from The Ultima 6 Project

I’ve said it once and I’ll doubtless say it a lot more times: blessed are the dedicated nerds.  Ultima 6 – The False Prophet was my first “holy shit this is so cool” gaming experience growing up.  Unfortunately it’s an experience that has been lost to us for many years with the demise of DOS prompts and PC speaker sound.

Team Archon have come to the rescue of nostalgic geeks like myself though with The Ultima 6 Project.  For the past four years they’ve been working on a mod for Dungeon Siege 1 that will recreate the original Ultima 6 experience in 3D.  Version 1.0 has just been released, 20 years after the original game came to our screens.

Visit The Ultima 6 Project website for more information.  Obviously I’m pretty excited about this, more info as soon as I manage to track down a copy of Dungeon Siege.

OK, so this level doesn't look so difficult, but it gets more complicated

CONTEST NOW CLOSED, WINNER DRAWN – Congratulations to Twitter follower @Aranchine!

Thanks to Jesper Rudberg and the crew (well, the one other guy) at Doctor Entertainment, we’ve got a copy of their new PC puzzler title Puzzle Dimension to give away to one of our readers!

Puzzle Dimension bills itself as a puzzle game that will help train your spatial awareness, which is a little difficult to explain but makes sense when you see the game in action.  Players roll a golden orb around a floating platform trying to collect all available sunflowers, but platforms become increasingly complex and three dimensional as the game progresses.

I’m currently working my way through the game for review, the verdict will probably be up in the coming week.

Until then, if you’d like to score yourself a free copy of Puzzle Dimension then get yourself onto Twitter and post the following!

Hey @ACDiplomat I’d love a free copy of #PuzzleDimension! Follow and RT to enter! http://bitly.net/cHonGF

Then sit back and cross your fingers!  The winner will be drawn midday on Tuesday 6th of July, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).  I’ll announce the winner on site, and also on our Twitter account.

Contest Rules and Conditions:

1. Open to entrants worldwide, one entry per person.
2. Entrants must retweet the above message and be following the @ACDiplomat Twitter account to be eligible.
3. Winner will be selected at random.
   
4. Entrants must own a Steam account to redeem game code.

Best of luck everyone, and thanks to the guys at Doctor Entertainment.  You can check out more details on Puzzle Dimension over at the Steam store.

So like all good games writers stuck at home this E3, I’ve been keeping my depression at bay by following the broadcasts of the major industry press conferences. 3D is once again under the spotlight, and the seemingly desperate race to catch up with motion control has come to a head with the release dates for both Kinect and Move slated this year.

But it hasn’t been all sunshine and flowers, with serious concerns arising about exactly who the big companies are looking to market themselves to. So I’ve selected a few memorable quotes from most of the major presentations that I thought summed up the entire event:

Coming soon: Kinect Corridors. You can go ANYWHERE.

Wow, look at the water! We can go anywhere!

-Shannon and Abigail demonstrating Kinect Adventures, Microsoft Xbox Conference

Two women jump and sway to steer a two-man raft down a river-rapids level, and this was the wittiest banter they could come up with? While I understand that the people on stage must be under tremendous pressure to make sure a product looks fun and technically proficient, this line was obviously supposed to reinforce what Microsoft had written as part of their Kinect press release.

The statement “we can go anywhere” especially smacks of PR, as every gamer knows that a game’s world is only as big as it’s designers make it. You can go anywhere you like in Grand Theft Auto IV too … provided it’s not inside most buildings or underwater.

(more…)

Art on loan (and "slightly" altered) from museumofchildhood.org.uk

We’ve been hearing a lot about hardcore and casual gamers this week and, for once, not just in forum flame wars. The defining announcements coming out of E3 have primarily been catering towards the family market. Microsoft’s controller-less Kinect, Playstation’s motion controller Move and the sans-glasses 3D of the Nintendo 3DS are all products geared with an “everybody plays” approach.

Which has lead, perhaps understandably, to a lot of backlash from gamers and reporters alike. There’s been no question in anyone’s mind that Nintendo made far and away the best presentation this year, followed by Sony and then Microsoft in a far-distant third. While both the 3DS and the Move both demonstrated some interesting and innovative applications for core gamers, viewers could only sit bewildered as Kinect showed off a series of upgraded Wii-style games and training regimes. Playing jump-rope with a tiger, running up and down on the spot, air-steering a cart, while the tech might be somewhat impressive it was content for casual gamers and if you weren’t a fan of first-person shooters then it was really the only thing on show.

Which has reignited the time-tested argument over core and casual gaming once again. But before we all start screaming “fucking casuals” at our E3 recaps once again, maybe we should stop and think about exactly how casual all of our games have become.

A couple of months back Moose discovered his old Nintendo Entertainment System covered in a layer of dust in storage and, Moose being Moose, decided to come and clutter up my ever shrinking lounge-room with yet another console.  He was interested to see if, as a gamer, I’d retained my ability to play retro games or if I’d continually adapted my playing style to whatever platform was currently in favour.  To this end he made me play several games he’d had bundled up with the console: Solstice, Terminator 2 and The Adventures of Bayou Billy, just to name a few.

Long story short, I didn’t fare so well.  Over time the ability to save your game’s progress has become integral to me, and to play games now without it feels like a strange and unusual punishment.  (more…)

Kitten pictures: One of Wire.VG's many aggregator innovations

So if you read us often, you’ll realise that we’re no news site.  When I first pitched the site to Mark I was always adamant that Armchair Diplomat didn’t need to be just another game blog, respewing news that we had no stake in just for the sake of attention.  We like to think of ourselves as a gaming opinion blog, and if there’s something going on in the industry that we genuinely want to talk about, that’s when we decide to make a post.  In this fashion, we very much hope to keep ourselves off GJAIF‘s radar.

But up-to-date news is still a very big commodity in the games industry, even if half of it seems to centre around rewording press releases and baseless rumour.  Everyone has their favourite site to check, but if you want to find out what’s really going on then you probably need to be monitoring many gaming news sites at once.

To this end, the founder of Negative Gamer NukeZilla and all round pretty cool guy John Kershaw (often better known as Wardrox) has started a gaming news aggregator site called Wire.VG.  As I explained it to a friend upon checking it out: it’s much like Reddit.Gaming except Wardrox rules it with an iron fist … so kind of exactly like Reddit.Gaming.  The key difference here is Wire.VG is not a user submitted aggregator.  It simply plumbs the RSS depths of the major players of gaming news, and delivers it to you in one easy to browse list.

The reasoning behind Wire.VG’s creation is a growing need amongst the community for news that’s free from spam and superfluous re-blogging.  I’m not entirely convinced that Wire will be able to live up to it’s aspiration of only delivering the source of news, as the big sites tend to source-link to each other before bothering with the actual source, but spam and re-blogging it can certainly take care of.

Simply put, it’s the complete RSS feed you couldn’t be bothered building for yourself, and now possibly one of the best and most concise ways of keeping abreast of gaming news.

At current the site is in it’s beta stages, so if you’d like to give it a try then you’ll need to apply for a beta code.  If accepted, then not onlu will it be up to you to assist with reporting any bugs and suggesting ways the service could be improved, but you’ll also have access the the site’s promotion features and play an active role in what Wire.VG features.  We’re not part of the feed itself, but our good friends at Gamer Limit are and I’m sure they’d appreciate any votes you sling their way.

No word as to when the site will be opened wide to everyone, but when it happens we’ll be sure to let you know!  Until then, check out Wire.VG, and if you dig it then apply for your own beta code.