Well I acquired them all legally, you can be sure of that ...

“Red keycard?  Shit, where am I supposed to find that?  I haven’t shot anything in at least 30 seconds and my ctrl finger is getting itchy … bugger it: i-d-k-f-a and I’m on my way!”

I’d reckon anyone old enough to recognise that internal monologue had the exact same discussion with themselves at some point.  Something dawned on me recently that made me think about it again: the relationship between games and cheating has changed a hell of a lot since I first started playing.

Once upon a time it seemed pretty much every game had cheats built into it – all you had to do was find the right keystroke combination, probably from the cheats and codes pages of your favourite gaming magazine.

The thing that really made me start thinking about this was the recent blowup over Starcraft II players being banned from the game for life for using hacks and trainers in the game’s single-player campaign mode and Blizzard’s threats of legal action against some of the people responsible for developing them.

I’ll get back to that later but in the meantime, what’s changed?  At what point did we decide that, actually, we don’t like cheats any more?

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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.

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.

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This was Guillermo's favourite dog

While we could be fooled into thinking the above quote was in response to pretty much everything that’s been said about video games by Australian politicians in the past two years, Oscar-nominated director and all round Pretty Cool Guy Guillermo del Toro actually said the above in defense of video games as an art form:

Video games are an art form and anyone saying differently is a little out of touch because they are a narrative art form

He continues, stating that he’s a big fan of titles such as Halo and Shadow of the Colossus.  We’ll choose to ignore the fact that he’s justified his opinion by saying ‘it’s an art form because it’s an art form’, ignore the fact that his comments are likely prompted by his upcoming but so far mysterious involvement with THQ and instead focus on the important message: people who don’t like video games are dumb-dumbs because a cool rich guy with a beard said so.  Brilliant!

Full story on 1Up, and selected other quotes from the actual Q&A session over at the Portland Mercury.

Not thinking about white bears was also kind of difficult

Seems we’re going through a period of high activity in the high powered field of phsychological research on video game usage.  Last week, Matt filled us in on a University of Rochester study that found action games can make you more decisive.  Not to be outdone, researchers from Ohio State University and Central Michigan University have just released their own study on the effects of violent video gaming.

Apparently, playing violent video games can make you continue to have aggressive feelings for up to 24 hours after you turn the game off, provided that you’re instructed to continue thinking about the game.  Don’t worry though ladies, you’re immune.  It only works on men.

Interestingly, the authors conclude that the results from their sample group will be applicable to the general population because “violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner”.  Interesting.  Whatever we might think of the findings of the study, it seems like it was executed with some degree of scientific rigor but “probably” is apparently OK to apply it to the entire population.  Hmm.

The summary article released by the publisher (haven’t been able to track down the full text as of yet) doesn’t say anything about how strong the effects are or how they compare to playing sports, watching the evening news, getting two-outed on the river or being raised by wolves.  Which means for all we know this could be a storm in a great big proverbial teacup.  But, naturally, nobody will fucking care because there’s an “OMG video games are part of the cancer that is killing kids!” headline in it and that’s all that matters.

The even sadder part is that some people point to this as yet another reason to censor games.  I think they’re missing the point entirely and they should go back and re-read the article because it seems to me that it’s not the games themselves that are to blame – it’s the post-game ”rumination” that we need to be banning.  Lose the rumination and no more problem.

Shit people, do I have to solve all the world’s problems for you?!?

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!

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.

The villain in the new ME2 DLC, we presume

Yep, it seems Bioware are conspiring to make sure that Mass Effect 2 never leaves our front page.  The company announced the next DLC release for the game this week, titled “Overlord”.

The premise is that Shepard has to go investigate a Cerberus base that’s gone silent.  Bioware use the word “mysteriously” in that description, by the way, but I think the mystery has gone for any regular players of the game: it’s undoubtedly gone silent because someone there did something monumentally stupid, resulting in genetically engineered life forms / robots / biotics / robo-space ponies running wild and killing everybody.

Just to prove me right, this time it’s robots.  A rogue VI is doing some nasty stuff and only you can shut it down.  We’re being promised five new level areas and two new achievements for a cost of 560 MS / Bioware points, the same price as the Kasumi package.  Which means I’ll have to buy even more Bioware points, which annoys the hell out of me, but I’ll do it because I’m obviously a fanboy who doesn’t know better.

Expect a June 2010 release date and visit the official page for more info and pics.