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?

I guess a lot of things have changed.  Maybe we used to be OK with cheats because, as Matt postulated a little while back, games used to be a fuck of a lot harder.  Sometimes it was either cheat or tear your hair out and never finish the game – or at least it was for people like me, who were especially crap at the kinds of games we had back then.  This was doubly relevant with the old console games that may not have even let you save your game.  All of that has changed now – save games and checkpoints mean you can do the hard bits over and over and over again until you get them right and if the missus/Mum/real life calls you away for dinner it’s not the end of the world.  And if you’ve run short of health in your FPS all you need to do is duck behind cover and wait for the red mist to dissipate – no more being screwed because you’ve already used all the health packs in the level.

You alright, Tychus good buddy?

Maybe we were a bit more frivolous and carefree as well.  Sometimes you wanted to play a game seriously and sometimes you just wanted to blow the living shit out of as many demons as possible with steaming hot balls of plasma without having to bother with pesky things like dying or starting the level again.  Sometimes gaming these days feels more like Very Serious Business.  I know there were times playing a game like Rainbox Six: Vegas where I would’ve liked to do the same thing, just fire up the hotel lobby level and run rampant with bullets flying everywhere and little thought for the consequences.  I never actually went looking for cheats for the game at the time though and now that I look there are third party hacks but seemingly no built-in codes.

Once upon a time when games were predominantly single-player it was only your own experience that was effected and if you wanted to downgrade your sense of achievement by turning on god mode for the hard bits there was nobody to judge you but yourself and any mates who may or may not have been in the room.  These days everything is about achievements and gamer scores e-peen and I heaven forbid someone inflate that fraudulently.  Again, they’re Very Serious Business.

Of course, multiplayer games have become huge now and I can fully understand the need to prevent cheating in a multiplayer environment.  There needs to be a level playing field, after all, especially with reputations e-peen on the line as it so often is.

Pfft, we've beaten Kerrigan befo ... wait, is that Lu Bu in the background?!?

But back in the day it seemed that every game had cheat codes right out of the box.  It was almost like a developer wouldn’t consider releasing a game without them, they were as essential as a main menu screen and probably even more important than the end-game sequence.  These days a few games have them built in but it seems like every game (on PC, at least) has a bunch of third-party hacks available for it.  How did this end up happening?  Did developers make the decision, for whatever reason, that gamers didn’t want cheats any more and the third-party hacks materialised to fill the void or did developers decide that since someone is going to hack the game anyway they may as well just save their time and leave it to the third parties?  Was it the chicken or the egg?

Funnily enough, this thought might actually help us make sense of the Starcraft II example.  Y’see Blizzard actually built cheat codes into the base single-player game, complete with their trademark amusing references to things like Firefly, The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings.  They obviously decided they were in the “provide it rather than leave it to third parties” camp and it was those found using the third party hacks that got banned.

Blizzard have justified their actions by stating that the hacks, even if they were only used in single-player mode, may have had multiplayer functionality as well and that the cheat codes built into the game itself were safe to use.  When the case is put like that it sounds pretty reasonable and Blizzard have obviously chosen to send a very strong message not to fuck with their fancy new showpiece.  They were also up front about what they were and weren’t going to stand for when the game first came out.

But how many people understood that meant never being able to play a game you’ve paid for again, even offline?  To me that feels like going a step too far.

I’m very keen to hear what our readers think – both on Blizzard’s actions and the issue of cheats in general.  Did they go too far with the bans?  Are cheats in general something we just don’t do these days?  Have we outgrown them?  Comment away…

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.

Cops, on the other hand, need to stop racers.  The more racers you stop before the finish line the better.  The demo gives you spike strips and lets you call in road blocks to help you in your quest, mostly though it’s just about smacking into the racer cars enough times to deplete their health and knock the off the road.  It proves to be quite a bit of fun and the full game promises EMP cannons and helicopters as additions to the police arsenal.

Murcielagos for all!

The cars in the demo don’t feel quite as chuckable as NFS:Most Wanted, which I still hold as something of a benchmark for the genre.  There’s plenty of fun to be had though and there were only four cars included in the demo (the Nissan 370Z with and without a top, a Porsche Boxster, a BMW Z4 and a Crown Victoria cop car) so it’s possible there’s some more nimble models waiting in the full version.  Speaking of the full version there’s an impressive list of cars slated for it: Alfas, Lambos, four Aston Martins, the Audi R8, Koenigseggs, Paganis, Porsches, the McLaren F1, Godzilla, tuner favourites like the Subaru WRX and Mitubishi Lancer and of course the abovementioned Bugatti Veyron.  Jaguar and Maserati make the first appearance I can remember in a long time.  Much to my disappointment, there are still no Ferraris.

Development has been handled by Criterion.  I was never a particularly big fan of their Burnout series (outside of the hilarious party crash modes) but the early impressions of Hot Pursuit are very promising.  Their car crashing experience even seems to have been put to good use.  As I type Matt is laughing hysterically at some of the wipeouts he’s causing in the police chase mode.

One new feature is the Autolog system, where you can compare your times against your friends and leave taunting messages for them.  Seems inane to me but some people might get into it.

Long story short, I was expecting to ignore this title and continue grinding my way through F1:2010 for the forseeable future.  On the strength of this demo though I might actually feel the need to pick it up…

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is due in Australian stores on November 18, 2010.

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.

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.