Armchair Diplomat

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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I enjoy playing games on a higher difficulty modes, it’s one of my many flaws. I say flaws because it’s this self-same trait in my gaming that has me hurling abuse at the TV screen while my wife shakes her head and quietly facepalms.

It can be quite frustrating in many games, being pinged twice then killed by someone you never noticed who seems to have pinpoint accuracy across amazing range. And there are many titles that you can be justified in feeling that the the game doesn’t offer you enough reason to go through that frustration. But I think I’ve finally discovered the game that deserves this kind of playthrough the most.

The Halo series, to an extent, popularised the health-bar free first-person shooter. And while the mechanic works well, allowing a player unlimited health as long as they can use cover to catch their breath, it does lend itself to a certain kind of gameplay. Tanking.

I did it myself in almost every previous Halo incarnation. If you played on a regular difficulty setting, there wasn’t much to stop you to just bum-rushing every group of enemies, then melee-bashing them into submission the moment you got close enough. This is fantastic fun, undoubtably, but it does remove the sense of caution and tactics that you’d exercise in a game like, say, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.

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Even Letterman is getting tired of these

So it’s a slow news week.  Everyone in the upper echelons of gaming (with maybe the exception of already afflicted Jim Sterling) has currently come down with a case of swine flu after attending Penny Arcade Expo.  On top of this, overwhelming popularity has seen The Beatles: Rock Band sell out of almost every major video game outlet before poor little old me could snag a copy.

So I was wondering, what does everyone else resort to when they’ve run out of creativity for any given week.  Content tables need to be filled, we can’t just let our readers go back to actually playing games, can we?

Then it hit me.  LIST ARTICLES.  I can’t believe it took me so long to remember what you’re supposed to do when you start scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Now, gentle friends, don’t get me wrong, there are many fine examples of list articles done well.  You may even notice that for all my bitchy sarcasm I’m guilty of writing them myself (inb4 “hypocrite!”).  But I’ll give you a quick example of what my main beef is.  Open up a new tab for me, and wander along to http://digg.com/gaming.  Scroll down, and I can almost guarantee you that at least half of the articles stuck to the front page are “Top Ten x We All y” or “8 Reasons x y’s z With a Candlestick in the Dining Room”.

So rather than just keep recycling the same old topics, let’s try this one: Gaming’s Top Ten Kinds of Overused “Top 10″ Lists.

Shall we proceed?

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I found this image by googling fffuuuuuuuuuuu, which is also one of the phrases people have used to find our site. Who would've thunk it?

Okay, I rarely rant (don’t laugh). What the fuck is with tonight?

Every freaking game Matty and I try to play just will not work. And it’s a fairly even distribution of whose machine is the cause of lack of gameplay.

Matty came around after a bit of site work, and we hiked up to my place to play some gentlemanly games. We’ve been really keen to crack at Section 8 Beta, so we can review it… And a bit of DoW2. My xbox is still at his place (until the kindly return of his RRoD’d console), so it was a pc affair (even though, my pc, is secretly a mac in disguise, now with iMoustache and everything)

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Finally! "Real" proof!

I couldn’t believe my eyes this morning when I opened up the latest K-Mart catalogue, I was shocked beyond belief.

First of all, what the hell were those pamphlet people thinking?  Delivering to a “No Junk Mail” signed letterbox? And on a Sunday?  Something hardcore must be going down.

Then sure enough I was hit by yet a second surprise, a surprise so surprising, it managed to surprise attack my first surprise completely by surprise (and decimate it for critical damage!).

There was a listing for the PlayStation 3 Slim console in this catalogue!  No!  Really!  Take a look for yourself at the completely undoctored original catalogue that I “scanned” in to my computer!

Convincing, no?  Hot damn, that looks like one slim-ass console.

So you may have been reading around the web in only a hundred or so different places, rumours and “proof” of the PS3 Slim console.  It’s in production.  Contract have been signed.  It’s being announced soon!  Real soon!

You can even pre-order it now, if you’d like!

So we all know that the PlayStation 3 Slim is a real product, with real feelings, but we haven’t actually heard any official word from Sony themselves regarding it’s release.  But it’s being released really damn soon, like next Thursday, I heard, so why the secrecy on Sony’s part?  I can only assume it’s to avoid the havoc created by millions of old PlayStation 3 consoles simultaneously being flung out of windows and into the streets as soon as the announcement is made.

But we gamers want the details, right?  So using our top sources (asking weirded out strangers on a train), we’ve put together a comprehensive fact sheet of PS3 Slim details:

• PS3 Slim is thin.  Like, swizzle-stick thin.  No shit.
• This badass has not one, not two, but three God-damn Blu-Ray drives, God-damn.  Rays are so God-damn blue up in this sculpted Adonis of a console.
• Forget your 120gig model, this perfume-modelling beast crams 312gig into a hard drive the size of an gin soaked olive.
• It’s widely accepted that Duke Nukem Forever is being developed exclusively for the PS3 Slim, and unlike previous incarnations, Slim always has enough gum to go around.
• Sony is launching a PS3 Slim in a space probe, which will hopefully one day reach an alien civilisation and prove to them how much humanity would fuck them up at KillZone 2.
• PS3 Slim has more processing power than even God could count.  Does that make you uncomfortable?
• You can trade your old, outdated PlayStation 3 console in to your local EB Games or GameStop for a new PS3 Slim, provided you include at least 56 games (selected titles only).
• Slim takes interconnectivity to the next level, with lightning fast WiFi hi-fi Bluetooth 3.0+ connections for your HD-TV, PC, PSP and CC’s.  This allows you to game, watch television, download anime torrents and eat corn chips at the same time.  Thank almighty Xenu!
• PS3 Slim buyers can choose from a range of colours: Classic Black, Gloss Black, Flat Black, Pearlescent Black and limited edition Back In Black.
• Sony certainly won’t release the PS3 Slim for two weeks, then make it obsolete with the new PlayStation 3 “Muscle” console.  It’s BEEEEFIER®!  Oh my no.

Don’t forget to get your pre-orders in, kids!  Sure, we don’t know the price, what it looks like, or when it comes out, but why should that stop anyone?  And if you’ve got any more “known” facts about the PS3 Slim, be sure to let me know in the comments!

A GTA style game, based on Lock Stock?

Having just sat through the hilariously entertaining movie Crank, there’s something that’s been troubling me.

With the huge number of movie tie-in games, and their general level of mediocrity, how is it that we don’t yet have some games based on Jason Statham movies?

I mean seriously folks, take a look at the guy’s movie credits:

• The Transporter 1, 2 and 3
• Crank 1 and 2
• Snatch
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
• The Italian Job

Now if there isn’t a movie in there that can be made into a kick-ass video game, tell me a better movie!  The guy was in freaking Death Race, for christs sake.  He’s voice-acted a few game roles, but none of his movies has managed to make their way console-side.

Given that  Crank was essentially one long video game cutscene to begin with, think about it: freakishly combine the automobile mayhem of Grand Theft Auto, the sprinting flow of Mirror’s Edge and the melee combat of Zeno Clash and BAM you’ve got Crank: The Game.  Players would have to keep themselves running, speeding or fighting to stay alive while trying to track targets down all over a city.  And if you’re not convinced yet, ponder this: a video game version of Crank would be the one and only concept that I’ve heard of so far that could make use of Nintendo’s new Vitality Sensor!  Remind me to patent this idea so I can heartily sue someone later, a-la the Xbox Live case.

Or hell, be lazy, just MAKE the updated version of Death Race!

Until then, we’re stuck with cash-in releases like Revenge of the Fallen.  Oh me, oh my.

Photoshop lacked a "Drunken Blur" filter

Since the conception of video games, humanity has longed to nurture two vices at once through the application of drink gaming. Drink gaming, the act of playing games while proceeding to get royally smashed, is an activity steeped in tradition going back to when the very first Pong arcade unit was installed in a bar. Groups of punters would gather to offer up useful advice to the player, usually along the lines of “Up! No, down! Down! Up!” and “Cor, you’re getting KILLED on this one, boy”.

Luckily, many years later, consoles became prevalent and no-one has to experience the local publican’s brains trust ever again. In this post, I’d simply like to wax lyrical about the games that we’ve probably all enjoyed (I know I certainly have!) playing through the bottom of a vodka bottle.  Pour yourself a drink in preparation. Read more

The last few weeks, y’all, I’ve been playing some real ol’ school classics.

Classics, damn you!

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There are times where I’m proud to be an Australian, with our national sense of humour and mateship, and then there are times like these where I think we truly must be one of the most backward countries on earth.

He's going to hit your interwebs from his epic mount for critical damage

So under the new government proposed internet filter, supposedly to be installed at ISP level, further to not being able to access the most vanilla of porn we’re now also told that apparently we can’t see or purchase any game that’s not suitable for 15 year olds. Seriously? 15 year olds? To put this in perspective, apparently this means Australians shouldn’t play a game targeted for anyone older than HALF of the average gamer’s age.

This is a simple extention of the filter’s denial of anything that’s been “refused classification” under our archaic classification system. Since we lack an R18+ rating, this means any game over MA15+ will be blocked by our filter.

Still don’t see the fuss? Well think about this: Australia as a country has refused classification to MMPORPG games. So if the filter is installed, Australian players of World Of Warcraft can forget playing ever again as the filter bans access to servers.

The saddest thing of all, of course, is that the implementation of the clean feed doesn’t actually mean ANY of these things. As the filter can be sidestepped by any twelve year old with access to Google and the word “proxy”, I feel even more shame about our country that we’re idiot enough to install such an expensive waste of time and resources. In the middle of a global recession of all times.

The article is right, however, when they say this is going to cause backlash of even greater proportions. Hopefully if nothing else, this highlights the need for an R18+ rating in Australia.

Prepare for a waffling!

WARNING: This post contains Matt rabbiting on, some pixelated pretty pictures and not much else! Hope you didn’t get enough waffle at breakfast!

Once the staple of home PC entertainment, adventure games have seen a steady decline ever since the second half of the 90’s. This, perhaps, is one of the few bad points ever to come out of our increasing fascination with multiplayer gaming. It probably also suffers from the immediate 24 hour support line that we know and love as the internet. Gone are the days that if you hit a block with a game you’d just have to wrestle your brain around it (or worse, BUY A HINT BOOK). These days, and I’ll admit to this myself, if a puzzle takes more than half an hour to figure out, it’s off to plunder the internet for solutions!

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