"Is This A Game.....Or Is This Real?"

The 'story trailer' for the Predator Vs Alien game Australian censors assessed, banned, endured a storm of controversy over, then reassessed before creating a new category, "strong science fiction violence", which then allowed them to pass the game for release with an MA15 rating :





Here's how the Australian Classification Review Board explained its decision :

In the Review Board's opinion the violence depicted in the game can be accommodated within the MA 15+ category as the violent scenes are not prolonged and are interspersed with longer non violent sequences. The violence is fantastical in nature and justified by the context of the game, set in a futuristic science-fiction world, inhabited by aliens and predators. This context serves to lessen its impact. The more contentious violence is randomly generated and is not dependent on player selection of specific moves.

Aliens Vs Predator is released on February 18.

You Think That's Something? Well, Let Me Tell You About The Time....



By Darryl Mason

I don't want to take anything away from this obviously incredible record....

In a back room of his Braidwood cottage in the NSW Southern Tablelands Phil Day has just broken the world record on the 28-year-old classic arcade game and successor to Space Invaders, Galaga.

Passing the previous mark of 2.7 million set by an American, Andrew Laidlaw, in 2007, Mr Day's score of 3.44 million is the culmination of six months' training and practice.

It took him two hours to break the record.

But I swear that I can remember a kid not just scoring a few million, but more than ten million, and clocking over the Galaga machine in a local takeaway, back in 1982-1983.

It took him more than five hours, probably closer to six, and he drew a coming-and-going crowd, some of whom thought it was hilarious fun to try and distract the unflappable gamer. This was in the days before mobile phones, or even phones in every home, and word about this massive event unfolding was spread by kids on bikes, rushing to friends' houses to alert them to the news of historic spectacle of Galaga mastery.

There might have been fifteen or more kids gathered around the Galaga machine, in the late afternoon of a firey hot Saturday, when the score hit 9,999,999 and then turned back to zero. There was an awed silence, and then applause, and then the patient, but well over it, shop owner told everyone to get the fuck out. Naturally, the kid that clocked Galaga sauntered away with only these words, "So what? It's no big deal."

Or maybe this happened on a Moon Patrol machine. Or was it the Mrs Pacman pinball?

No, it was Galaga, dammit, I'm sure of it, and even if the above details about Galaga's scoring system are flat out wrong, I will be, regardless, shouting to bored young people well into my old age that I Was There The Day an incredibly focused friend clocked over Galaga, turned that bastard back to zero, and that the youth, like them, with their iBrains and holograms and flying robot friends, don't know what the hell real excitement is.

Or was.

This year marks the 30th birthday of Space Invaders.

Conroy's Net Filter Will Block Access To E-Bay And Amazon

By Darryl Mason

If That Net Censor Guy, Stephen Conroy, wants to stop all Australians from visiting websites that sell games that are not allowed by law to be sold in Australian shops, Stephen Conroy will have no choice but to block web access to both Amazon and E-Bay, which ship thousands of R18+ games to Australian gamers every month.

Asher Moses :

The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.

Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.

So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.

Sites like Amazon and E-Bay.

That should go down well.

The average age of an Australian gamer is 30 years old.

Conroy should be careful. He doesn't want to get millions of Australian gamers and daily internet users offside anymore than he already has, particularly if an election is drawing near.

If the Rudd government doesn't already know this, they should, but they don't want to make internet censorship and the way they constantly fuck with gamers into election issues, because they can easily be made into Big Election Issues, particularly for Labor voters in their 30s and 40s.

The Greens already know this.

Likewise, Labor has to be careful in their plans to crack down on so-called online piracy and peer to peer file sharing. Cutting off the internet access of, or pursuing prosecutions against, some 40 year old single mother who downloads a digital copy of an album she has already brought on vinyl and/or CD will be the kind of Big Ugly that no-one in Labor wants to find themselves associated with.

They won't even have to go that far. There's a few hundred thousand Australians who regularly use file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, and they will be extremely displeased if there comes a day when they visit those sites (to download games that they're not allowed to buy in Australia) and they find that Stephen Conroy has blocked their access. Everyone will know very, very quickly that the Rudd government is responsible.

An independent running in the early 2010 federal election fighting against internet censorship and for the rights of gamers and file sharers, might find themselves a particularly large and surprising number of former Labor voters giving them the big tick.

That's if The Greens, by then, aren't already all over those fundamental issues of digital reality rights. And they probably will be.

Mad Max IV Is Coming Soon, Animated And Mel Gibson-Free



There will also be a video game to go with the new, animated, 3D Mad Max movie....or does the movie go with the game? Director George Miller told a vid game website two years ago he was deep into building a Mad Max gaming world, or series of video games. So now add in an anime movie and it's clear George Miller is thinking on a Lucasian scale :

The plot would be partly lifted from the script of the fourth “Max” film, which was set to shoot in 2003 until financing collapsed in the wake of the Iraq War.

Now Miller is resurrecting the idea as an R-rated, stereoscopic anime flick for theatrical release.

“The anime is an opportunity for me to shift a little bit about what anime is doing because anime is ripe for an adjustment or sea change,” he explained. “It’s coming in games and I believe it’s the same in anime."

Mad Max is really the ultimate post-apocalyptic Grand Theft Auto. Mad Max games have massive potential. But why just go anime?

There's probably a few hundred thousand Australian males aged 40 to 60 who will buy a games unit just to play a realistic Mad Max game on their monster plasmas. But it has to be the right game. Not just a game based on the anime Mad Max IV movie. We need Mad Max games that take us back to the first movie, and all those pristine cars. Do you want to be Goose, or NightRider, or Max?

And there would have to be a game to recreate Mad Max II (or Road Warrior as it was called in non-Australian lands) so we can do that sand-filled tanker run, fighting off the post-apoc. biker hordes all the way. Running wild with that boomerang as the Feral Kid, helping Max deal with all those badlands bandits, and diving into tunnels like a rabbit, would also have to be an essential option.

Beyond Thunderdome? Eh. If we get to play Mad Max I & II, a Thunderdome game (or chapter) might feel a bit "been there, done that", unless some of the action takes place in the post-nuking Sydney we only get a glimpse of at the end of that movie.

I'm looking over a piece I was working on for the British Airways inflight magazine back in 2001, when Mad Max IV was beginning to shape up as a viable Mel Gibson movie, not animation. There's some interesting details about a possible storyline. I'll post it here, later.

Australia Bans War....Video Game

Australia Now Bans More Video Games Than Any Other Country In The World




You can watch it, but you can't play it.

Australia now leads the world in officially banning video games for having "adult content", even though the average age of gamers in Australia is now 28 years old.

Adult content determined by our enthusiastically draconian censorship board to be unacceptable for adult gamers includes graphic nudity or sex, extreme violence, gore, drug use or imagery depicting prostitution.

Indonesia is a majority Muslim nation, with supposedly restrictive rules on acceptable entertainment, but every single video game banned in Australia in the past three years fill the shelves of gamer shops in Jakarta.

Australia's classification regime has now decided that the forthcoming shooter title, Solider Of Fortune : Pay Back, is too gory and violent for the millions of adult Australians who play video games every evening, instead of tuning into Dancing With The Australia Idols.

The game was refused classification by the Office Of Film and Literature Classification.

The absurdity of the ban is compounded by the fact that the news.com.au website features a collection of YouTube clips showing exactly the kind of graphic violence that led to the game being banned. There is clearly no age restriction to viewing the game's most violent scenes and action. You just can't participate.

Australia is now, the only country in the world to officially, and regularly, ban video games for violence or "adult content". We now ban more video games, through censorship legislation, than any other country on the planet.

Yet the Australian Defence Force now uses very realistic video games to help recruit teenagers into a militaristic way of thinking. The games are specifically designed to begin training teenagers for war, long before they are old enough to sign up for the real thing. Those games, naturally, are not banned. They are, in fact, free.

So is the problem here that Soldier Of Fortune : Pay Back actually shows the kind of injuries, decapitations, amputations and spouting head wounds that are part of every day life in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan where Australia has deployed thousands of troops?

Clearly, it's a dangerous and terrible thing for even adults in Australia to see what happens to the human body when it is hit by high calibre bullets and RPGs. Even in a video game.

Some of the video games now banned in Australia - Blitz: The League, BMX XXX, Manhunt, Reservoir Dogs, 50 Cent: Bullet Proof.

Blitz was banned in January due to the fact it "contains drug use related to incentives or rewards."

More here :

In its board report on Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back, dated October 16, the OFLC said frequent high impact violence made the game unsuitable for those aged under 18 years.

It's animation.

"Successfully shooting an opponent results in the depiction of blood spray," the board said.

It's animation.

"When the enemy is shot from close range, the blood spray is substantial, especially when a high-caliber weapon is used, and blood splatters onto the ground and walls in the environment.

It's animation.

"The player may target various limbs of the opponents and this can result in the limb being dismembered.

It's animation.

"Large amounts of blood spray forth from the stump with the opponent sometimes remaining alive before eventually dying from the wounds."

It's animation.

Australia has no classification to restrict violent video game sales to person over 18 years of age, despite the fact that the average age of players is 28, and the vast majority of all gamers are over legal adults.

You can't legally play the Soldier Of Fortune : Payback video game in Australia. But you can sign up to the Army on your 18th birthday and clock up a tour in Iraq, shooting real guns at real people, by your 20th birthday.

But a video game?

God, no.

Fight in real wars, but ban the fake ones.

You know it makes sense.