Most readers would know about Australia’s absence of a R18+ rating for video games, which has resulted in a few titles being refused classification, at the expense of Australia’s mature gamers. There have been a few arguments put forward to support R18+, one of which is the inclusion of parental controls on gaming consoles to restrict access of mature titles to minors.

A Newspoll study, commissioned by the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA), found that 74% of parents didn’t know about the parental locks on their children’s games consoles. 22% of parents believed that their children could circumvent such protection, despite SA Attorney-General Michael Atkinson’s claim that it’s “laughable to suggest that they couldn’t find ways around parental locks if R18+ games were in the home.”

To be completely honest, I don’t think I’ve stumbled across the parental access controls on my Xbox 360 or my PS3. They’re probably hidden somewhere deep in the bowels of the System Settings menu, several button presses and slow methodical menu scrolls away.

Granted, I haven’t been actively looking for them, but that’s the point - if parental controls are hidden away, chances are they’ll be overlooked. When doing the initial set up my Xbox 360 and PS3, there wasn’t any mention of setting up parental controls. In fact, I spent most of the time setting up my accounts for XBL and PSN. Hmm.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all up for active parenting. I believe parents should know what their kids are up to in their formative years, especially in a heavily interconnected and media-saturated society like this. However, keeping parents informed on what tools they can use and helping them make decisions can only be a good thing, and saying that these tools can be circumvented is dismissive.

Parents need help to help their kids. Perhaps our representatives should be looking at ways of educating consumers rather than sheltering them.

I enjoy good games. I also enjoy good cinema.

Up until recently, I was under the impression that cinema and games were like ice cream and pizza - good on their own, but not so great when mixed together. (Then again, I’ve never had a pizza milkshake.) Case in point: those god awful movie tie-ins. It’s beyond the cheap money making ploy they’re meant to be; they descend into the fiery brine of poor design and uninspired gameplay.

Examples, you say? Terminator: Salvation, Iron Man, Jumper, Watchmen, Fantastic Four, Eragon. (Okay, most of those movies were terrible to begin with, but I stand by my point.)

On the flip side, there are also a few games that are truly cinematic. Call of Duty 1 immediately comes to mind - storming Stalingrad, sneaking through the countryside under cover of darkness, the relentless bark of an MG42…it sucks you in and captivates you. Half Life 2 was also a step in the right direction, but there were still times where the immersion fell flat. Boss fights in particular ruined things for me, because it was such a break in the game’s flow. It was like something triggered in my brain to say, “Okay, brace yourself for some pain until you find a weak spot to exploit.” Who knows, maybe good gameplay and good cinematic values weren’t meant to go hand in hand.

I despaired, languishing in self pity, and then I played Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

The balance was impeccable, the gameplay was superb, and the voice acting was believable. It had all the hallmarks of a great game - excellent art direction, enjoyable set pieces, an accessible control scheme, and an easy-to-swallow plot that could be plucked from a silver screen. It sucked me in. I was captivated.

I’ve yet to play Uncharted 2, but I have the feeling that it’s going to be very much the same. I’ve also got a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4, and I’ve been told that it’s “a movie with a game attached”, so it’s most likely relevant to my interests there.

They’re not the only games on my mind, though. After watching the preview for Heavy Rain and reading Gamasutra’s feature on “interactive storytelling”, I’m incredibly keen on this. I’m hoping it’ll be like Condemned…but without the supernatural powers.

I understand the appeal of catering to the mainstream market when it comes to storytelling, but to be frank, not all of us appreciated the Halo plot.

I’ve done some terrible things in games. I’ve killed squads of police officers in GTA4, and killed hookers for their money after soliciting services from them. I tortured criminals in The Punisher. I beat people to death with a fire axe in Condemned.

That’s all relatively tame, though, compared to “No Russian” in Modern Warfare 2.

Warning: spoiler alert.
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According to Gamasutra, analysts have determined that review scores are the least important factor (out of a potential eight) in game purchasing decisions.

It was mildly surprising news to me at first, but then I could see where those survey takers were coming from.

Back in the day, I was young, naive and highly impressionable. I took the reviewers’ words as gospel. Hell, at the time they probably had more games and hardware in their bedrooms than I had in the whole house. Who am I to doubt their professional and informed opinion?

And, for a while, it was true to some extent. The gaming scene was limited and restricted, and reviewers were more or less subjective back then. The Internet was in its infancy at the time and we were not as informed as we are now. Most reviews tended to circulate via word of mouth in my end of town, and what usually happened was that some lucky duck managed to get their hands on a cartridge, and we’d all crowd around their TV taking turns in the hotseat.

It was not too long ago that I began to doubt the integrity of “professional” games reviewers. It was in the editorial of a PCPP magazine, where they said that the magazine had “the biggest number of Gold awarded games reviewed (ever published in a single issue)”. I was sceptical. Really? Was it just a good month at the time? Were the reviewers just feeling a bit more lenient than usual?

As I continued to read reviews both online and in print, I noticed that (even though the reviews seemed to be generally disapproving) the scores didn’t necessarily reflect the reviewers’ comments. It wasn’t until the aftermath of Gerstmann-gate and the advent of aggregate review sites that contrasted professional reviews with user reviews that the integrity of professional reviewers began to start falling apart at the seams.

I’ll admit that some of my own review scores have been given out a bit too hastily. I try to keep my scores objective and I don’t want to pan games needlessly, but I’ve found it’s a fine line to tread. (And I don’t even have sponsors to satisfy.)

Nowadays, there are only one or two publications whose reviews align with my own tastes. Even then, I’m wary of the scores they give. Granted, I still consult Metacritic to see what everyone else is thinking (and to determine if my taste in games for the day is mainstream or underground). Recommendations by friends are slightly better.

But there’s one thing that I trust over any review score, and that’s first hand experience with it. A short session at a mate’s place, or spending some time on a demo is miles ahead of any sponsor-funded article or incoherent rant sans proper grammar by some internet random.

Yes, I can feel the irony too.

If you didn’t already know, Steam is having a big weekend sale. Despite what people may say about it, I think that the platform works extremely well and is a great money spinner.

I was just reading a thread about the sales and someone made the argument that “if they did this more often, there’d be no excuse to pirate (games)”. Immediately afterwards, I read a thread about how PC gaming for this year was lacklustre and that it was only going to get worse (in so many words).

This got me thinking - is PC gaming getting to the point where publishers / distributors have to lower prices to get any sort of volume moving? Is the time of PC gaming actually “dying”? Ergo, is Steam going to go away any time soon?

I, for one, think all this talk of the PC platform going away is rubbish. I can understand the arguments against PC gaming - the high upkeep costs of PC upgrades, the maintenance, the hurdles of compatibility, the numerous DRM issues to curb piracy…hell, I’ve even heard the argument that WASD is too hard to use.

And, despite my heavy PC-gaming background, I enjoy console gaming. I like using my 360 - I’ve had some good times with it, and I think that remembering a handful of buttons is easier than hopping all over my keyboard. I used to abhor FPSes with the controller (admittedly, I still find it amazingly awkward to use) but now I don’t think it’s all that bad.

But now that console gaming is becoming increasingly mainstream, there are more than enough fanboys out there to proclaim the end of PC gaming. While it isn’t as popular, I reject claims that it is dying. Cases in point:

• Many popular mainstream franchises and titles cut their teeth by debuting on the PC platform;
• It would be fair to say that there are more PCs in households than there are consoles, thus increasing market potential;
• The barriers for entry to PC development and distribution are lower, with the emergence of public dev kits;
• Digital distribution can lower costs for all parties in the chain, as opposed to taking a “gamble” with official online console subscription services.

Those are a few that I thought of off the top of my head.

People claim that they game more on their consoles than they do on their PCs, and that it offers an easier, more seamless experience. And that’s fine. That’s one of the main advantages of consoles - it allows those that are not technically literate to enjoy a gaming experience. But to say that “PC gaming is dead” because you now have more console games than PC games is short-sighted. PC gaming is certainly not as popular as it was way back when…but it isn’t going to just “die”.

There is a place for PC gamers…even if it happens to be second place.

I read about Love Plus earlier this year. The game appeared to be your typical Japanese dating sim game, but proved to be a big otaku hit. It was so popular that even Hideo Kojima’s development team was losing productivity due to being so heavily engrossed in spending time with their virtual significant other.

Then there are those that take it that one step further. By that, I mean a Japanese man has married his virtual girlfriend in Love Plus.

The reception included a priest, an MC, a DJ, speeches from friends and family, photo slideshows, wedding music and even a bouquet. The entire event was streamed live on a Japanese video-sharing site, of which SAL9000 is a prominent member.

“I’m so happy so many people were able to witness this,” SAL9000 wrote in a letter to tech culture blog BoingBoing.net, calling it a milestone in his life.

I don’t mean to turn this into a “wtf is wrong with Japanese people” post, but I had some initial reactions to this.

1) Damn, I’d be chuffed as the developer who created a love sim so potent that a fan had to marry its characters.
2) How do they, erm, consummate their marriage?
3) If he married that character, and that same character is available in the copies bought by other gamers, does that mean she’s cheating?
4) Wouldn’t she run out of dialogue eventually?
5) When the sequel comes out, is there going to be some nasty mistress action going?
6) Could someone monitor his movements with his NDS, steal the cartridge, and hold “her” to ransom?

Sorry. I, too, hope to marry something with personality.

Even if it’s a pre-programmed one.

Back when arcades were king, one of my favourite machines was Samurai Shodown 2.

It was a Japanese import that was in my local games trader store. You would walk past rows of computer games in full A4-sized boxes and walls lined with SNES games that overlooked a set of tables where regular Magic: The Gathering games took place. I would go to the back of the store where the arcade machines were kept in a stuffy little room and, armed with the dollar that I palmed from my parent’s shop’s cash register, I would get my fix of feudal Japanese 1-on-1 combat.

The one thing that made it stand out from the mess of fighting games at the time was, of course, the weapons. They were actually interesting weapons as well - they ranged from standard katanas and blades to giant armoured fists and, ahem, magical hawks. Its parrying mechanic was ahead of its time, and the Rage meter was a finely balanced risk/reward mechanic. The characters were so varied and exhibited such different playing styles that I spent weeks going through the list of characters, familiarising myself with each and every one.

The local high school kids would crowd the machine after school, and I’d listen to them discuss character strategies and tactics for certain matchups. Occasionally I would take part in a versus game or two, and still fondly remember the time when I used my faithful Kibagame Genjuro to trounce another player’s Haohmaru to the point where he rage quit from the store. Good times, good times.

Eventually they replaced the machine with a World Heroes machine, and I forgot all about it until I discovered the joys of Neo Geo emulation. By that time there had been a couple more iterations of it, with new characters and a new look and feel.

Nowadays it’s a lot easier to just jam a network cable into the back of your console and game with randoms in that way, so we’ve moved on in that regard. Hell, arcade machines nowadays have seats. I mean, seriously. Shit is so cash.