The (Geekier) Odd Couple - the Gamer and the Mac

So my old PC was one of the many casualties of The week my everything broke, and in the name of more artistic endeavors, I bought a MacBook. 

I guess this makes me an exclusively console gamer, which I’m Ok with. I’ve nearly replaced my entire PC game collection with console versions. I even found a PS2 version of Deus Ex. Now I’m just missing Bioshock and Unreal Tournament III, the latter of which I didn’t play much anyway but it could be fun once I get more into Xbox LIVE. I did notice that Oblivion took a massive graphical downgrade from PC to 360, but that’s probably not a fair criticism considering my old graphics card weighed more than my new laptop.

The only upcoming non-console title that I could be convinced to give a shit about is Diablo III, and Blizzard have a long history of catering to a turtle-necked mac crowd who game when nobody’s watching.

I’m not sure if I’ve lost or gained artistic cred, as there was something gritty and underground about editing comics on a desktop PC with pirated software.

Short Rant - Halo Wars

So I just picked up my new Xbox 360 and everything works the way it should (touches wood). It was $11 cheaper to buy it with Halo Wars, which trades in for about $85 if I bring it back before Wednesday. I haven’t been into Real Time Strategy games since Warcraft III and I'm not a fan of Halo, but I was intrigued enough by an RTS designed specifically for console controls to not trade it in straight away.

After trying out the first few levels last night, I plan to trade Halo Wars in today. It has the same main problem that I've had with most RTSs in that I spent most of the game just watching numbers get bigger. The action system isn't worth much, most battles can be won just by selecting all your troops and clicking on the opposite side of the map. The cutscenes are beautifully rendered, but a little perplexing in that they mostly involve watching ground level gunfights. Basically serving to show the player what they'd probably rather be doing.

The building system is inventive enough and disproved my theory that RTS games haven't changed at all since their conception. Resources are handled automatically by structures, so you don't have peons or SCVs or Tiberium Harvesters to shake your impatient power of god fist at but it's still fucking boring.

I suppose if you're into RTSs this is an imaginative take on the genre and not just copy pasted from a much more functional PC version. Me, I'm going to see if any of the city EB stores have Left 4 Dead.

Zombies Ahead

The Story.

That's a point for the nerds.

Rant - Resident Evil 5 Demo

I'd like to start this entry by shedding a tear for my fallen Xbox 360. It was only a matter of time and overheating I suppose, but it served me better than most electrical equipment unfortunate enough to be owned by me. It now faces an uncertain future that I'm somehow tempted to blame on the Resident Evil 5 demo I downloaded last week.

For starters this isn't a survival horror game, it's just a shooter in which you run out of bullets more often and your enemies rarely shoot back yet they're still carrying bullets for whatever reason. That's fine. What drew me into this series has always been the puzzles. The horror was capable and the storyline was woeful.

If I judge this as a shooter there are a few kinks in the controls I'd like to see ironed out before the game goes gold. In terms of gun play you can’t move while reloading, aiming, shooting, healing, looking at your inventory or basically while doing anything. Apparently Chris is really bad at multitasking. This would all be fine if I could fire from the hip (shooting without holding the aim button; less accurate but quicker). In the more claustrophobic moments I got a brief glimpse of the horror game this was trying to be. Being able to fire from the hip or move while aiming could vastly improve these areas without giving the player too much tension breaking power. As these moments stand, they're simply frustrating. Aside from that, the controls aren't exactly intuitive but effective once I got used to them and the aiming was impressively smooth.

The new zombie virus thing is a horrifying parasite that, upon the death of the host, melts their entire body into just the bullets they were carrying. Hitler couldn't come up with that shit. It's hard to be afraid of these guys though, because you're far from vulnerable. Within the first few minutes of play I'd taken giant axe in the face no less than six times without healing myself at all. My teammate just patted me on the back and I was right as rain. The only sense of the survival element is aforementioned rapid bullet depletion cracking action. But even then, the knife actually kicks arse against your garden variety zombies.

As far as story goes my best guess is that the bad guys are trying to enslave an impoverished African nation while the good guys are performing incidental genocide on it. Which is pretty much as ambivalent as it gets.

All bugs and glitches aside though, I think I will buy the full version of this game. Basically I really liked Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero on the Gamecube. And this game basically looks like it is to RE4 what RE was to RE0. The same basic formula applied to two characters with different strengths and weaknesses, and playing co-op this time around is actually a lot of fun. It's no giant leap, but it's a small step in the right direction.

Rant - The Strangers

The Strangers is a horror movie that’s recently come to DVD in Australia. Starring Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler with Brian Bertino who’s previous work (according to IMDb) includes Gaffer and Smoking Guy in Xtracurricular.

This is the type of horror flick your English and Cultural Studies teachers warned you about. It’s bad. Bad with no compensating factors. The soundtrack feels like Scary Movie without the rock singles. Liv Tyler gives a great performance that only draws attention to Scott Speedman’s trademark horrible performance. The ending is a cockslap of ‘it was all a dream’ proportions. The victims are idiots and the villains are evil.

I might want to watch this movie again without my grumpy-pants and detective/thriller-hat on just to see if the bile settles, but this seems like it was designed to annoy people like me who were there for the plot. It’s a story about some psychos who kill some people. I probably should have called *Spoilers* there as that is seriously the entire movie. There are no plot twists. No big reveals. No motives for the killers, ulterior or otherwise. The victims are given a brief but ultimately unnecessary backstory. It does a lot of apparent foregrounding that goes nowhere, and there are subtleties between the lines that have no trade-off. It’s essentially a shit idea, poorly executed.

If you’re into horror for horror’s sake this could make for an ok night in, but the enjoyable part of horror for me is picking apart the story. A horror technique I love is when a story misdirects its audience; making me predict one ending with absolute certainty then turning it on its head. Admittedly, The Strangers did this but it doesn’t really pull it off, it just drops a clichéd ending for a completely unsatisfying one. About halfway through there’s a turning point that almost crosses into intriguing psychological thriller territory, but the movie seems to realise this and throws its arms up, runs in the opposite direction, and eats some shit.

If nothing else, The Strangers is an ambitious film, because it’s trying to scare the audience without just using gore and shock tactics. Unfortunately it still falls short here because the protagonists are impossible to empathise with and the killers are hard to take seriously. Keeping the killers motives in the dark can make them more terrifying, but it’s a tricky thing to do well. Here they just make me want to shake my fist and yell “get off my lawn you cheeky kids!”

I’ve heard it argued that this type of movie could inspire people to become psycho killers because it makes it look easy, but I’d be more inclined to think it’d inspire established psycho killers to go out and get their dignity back.

Recent Release Ruckus

So I picked up my mindless action fix on Friday in the form of Gears of War 2. A night of playing indicated that it should tide of cravings for at least the next few months, even if there’s more story in the first 10 minutes that than in the entire first game.

I only bring this up because the back of the case sported this sticker:



Ignoring the missing full stop after 2008, release dates have been an interesting issue in games over the last few weeks. Before I go any further let me just clarify that this is definitely where this becomes a blog, not legitimate journalism. The only sources I have on any of this are direct conversations with retailers that were on a casual chat basis and in no way recorded. K? K.

So October 23 was to be the start of the pre-Christmas releases in gaming, marking the first major console releases since Grand Theft Auto 4 (April 29) and Metal Gear Solid 4 (June 17), neither of which I had much interest in anyway. Three major releases were to dawn that day: Fable 2, Dead Space, and Far Cry 2. However, on Friday 17, Kmart Western Australia broke street date on Fable 2, arguably Xbox’s biggest release since Halo 3. On the Monday, Microsoft contacted Kmart and fined them $1000 per copy sold before release date and informed them that their next big release (Gears of War 2) would be given to them a full month after other retailers. The next day other retailers were allowed to break street date and begin selling the game. It could well be argued that this is overly malicious business. Holding the next release would have been sufficient penalty – I have heard of Valve doing something similar regarding the release of Half Life 2 – but the added $1000 fine seems like a fairly low blow, considering how little mark up there is on games to begin with. However as much as an industry member may have stepped in, to me it seems unlikely that someone would lock legal horns with Microsoft.

Then an interesting thing happened, Far Cry 2 broke street date and was released a day early, leaving only Dead Space chilling in the green room. Also, if you remember my last post that was predominantly a censorship fight the power rant, I briefly mentioned that Fallout 3 was my most anticipated game release for the year. It also broke street date. Not that I could buy it being neck deep in uni work, but apparently in this instance vendors simply told retailers to put it on the shelves early.

In some cases, video game release dates seem like pointless withholding of a product. They’re not exactly like movies or albums that are all released on Thursdays and Saturdays respectively. In the case of games based in an online community, I could understand needing to manage which regions receive a product first. Blizzard would probably want some idea of which servers would be busiest when during addon releases of World of Warcraft, plus having a world wide release for such games would mean that countries like Australia would get the game before it was the same day in the States. This chain of broken street dates has piqued my interest though. Maybe Australian retailers have just gotten the shits with doing midnight sales for games they receive up to three months after the rest of the world, but I can’t help but think this is a big fuck you to Microsoft.

Fallout 3 Pre-Release Thoughts

I'm still alive. I just fell under a sizable pile of uni work for a while there. This Friday I'll hand in my final assignment after four years of study, but in true geek form, that day I’ll be more excited about picking up a copy of Fallout 3.



Fallout 3 has all the elements to potentially be my new favourite game. It employs elements of RPGs and shooters, follows an open world storyline in a post apocalyptic electro-punk setting, and includes the voice talents of Liam Neeson, Ron Perlman and Heroes' Malcolm McDowell. It's definitely my most anticipated game release of the year, and a distant second to The Dark Knight for my most anticipated release of 2008. Unlike The Dark Knight however, Fallout 3 was at risk of not reaching Australian shores at all.

On July 4, Fallout 3 was refused classification by the Australians Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), effectively banning it in the land down under. Admittedly when these screenshots were released I had my doubts that it would make it past the censors, however it wasn't the violence that caused the ban. While our classification system is in need of an R18+ rating, that’s a debate for another time. An adults only rating would not have saved Fallout. The OFLC's gripe was that the game contained real life drugs (referred to as chems) that basically performed the function of say, health or strength potions. These were depicted a realistic manner, which in their view pushed the boundary of science fiction drug references to real life drug references. Because a game may not offer incentives for using narcotics, not only was the game not to be advertised or sold within Australia, it was illegal to own a copy that had been obtained overseas.

By August 7, a toned down version of the game was given an MA15+ rating by the OFLC. This version had substances such as morphine given fictional names and removed the short animations of them being injected or ingested. For Australian gamers this basically meant that it was no longer illegal to own Fallout and so it was safer to import it. However, on September 10, Bethesda Softworks announced that the changes made to the Aussie version were to be applied to all versions of the game. If I hop off my games-are-art and censorship-is-the-devil soapboxes for a second, I think this is actually a better game mechanic. In any given game if I want a health hit, I want it then and there. Waiting for an animation to play out can be the agonising seconds delay that usually ends in death. The kicker is, that our broken classification system has now bled over to the rest of the world's gamers.

This isn't the first instance like this either. Earlier this year, Australia was given a trimmed version of Grand Theft Auto 4, and to prevent mass imports from New Zealand, they received the same version. Anyone who was going to the trouble to import that game would have known that the only difference between the Kiwi and Aussie versions was the sticker on the front saying "18+" and so they ordered from the UK, who share our region code but received the full version. So the main people at a disadvantage were New Zealand gamers who, at no fault of their own classification system, received a toned down game. This was eventually was revoked and New Zealand retailers now sell the unedited version.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think being able to see the drugs being taken and having realistic names is a crucial part of the game experience. Especially if they'd renamed the drugs something like Michael-Atkinson-is-a-scare-mongering-douche-bag. What bothers me is that our broken classification system is affecting the game content in countries where adults are allowed to buy adult things. Imagine if the say no to drugs theory was applied to all forms of media. Off the top of my head you'd lose movies from Requiem for a Dream to American Beauty. Not to mention that Super Mario Brothers didn't result in a generation of shrooming plumbers.

I think we've really lost a great platform for comment here. In my opinion science fiction and fantasy are the greatest genres to get a message across in as it allows something to become so fictionalised that it becomes more relatable. Take X-Men 3 for example. Sir Ian McKellen approached his character's motivation against a mutant-cure with the same attitude that he has towards the idea that homosexuality can be 'cured.' This could be applied to many groups of people who find themselves alienated or oppressed by modern society, while if the movie had been about an actual cure for homosexuality, while problematic on many levels, would speak only to a queer, already converted audience. Science-fiction and fantasy allows a level of comment not achievable in more realistic genres. It also means that the drug use was contextualised, as the protagonist has to put their moral objections aside and take what they have to in order to stay alive. More over the nature of the game itself, particularly in first person, gives the potential for insight into the issue that I don’t feel is as accessible by other mediums.

Essentially I don't think what we’ve lost in this game will deter from the experience, but I do feel that a great platform for comment is being cut short by a conservative and outdated rating system. Maybe I never got off my soapbox at all.