Monthly Archives: June 2009

Australia’s federal government plans to block websites that contain games that are unclassified or have what is considered riskier than an MA-15+ rating, and the censorship will apply to all age groups.

A spokesperson for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told the Sydney Morning Herald that all Flash and downloadable games as well as online retailers that sell boxed copies of MA-15+ games via mail order will be filtered.

“This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping,” said Colin Jacobs of online lobbyist group Electronic Frontiers Australia.

“Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old. In a free country like ours, do we really need the government to step in and save us from racy web games?”

The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia has stated that this new plan is the direct cause of not having a 18+ rating for games, and such a situation could affect players of MMOs like WoW and Second Life because online games are unclassified.

“That [online games] exemption [on content ratings] is the only reason why multiplayer games with user-generated environments are possible in this country,” said Mark Newton, an ISP engineer. “Without it, it’d only take one game user anywhere in the world to produce objectionable content in the game environment to make the Australian Government ban the game for everyone.”

This is all over the place. Read more about it on GI.biz, GamePolitics, and TheAge.

SCEE boss Andrew House has offered up an explanation as to why the PSP Go has such a large price tag.

“When you introduce a new piece of hardware you have the opportunity to say there is a certain premium that is associated with it, and we took that into account,” he told MCV.

“As with all hardware launches you look at the business model, the cost structure, and the necessarily level of profitability, and you use that to set the wholesale price. Much as we do with any other hardware.”

So the $249 will be spent by those who want it, basically, and those who don’t wont. That simple. Same as all things, really.

More through the link.

Gaming will have a larger impact than ever before at this year’s  SIGGRAPH conference, with Will Wright giving a keynote and game graphics being discussed in a special session.

The annual meeting of digital artists conference has a special gaming session titled “Big, Fast, and Cool: Making the Art for Fight Night Round 4 & Gears of War 2″, which will focus on real-time graphics and visuals for both games.

“So much of what makes today’s videogames so great are the responsive graphics and the stories that unfold during game play,” said SIGGRAPH chairmain Evan Hirsch in a press release.

“This year’s sessions will offer a rare perspective into how animation and graphics can really enhance and impact game development and the user experience and investigate the future of gaming.”

Full thing through the break, courtesy of Joystiq.

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Those who are not members of the special club that is the Xbox Live Gold Membership will get a taste of what it’s like in the big leagues this weekend with 1 vs 100 being free for all.

Silver folks  will be able to play the video game trivia show that pits players against each other in a game-show setting.

You win real prizes too. Last week a car was given away.

Try it out.

Thanks, Kotaku.

This week the US PS movie store has HD movies that seriously make you want to just go ‘meh’ and move right along. Unless you like Ben Affleck and his wifey-poo’s superhero movie Daredevil. If so, you are in luck.

The list of HD television shows is a bit thin as usual, but Burn Notice and Rescue Me are enough to warrant the posting.

Full list of HD offerings are listed below, while the rest can be found over on the US PS Blog.

HD Movies

• Pulse
• Bachelor Man
• Daredevil
• Date Movie
• Date Movie (Unrated)
• I Want Candy
• Inkheart
• Mr. Troop Mom
• Poison Ivy 4: The Secret Society
• Wicker Park

HD TV Shows

• 4th and Long – Season 1 “Great Sacrifices, Great Rewards”
• Burn Notice -  Season 3 “End Run”
• Kings – Season 1 “The Sabbath Queen”
• Rescue Me – Season 5 “Disease”

Warhammer Online producer Jeff Hickman has stated that changes to Mythic management are nothing to worry about and the ‘show must go on’.

The verbal hand-holding comes on the heels of Mark Jacobs’ departure along with the merging with BioWare.

However, despite the changes, Hickman assures WAR players that the game will continue to progress, and to prove it, he listed a number of things to expect from the game in the coming months.

Some of these goals include AoE effects, server stability, crowd control Tier 4 improvements, server population distribution and reward itemization.

You can read the full letter to players here.

Thanks, IncGamers.

The fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston revealed that health games are a major force in the industry, generating over $2 billion worldwide.

“Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term,” Games for Health Project co-founder, Ben Sawyer, told Reuters.

“If you add up the 18 month sales of Wii Fit and the sales of EA Sports Active, Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion.”

Dr. Michael Levine of the Sesame Workshop (yes, Sesame Street) has released a report citing how games can be beneficial and educational when it comes to health care and children.

“The White House should launch a national initiative to promote research and development of proven games,” he said, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation agrees with him.

It has called upon the White House and Congress to start a public engagement campaign to educate parents, teachers and health providers about the healthy side of gaming.

Videogames in schools. Sure beats getting battered playing dodgeball.

Via Joystiq.

Joystick Radio has analyzed the trailers for Modern Warfare 2 and listed the weapons that will be present in the game.

Here’s what has been seen so far:

• Silenced Bushmaster ACR
• M110 SASS
• Famas (With Red Dot Sight Attachment)
• Steyr AUG HBAR
• Glock 18 (Pistol)
• AK47
• SPAS-12
• M429 SAW
• 870MCS
• SCAR
• Frag Grenade
• FN F2000
• UMP .45
• P90
• M1911 (Pistol)
• C4 (Explosive)
• Stun Grenade

Head over to the site for more info.

Hooray. Another game website with a countdown to a game reveal.

This time it’s Square Enix, and the timer on the teaser site is expected to go off on July 6.

Dunno what it’s counting down to, but speculation says it may be “Four Warriors of Light” which was recently trademarked by the company.

Go have a look.

Via Kotaku.

VG247 has learnt that PS3 Firmware 3.0, “a completely new system” for the console, is to release pre-Christmas with a raft of major feature updates.

The software upgrade has been described to us as “a huge overhaul”, and was compared to NXE “in some respects”.

The before-rumoured reputation system will be included. We were told that, “A reputation system in which users will be able to evaluate each other will be provided for… game applications.

“There will be a new API available to so the user can… allow users and also obtain users’ reputation.”

A “grief reporting system” will be included in the update, allowing gamers to take screens of offensive players and submit them to Sony. Apparently this is going to be similar to the LBP system, and is likely to include a text input.

Firmware 3.0 will allow patches will be downloaded in the background, meaning you’ll no longer have to sit staring at the screen while Random Shooter updates itself with a 500Mb fix.

There’s more. Simultaneous HDMI and digital optical outputting will be included in the release, a move likely to bring big smiles to the audio heads in the crowd.

We’ve been told a lot more on this, but you’ll just have to wait. Rest assured, 3.0 will be significant. Just remember where you heard it first.

Update: SCEA’s Patrick Seybold has told Joystiq: “Those rumors are completely untrue, nothing has been announced or confirmed for upcoming PlayStation firmware, and this is just wild speculation.”

IGN’s posted three movies of a live E3 demo of Heavy Rain, with the game being played by Quantic Dream’s David Cage.

It’s a 15-minute play-through of the scrapyard sequence with Cage and two IGN editors talking over the top.

If it’s bonkers real-time graphics you’re after, look no further.

The game’s out later this year. Maybe.

After the break.

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Tecmo will release a demo for Ninja Gaiden Sigma II – the PS3 version of Ninja Gaiden II – this September.

The news comes out of an ongoing London press event.

The game’s out this autumn.

More on CVG.

Game Watch has upped a bunch of photos from a Japanese PSP Go event showing both black and white models alongside their PSP 3000 counterparts.

There are some UI shots there as well.

PSP Go releases on October 1.

Wolfenstein will allow you to track not only how many Nazis you’ve killed in the game, but how you’ve killed them.

According to MTV, it looks as though you’ll be murdering in the region of 1,600 Nazis throughout the entire game, which is a healthy quotient in any Nazi-killers book.

The game’s out in August for PC, PS3 and 360.

PlayStation king Kaz Hirai is most likely cock-a-hoop this morning, as it’s been confirmed he has a new deputy in the form of Kunimasa Suzuki.

Suzuki’s new role is titled, “Representative Director, Deputy President of SCEI”.

Does that mean he’s only a representation of a director? Not a real one? He can’t be too happy about that.

There’s a press release here.

Game Watch has posted up a heap of screens and art from Tales of VS, the PSP-exclusive Tales-based fighter.

It’s out in Japan in August, and hasn’t yet been dated for the West. US – maybe. Europe – no chance.

Look and see.

A new Interpret report has claimed that as many as 25 million Americans played music- and singing-based games in April.

The paper said that 29 percent of music gamers had downloaded or streamed a music video in the past three months, compared to 15 percent overall, while 45 percent listened to music via a social network versus 32 per cent overall.

Plenty more on GI.

Console MMOs clearly aren’t easy. Which is probably why there are hardly any of them. Why? Blizzard’s Rob Pardo reckons the main culprit’s the pad.

“I’d say challenge number one is the input device,” he told IndustryGamers.

“So if you’re going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue.”

Pardo said that advances in Cloud gaming may overcome some of the lesser tech issues involved.

“The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we’re always pushing out more content. That’s something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that’s a lot to deal with.

“You’d have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don’t have hard drives. So that’s a big issue,” he said.

The next major console MMO is likely to be Cryptic’s Champions Online, releasing for 360 later this year.

As promised, the silver DualShock 3′s gone on sale in the US, as listed on EB and Amazon.

No word on Euros getting it as yet.

Zenimax first started talking to id about the possibility of buying the firm about a year ago, ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman has told Joystiq.

“I had my first meeting with Todd Hollenshead at E3 a year ago,” he said.

“We had a general discussion about how our two companies might explore matters of mutual interest and the conversations then took place over the ensuing months.

“So it’s been almost a year, on and off, that we’ve been having these conversations.”

Zenimax was announced as the new owner of id earlier this week.

There’s an interview with Altman and John Carmack through the link.