Tag Archives: the guardian

With the worldwide release of L.A. Noire less than a week away, gamers are waiting with bated breath to see if Rockstar Games’ new crime thriller can live up to the hype. Wait no longer, a UK paper has gone ahead and published its review of the game a little ahead of schedule.

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The Guardian’s flown in the face of public opinion on No More Heroes 2 today, giving the Grasshopper slasher – which is currently enjoying an MC rating of 86 percent – an eyebrow-knotting 2/5.

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The Guardian’s named Half-Life 2 as the best game of the decade. It’s a user vote thingum.

Apparently, “Half-Life 2 is the game of the decade, not just because it’s good, but because it encapsulates so much of what mainstream gaming has been trying to do for the last ten years; the aspiration to create believable, physically accurate worlds, then to make us a part of them.”

Knock yourself out. We really want to stop now.

Mike Antonucci, the San Jose Mercury News journalist named by Peter Moore in his recent Guardian interview as “really pushing hard” on the issue of Xbox 360 failure rates, has contacted VG247 to set the record straight on the subject.

Antonucci, who’s now moved on from the paper, conducted the interview in which Moore famously said that “things break” in relation to the RROD problem.

Antonucci told us this morning that both he and Dean Takahashi – author of The Xbox 360 Uncloaked – had mailed the Guardian to show that Moore hadn’t been “pushed” in the interview, or that Antonucci had taken his remark out of context, saying that, “Perhaps the loss of context is a reference to other reporting that quoted my interview with him.”

The note went ignored, apparently. You can read the full mail sent to the Guardian after the break, which includes a full transcript of the interview in question. We’ve bolded the section containing the quote.

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Following this week’s news that wary glances are being cast behind the scenes of Tanja Byron’s upcoming report, British national daily The Guardian is this morning carrying, “Ministers plan clampdown on ‘unsuitable’ video games” as its main headline.

The story mirrors earlier reports this week in that it claims the Byron Report is to recommend a legal classification system for all games, but goes into further detail about plans to advise parents to not allow children to play games in their bedrooms and to only let them use computers and games consoles in places where the screens are clearly visible.

According to the piece, “A legally enforceable, cinema-style classification system is to be introduced for video games in an effort to keep children from playing damaging games unsuitable for their age… Under the proposals it would be illegal for shops to sell classified games to a child below the recommended age.

“At present only games showing sex or ‘gross’ violence to humans or animals require age limits. That leaves up to 90% of games on the market, many of which portray weapons, martial arts and extreme combat, free from statutory labelling.

Ministers are expected to advise parent to keep computers and games consoles away from children’s bedrooms as much as possible, and ask them to play games in living rooms or kitchens facing outwards so carers can see what is being played.”

The report doesn’t mention the BBFC as being the body to handle a new classification system, instead leading with a strap of, “New rating scheme devised.” Currently, only a handful of games are classified by the BBFC, with most in the UK carrying the voluntary PEGI rating.

The Byron Report, due next month, includes a lengthy review of studies into the effects of games on children, and has been discussed with the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Ministers are now said to have a “sense of the report’s direction”, said the Guardian’s piece, on which the article is based.