R18+ Rating For Computer Games Close

The Gillard Government appears to be ready to embrace the notion of an R18+ rating for adult computer games, after a review found there was little evidence of a strong link between violent computer games and violent crime or aggressive behavior.

The Minister for Home Affairs and Justice, Brendan O'Connor, released the review yesterday.

It comes shortly before a standing committee of attorneys-general from across Australia discuss the issue at a meeting in Canberra on Friday December 10.
Under consideration is a proposal to introduce the R18+ classification, restricting sales and viewing of adult games to people aged 18 and over. At present, since they are refused classification, such games cannot be sold in Australia.

O'Connor appeared to be amenable to the new category in his remarks yesterday.

"We need a classification system that protects young minds from any possible adverse affect, while also ensuring that adults are free to make their own decisions about what they play, within the bounds of the law," he said, adding: "I'm keen to proceed with making this important decision, based on solid and robust evidence."

From the linkosphere: An Extremely Interesting History of Game Packaging. That's the name of the article. I only found it somewhat interesting.

I've finished with Flame of Vengeance and ought to have the review up tomorrow.

You may recall that last year I picked up Divinity 2: Ego Draconis and considered it 'one-third of an awesome game.' I was thrilled to read about the Flames of Vengeance expansion that would supposedly finish the story of the Dragon Knight.

Flame of Vengeance was to arrive in August but got pushed to November. It then came out as part of the Dragon Knight Saga, which is a graphically enhanced version of Ego Draconis and the expansion bundled together. As far as I can tell, there's no way for owners of the original game to simply buy the expansion pack, but Dragon Knight Saga is only $39.99.

After instillation, I attempted to load up my last save so I could jump into Flames of Vengeance, but the game says my old saves are all 'wrong version.' I can create a fresh, high-level character for FoV, but I might as well replay the original game. It's been almost a year but I do recall I wanted to try out something other than the basic melee build I originally used.

Unfortunately, the 'enhanced graphical engine' still gives me a black screen when I pick my PC's native 1680x1050 resolution and attempts to reset to 640x400. My video card doesn't even support that. Why in the world would a modern game even acknowledge the existence of such a screen resolution?

I do what I had to do in the first game and open: C:/Users/LSN/AppData/Local/Divinity2/Profile/graphicoptions.xml

And manually set my resolution.

The game doesn't support screen capture, so it's FRAPS time.

Despite my issues, I will say that the game itself is already faster. In the original, the main menu would appear and then I'd have to wait 15-30 seconds before I could interact with it. The time to load the character creation screen is also faster.

Dragon Age II Items

If you sign up for the BioWare/Dragon Age newsletter, BioWare will give you codes for two DLC items in Dragon Age II, the Staff of Parthalan and Hindsight, a magical belt. You need to have a BSN or EA account.

To get the Staff, click here and sign-up for the newsletter. They'll mail you a code but it's taking a month for some reason.

To get Hindsight, click here, click Get Your DAII Penny Arcade Belt, and sign up to the newsletter *again*. This item will automatically appear in your game promotions.

Comments: I signed up and immediately was sent 2 DA II newsletters + EA newletter. Others have not gotten any newsletters. I don't know why they didn't automatically add the Staff of Parthalan to your promotions. I guess Hindsight is 20/20?

The Hindsight belt promotion shows for the X-Box 360 and PC, but not the PS3. That does make me wonder if they're having problems with PS3 accounts.

BioWare Loot

It occurred to me while writing my Fallout: New Vegas review that BioWare sent my current video card. I won it in the community event they had in April, but it seems like something a game review should mention, yes?

Sadly, though I've only had it for five months, light grays have started to turn pink. Whites, blues, reds, yellows, blacks – fine. Light gray? Slightly pink. It's an ATI Radeon HD 5770.

Blog Update

You might have noticed, but I went incognito in the spring and have just resurfaced like a terrible sea creature rising from the irradiated depths to devour the scrumptious inhabitants of New Tokyo.

If you see this as a good thing, thank
1) swirlwind, a woman at the BSN who was kind enough to say she would like to read a review of New Vegas from me,
2) Monster Import, which I devoured an entire can of while I wrote the review, and
3) The Myst Series soundtrack.

Preamble, the skipable part

In May of 2004, I learned that a new development studio, Obsidian, would develop the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic. Like Trokia, the developers at Obsidian were former Black Isle employees. Specifically, they were known for working on two respected games in the RPG field: Fallout and Planescape: Torment.

My perception of their games was as follows.
Fallout 1 and 2 – Never played them
Planescape: Torment – Excellent
Icewind Dale- I bought it when it came out, created a group, got one quest to kill goblins, killed those goblins, and then uninstalled the game. I never attempted to play it again because no gameplay element appealed to me.

Arcanum - Very good
Temple of Elemental Evil – It looked like another Icewind Dale, so I never picked it up
Vampire: Bloodlines – Very good

I looked forward to Knights of the Old Republic 2, got it the day it came out, called in sick to work, and played through in one 26 hour sitting. KotOR 2 was a great game… in places. It was fascinating, interesting, and stylish but some aspects of it were quite disappointing.

I was still a fan of Obsidian and looked forward to their next game. Unfortunately, I found Neverwinter Nights 2 to be more of a disappointment. I've heard praise for Mask of the Betrayer. I ought to play through it someday, but doubt I will do so. I own Alpha Protocol. I even installed it. I never played it and it's currently sitting in a plastic bin with a bunch of other games that I ought to organize.

I did eventually play Fallout 2. There was a great deal about it I liked, but I found the combat cumbersome. I played for 20 some hours before I hit one of the harder fights, and after several tries, and getting killed by my squadmates repeatedly, I set the game aside and didn't pick it back up.

I didn't panic when I heard Bethesda picked up Fallout 3 but I did adjust my expectations. I had played Morrowind and Oblivion, the first of which I thoroughly enjoyed. Bethesda can make good RPGs, they just can't make strong main plots or interesting NPCs. I never 'finished' Fallout 3, but that's because I abandoned the main plot as soon as I could and only rejoined it when I had to or I happened to stumble across the right NPC. I hear it had something to do with my Father and water.

That leads me to…

The Review

Fallout: New Vegas is a great RPG. It's the RPG that I've waited six years for Obsidian to create. I was prepared to like it, but I was not prepared to love it. It's the best open world RPG I've played. (Beats Morrowind) It's the best first person RPG I've played. (Beats Deus Ex) Is it the top of my RPG list? Possibly. Ask me in a year when the luster has worn off.

Two caveats to the above. One, I live in Las Vegas. I live a one block from the strip and there is a certain 'neat!' factor to roaming around a post-apocalyptic version of your own backyard. Two, I haven't played a good game in awhile. Assassin's Creed 2 in March would be my last one.

That's seven months without a good game. It's a bit like being abstinent for seven months and then having sex; I'm inclined to like it more than usual.



Fallout: New Vegas is not the type of RPG I like. In general, I prefer story-driven RPGs like Dragon Age or the Witcher. Open world RPGs are a bit more touchy. I want to explore, but if it's something like Oblivion where I feel I have to hike five miles from one place to the next, I quickly get bored.


New Vegas gives you with the feeling of a desolate wasteland, but packs it with stuff. It's a delicate balance. The only time walking distances managed to make me cranky was when the game kept me up passed 2 am, which is generally when any game element can make me cranky.

The graphics are rough. I am fine with this. If you're not, there are already a number of mods available already to tinker with them. Given the overall quality of the game, I was surprised at all the new art assets. Yes, many objects are the same, but when it comes to the environment, there's a great deal of new content.

There are several new Vaults and all but one is a treat. There's the Science Experiment Run Amuck Vault, the Sinister Moral Dilemma Vault, and the Zombies Attack! Vault.

Bizarrely, many Vaults are flooded with water. This makes no sense because the setting is *a desert*. Rainfall is rare, storms are incredibly rare, and while flooding happens, it rarely lasts more than a few days. It begs the imagination as to how one vault designed to withstand a nuclear bomb might suffer massive water damage underground and remain flooded for years, let alone three.



Combat is much like Fallout 3 though thankfully not every death is accompanied by a gory and slow-mo moment. You get companions early and the humans are well done though the AI can be horribly aggressive. I entered one Vault, stood near the enters and just waited to see what my companions would do. As I stood there, they cleaned out the first floor (even opening doors to do so) and started on the second before returning to me.

Fallout: NVneeds to place a marker on the local map for fallen companions because they frequently run off to battle something you hadn't notice and then die. Several times I would be running along only for the [Cass has fallen unconscious!] message to pop up. I'd backtrack and find her lying among a group of giant radscorpians that she'd taken on with only a 10mm pistol.

Oh, I gave her a shotgun, but earlier I'd used my sniper rifle to take out a large group of Fiends. Cass, bless her heart, had decided to charge them, firing round after round while she was still a half mile away. She possibly did no damage, but she easily ate through the 40 slugs I'd scavenged. After running out of ammo (though still not at their base), she then stood there furiously cocking and reloading her shotgun while going "Fuck! Out of ammo!" "Fuck! Out of ammo!" "Fuck! Out of ammo" (I somehow heard this clearly though she was nowhere near me) until a Fiend armed with an incinerator popped out and fried her.

Screen Note: [Cass has fallen unconscious!]

That said, the companions are likable, interesting and, when the AI works, incredibly useful. If your PC wants to focus on soft skills instead of combat, the companions level up with you and are all designed around combat so you can sit back while they kill shit.

Can I heap more praise on this game? Yes.

The plot is interesting. The sidequests are varied and the minor NPCs well done. I like the various factions, though the game needs to be clearer about the difference between Karma and Reputation. I killed a bunch of Powder Gangers, which lowered my Rep with them but increased my Karma. I then took their stuff, which lowered my Karma because apparently stealing from dead outlaws makes you a bad person.

Speech, Medicine, Barter, and Repair all make frequent appearances in the dialogue, but you'll also see Sneak, Survival, Charisma, and Intelligence on occasion. There's a perk called 'Terrifying Presence' which I've only seen once, and it didn't do anything. There's also something I call the 'I'm a lesbian' perk, which gives you +10% damage to female characters and extra speech options in regards to…being queer. They're not always flirtatious or romantic, and one wonders how liking women helps you do more damage to them. (You're intimately familiar with female anatomy?)

I like the music, though there seems to be less variety than Fallout 3 and I quickly turned off the radio. Mr. New Vegas isn't as interesting as Three Dog though Wayne Newton does a good job.

(On a side note, Mr. Newton agreed to come to an event my company sponsored but didn't show up. I *still* get the occasional angry e-mail from men who came simply to see Mr. Newton and say we lied about him coming.)



I've heaped praises on this game. Is there anything I'd change? Yah. The bug that won't let me finish after 50 hours of playing.

Oh Obsidian. I was waiting for this throughout the game. You've given me 50 hours of interesting, fun gameplay along with an enjoyable story and the feeling as though the world was really reacting to my decisions. Now, however, whenever I step onto the Strip, I'm attacked by a swarm of robots who have missiles and grenades. And my ally, the one I've worked with since the beginning, now will no longer speak with me, and the main questline is marked as FAILED.

Why? There are two possibilities. It seems the turrets of a random Vault are marked as part of the Strip's faction. Therefore, even though they automatically target you, if you destroy them, you're marked as hostile. In addition, it seems that if you tell a companion to return home, they're attacked for some reason when they try to enter the Strip where the home base is. When they defend themselves, again, the PC is marked as hostile.

I've done both of these things in the ten hours since I was last on the Strip. Yes, I have a save, but it's been *ten real time hours* since I went to the Strip last.

For now, I'm uninstalling and waiting for a patch. I know one has come out already. I tell myself that in a month, another will come out, I'll reinstall, and play through the entire thing without a hitch.

Flames of Vengeance

Hamburg/Germany, March 04th, 2010 – Aleroth, once a war-torn city, now holds the next challenges for computer role playing gamers. Rivellon, the world of Divinity II: Ego Draconis, is still not safe. In Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, the game’s official add on, players must face the evil once more.

Soon they’ll recognize that many of the characters they met in the main game aren’t who they pretended to be. Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance continues where Divinity II: Ego Draconis left off. "In Flames of Vengeance, the player picks up the story of the Dragon knight and guides him to his ultimate destiny. Along the way several accounts are settled, and the answers to many questions in the Divinity universe revealed. We've also taken the opportunity to give the engine a solid overhaul, improving performance and graphics quality along the way", Swen Vincke, Creative Director and CEO of the development team Larian Studios, explains.

Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, the official add on to Divinity II: Draconis, offers more than 30 questsand about 15 hours of gameplay.

Coming August 2010. Link to Announcement

LSN: (major spoilers for Divinity II)

Can I get a 'thank gawd?' The ending to Divinity II was pitiful - the entire game felt like 1/3 of an awesome game.

An example of this: When you become a Dragon Knight, your previous mentor, a Dragon Slayer, gives you a sword, tells you to kill yourself, and then orders three veteran Slayers to kill you if you can't do this. She leaves, supposedly because watching her previous protégée die is too hard for her. Instead, you kill the three Slayers. Later, she pops up again, furious at your betrayal and blaming her own weakness for the death of her men. You’re in a major city though and the Captain of the garrison orders her sent to a cell. She leaves, but vows she’ll find you again to avenge her fallen comrades.

Compelling stuff… and we never see her again. Divinity II is fun, but it has about a half-dozen plotlines that abruptly end with no closure.

Which leads to a question: Shouldn't this have been in the game to begin with?

I often think that I'm too easy with game companies. The ending to Divinity II made me unhappy. It's remarkable similar to the endings of the first two games in that 1) your hero's efforts are for naught, and 2) there's obviously more to the story. Moreover, the ending was abrupt. In the first two games, I felt like I’d gotten an entire story, abet one that didn’t end as I’d like.

As soon as I saw the ending to Divinity II, I knew that the next game would be a continuation, not a new story. I sat there wondering if the developer’s funding had just run out – and I still suspect that’s exactly what happened.

So, how do I feel about Flames of Vengeance? I want it. I want the closure the first game didn’t give me, but should have. This makes me an idiot. I should in no way, shape, or form encourage developers to rush a game out the door and then finish the story in an expansion. At the same time, I understand. Making a game is not cheap; it’s very expensive and it takes time. I would rather a developer release half a story with the time and money they have, than go into debt and possibly lose their business.

What *actually* bothers me the most about this is that one of the best elements of the game is now gone. I’m speaking about the Dragon Knight Talana who jumps into the PC’s head at the beginning of the game. She was a helpful companion who I never had to check the inventory of, control in combat, or give gifts to in order to increase her loyalty rating. I consider Talana up there with GLADoS in the acerbic running commentary department, but now she’s gone.

I might as well download the 1.03 Patch and play through with another character. I did a two-handed warrior my first play-though and want to explore the magic spells.

Oh, I could even take screen shots and do a review this time if I were so inclined.

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From that other blog: A positive review of World War Z.

It’s the snowy season, which means LSN spends most of her time huddled under snowy tarps in the forest or running across ice covered lakes. It’s also the New Year despite the fact that it’s the DEAD OF WINTER, and it doesn’t feel as though anything new has begun at all. This is because about two-thousand years ago, the Roman consul assumed their position in January, then the eleventh month. The Romans originally celebrated New Year in the spring and that makes far more sense to me, but I’m not a Roman consul so my opinion on the matter is meaningless.

The best part about the New Year is sitting down and budgeting my expenses for the coming year. When it comes to video games, I like to think of this as listing all the cool stuff I look forward to getting this year! (It doesn’t work so good for utility, rent, and car insurance. )

My list so far looks like this:

January –
Mass Effect 2
Divinity 2: Ego Draconis

February –
BioShock 2
Splinter Cell: Conviction

March –
Assassin’s Creed 2

May –
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Spring –
Alpha Protocol

Unknown –
Arcania: A Gothic Tale
Fallout: New Vegas
Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty
Star Wars: The Old Republic
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm


Mass Effect 2 is coming about twenty days! I just finished a paragon FemShep run to import into the game. I don’t know if I should do another run and try to get to level 60, or if I should dust off Splinter Cell: Double Agent and finish it.

What cool games are you looking forward to playing this year?

... ain't bad.



From a great tribute to E. Gary Gygax.

"Back before fangirls existed anywhere but our imagination"

Eh, I know fangirls in their early fifties who played the blue box dude.

A new study led by Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, revealed that in some cases every male geek gamer's fantasy may be true -- some girls really are closet gaming freaks.

The study, published in the Journal of Communication, and available here (PDF), examined the gaming habits of females and males playing the popular Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (MMORPG) EverQuest II.

The sample group was quite large, consisting of responses from 7,000 logged in players. There were many surprises in the results. First, the gaming wasn't dominated by kids -- in fact the average age was 31. More interestingly still, older gamers tended to spend more hours on the game per week.

And female gamers spent, on average, far more hours than their male counterparts. Top female players logged 57 hours a week, while top male players only logged 51 hours a week. And on average, girls logged 29 hours a week versus 25 hours for males.

Age isn't the only thing women tend to lie about, according to the survey. More women than men responded that they lied to their friends and loved ones about how much time they played.

Other dark elf slayers/professors and grad students that participated in the study included Mia Consalvo, Scott Caplan, and Nick Yee.


Original article

LSN: Not that anyone gives a damn about Everquest. But yah! Women can waste more time than men on the monotonous grinding that is MMORPGs.

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Squeenix CEO Calls Out Japanese Gamers on Western Bias

The relationship of Japan and the West when it comes to video games is a strange one, and Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has spoken at length on the subject more than once. Wada clearly admires the Western game industry, mentioning that he wants to see his native Japan follow suit with more games made for adults, and - like many other Japanese developers - has obviously been mulling over how Japanese game makers can market their titles to Western gamers more successfully instead of dealing with a relatively small, insulated market.

But for the moment, Wada isn't concerned with how to market his company's games in the West, but with the exact opposite: In an interview with Japanese TV posted to YouTube, Wada expressed frustration with Japanese gamers' resistance to Western titles, in part due to the country's collective "meh" to Modern Warfare 2, which Activision handed off to Square-Enix to publish in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Specifically, Wada has an issue with the Japanese term youge- (洋ゲー), the word used to refer to titles made in the West as opposed to Japanese-made games, or geimu (ゲーム - yeah, it's just the word "game"). By differentiating between the two, Japanese gamers are essentially saying that Western games aren't actually games, and the Square-Enix boss doesn't like it.

"Even now, there have been people in Japan using the label youge- (Western games) with a terribly discriminatory meaning," said Wada. "I'd like them to try it once. If they play it once, they'd realize how incorrect that label is."

There's no doubt that Wada has a bit of a personal investment in the matter considering that strong sales of MW2 would benefit his company's coffers, but considering his previous statements on the matter it's not hard to believe that the man genuinely wants Japan's gamers and game makers alike to broaden their borders in more ways than one.

The Escapist

LSN: And after this fair-minded and progressive message, the Escapist encourages people to play a Ching Chong Beautiful, a really damn racist browser game for the holidays.