As a teenager I used to have the biggest crush on Nicole Kidman. In fact, I told myself that if the majority of Australian girls looked even half as hot as her I was going to move there when I grew up. Lucky for me and my unhealthy gaming addition, I never grew up.

The Australian Game Ratings Board has struck again pretty much rendering Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2, a terrifically gore-filled zombie hacking blood fest, into a body vanishing mess that even a trained CSI couldn’t extract DNA from. Bravo Australia, I will never eat at another Outback restaurant again.

As you can see below in the Left 4 Dead comparison video featuring pre-censorship and post-censorship gameplay, the experience is pretty much garbage now.

The Australian games ratings board have refused to classify Left 4 Dead 2 for release. Because the game features a lot of blood and gore, it is only suitable for those who are 18 and over. Because the Australian ratings board (the OFLC) is ridiculous, they do not have an 18+ rating. Therefore, Left 4 Dead 2 is banned from being sold in Australia.

Because of the stupid and backwards system in place in Australia, the game must either lose all of its sales or cut out most of the mature content in order to secure a 15+ rating. I know that many are campaigning for a separate ratings board for games in Australia, and I wish them the best of luck- even if all they can hope for is an 18+ rating for now, that’s a start. As if they don’t suffer enough from price hikes and late releases.

Sega reps won’t be showing the extreme gore-fest MadWorld at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, mostly due to the fact that it may be too extremely gore-festy for Japanese audiences.  The game is being developed with a western audience in mind and will only be evaluated for a release elsewhere if it becomes a hit.

Japan-based Platinum Games, developer of MadWorld, is said to be be working closely with the ESRB.  They want to make the ESRB feel like “part of the process” and they “don’t want to surprise them”.  Basically, they want the game to be as violent as possible and are pushing to see where the ESRB draws the line.

This level of violence obviously doesn’t go over well with those pussy censors in places like Australia and Germany, so those countries are not currently in the running to receive a localized retail release.  Oddly, even Japan is not being targeted for some MadWorld action.

Platinum Games and Sega are mainly focused on making MadWorld a huge, bloody hit for the Wii when it releases in North America in March ‘09 and, depending on how successful it is, will consider releases in other countries sometime down the road.

Tough call on this one.  Most Wii owners are the proverbial “casual gamers” like my sister and her 7-year-old, and I don’t see either one of them being a likely fan of the game.  Sure, there are plenty of parent gamers out there that used their kids as a cover for buying a Wii, and maybe they would appreciate some intestine-ripping action, but people like me who think the game looks awesome, well… I don’t own a Wii.

What do you think?  Even if MadWorld were a good game, would that be enough to get the numbers given it’s violent nature?

Source: MTV Multiplayer

The Australian government has reversed a ban on the forthcoming Fallout 3 due to gamer objections.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification originally had banned Fallout 3 due to its in-game drug use, rendering the game illegal for sale in Australia.

However, the game was resubmitted to the OFLC with changes in the game that allowed it to be reclassified to a MA +15 rating.

The ruling came as the game depicted the player receiving beneficial effects due to drug use, such as morphine, while in combat. The OFLC also cites the realistic depictions of drug paraphernalia led to its ban.

Australia, whose videogame rating system boarders on the antiquated, has similarly banned other games that conflict with their classification system such as Shellshock 2: Blood Trails and Dark Sector.

Dark Sector was modified and according to the OFLC will be released for mass market in the near future.

Source: gamespot.com

An Australian man was arrested recently after he convinced a 15-year-old girl he met while playing World of WarCraft to run away from home to be with him. He even paid for the trip. How sweet.

The 31-year-old Anthony Taylor formed a relationship with the less-than-half-his-age girl, which eventually led to sexual messages and phone calls.  The girl’s father found out about the relationship and threatened to kill Anthony, so Anthony did what any self-respecting pedophile would do — he sent her a plane ticket and some money to cover the cab fare.

Obviously, the girl’s father doesn’t let her go, so Anthony is met at the airport by police instead. They question him about the girl, at which time he admits he “thought the age could be a problem.”  Really, you think?

Anthony is then brought before a judge, where we find out some interesting facts about his raiding past.  Turns out he met his current real-life girlfriend online, though thankfully she’s 27, and he has fathered a child with yet another girl who happens to be under the age of 16.

Anthony pleads guilty to “child stealing” and is sentenced to, and I shit you not, a “seven-month non-custodial intensive corrections order”. I don’t know what that means, but it certainly doesn’t sound like enough.

With rulings such as this, it seems to me that Australia is now the place for lovers… of underage teens at least. Virginia will be confiscating your wallabies since you stole their motto, and hopefully some of that old-fashioned redneck justice makes it down under as well.

Source: news.com.au

Attention all gamers! Fill your mugs up with game fuel and strap on your fingerless gloves, because the 2008 Championship Gaming Series (CGS) dates have been announced for the North American Season and World Final. 

The events will run for two months starting on June 2nd and continuing through to July 28th. Eight teams from around the world will meet in Los Angeles to compete in the World Championship for a chance to win $1,000,000 in prize money, with a payout of $500,000 to the winning team.

For gamers in the States interested in watching CGS’ North American Season, it will be broadcast live in high definition via DIRECTV starting June 2nd. For Ripten.com readers outside of the US, the broadcast can be found in UK on BSkyB, in Asia on STAR and ESPN-STAR, and on STAR in Australia. The CGS’ website will be airing additional videos from the competition throughout the summer.

Currently, the CGS is the only established professional video game league. Formed in 2007, the league consists of the best gamers around the world, from countries such as North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.

The CGS is a wonderful start in the growing effort toward legitimizing video games as more than mere toys. For the entire summer schedule of events please visit the CGS website by following this link: Champion Gaming Series’ 2008 Schedule of Events.

Debra McGrath of EB Games Australia, the largest games retailer in the country, has recently announced that the PS3 version of Grand Theft Auto 4 is just ahead of the Xbox 360 version in terms of pre-sales.

Following that statement the National Marketing Manager of Gametraders, Chad Polley went on to say “According to the figures we have at the moment, we’re [pre-]selling two PS3 versions for every one 360 unit.”

If this trend is replicated around the globe, surely Microsoft isn’t going to be happy about the 50 million dollar DLC deal with Take-Two as an incentive for people to choose the Xbox version. However, Microsoft could have the last laugh if they manage to sell significant quantities of downloadable content at a later date.

The latest reports from the UK suggest the trend doesn’t seem to be confined to just Australia. Speaking to MCV.UK, Asda’s Duncan Cross said,

Both titles have generated great interest on the Asda website, with strong pre-orders, and the PS3 version is selling three times that of 360, which is surprising and not in line with what we’d expect.

Then again, online retailers tell a different story. If you take a look at the bestsellers on Amazon.co.uk GTAIV on Xbox 360 is first and the PS3 version is second.

The game is expected to spur sales of both consoles accross the globe, but Patcher tells Reuters that the game could result in 2 million more PS3 sales in comparison to only 1 million Xbox 360s. “I think PS3 ‘wins’ this battle,” Pachter said.

However, this needn’t be reflective of game sales, mainly due to the Xbox 360’s already larger install base. Jesse Divinch predicts that US sales of the game will be 2:1 in favour of the Xbox 360:

If there is a correlation between the GamerMetrics data and the U.S. NPD data (and there somewhat is), I estimate that we are going to see a GTA IV sales ratio of anywhere between 2.2 to 2.7 in favor of the Xbox 360 – which is also in the same ballpark of the current Xbox 360 to PS3 lifetime-to-date hardware sales ratio of 2.4.

Only time will tell.

Source: Gamespot, MCV.UK, Reuters and Gamasutra

After a solid two weeks with Dark Sector, I feel fully qualified to make this statement with absolute certainty: I played Dark Sector. That’s honestly as objective as I can be, but if you want to know my true feelings of the game, please continue.

For anyone not in the know and/or recovering coma patients, let me explain what Dark Sector is. Dark Sector is a third-person shooter/body part dismemberment simulator (except in Australia, where you instead throw rainbows at people who react with sprays of chocolate and hugs). Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. I’ll explain…

Let me first start by saying that Dark Sector is by no means a bad game. That being said, let me go over the things I didn’t like about it.

First and foremost, it doesn’t feel right. That’s a highly subjective thing to say and something a good many people will disagree with, but I’m sure many people will completely agree with me on this as well. Hayden Tenno, your avatar in the game, feels sluggish and slightly unresponsive at times. Then at other times, he does exactly what I’m trying to make him do. This inconsistency baffles me, and while it isn’t a design flaw, there are plenty of those as well.

My biggest peeve is that I have to look straight down to smash open an ammo box at my feet, which results in me kicking it instead of doing my usual glaive-swinging melee move. Of course I can just throw my glaive at the box, or even shoot the box (I’m a genius, I know), but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to stare straight down if I want to kick it.

In the grand scheme of things, these control issues are relatively minor. It still says something about the polish of the game in that it could have used perhaps a bit more of it. There are, however, other control issues that a lot of reviewers seem to have a problem with.

A lot of people complained about the cover system, which I totally disagree with. Compared to Gears of War, Dark Sector’s cover system is superior, though both games are inferior to Rainbow Six Vegas. Like Gears of War, Dark Sector’s running and covering mechanic both work with the same button. In Gears of War, sprinting into a wall made you press against it and take cover — Dark Sector requires that you push the button again to take cover.

While all the whiny kids out there will complain about the extra work involved in hitting the cover button again (the horror!), Dark Sector’s system prevents you from sticking to walls that you are intending to run past. This is a problem that frequently pissed me off in Gears multiplayer (among other things — I’m looking at you, mister shotgun), and has lead to me never wanting to play GOW multiplayer ever again (which Chad can attest to).

Speaking of multiplayer, Dark Sector’s multiplayer is a bit of a letdown. You basically have a choice between VIP and Team VIP. Infection (VIP) has one character as a tricked-out Hayden while the rest of the fools play as sorry-ass hazmat soldiers. The entire point is to kill Hayden, in which case the round ends and you become Hayden. This means that while you are a hazmat soldier, you have only one enemy, and instead of working with the other hazmat players to bring Hayden down as intended, you are competing to get the kill shot. You are basically encouraged to kill-steal.

Epidemic is the same thing except you have two teams, each with one Hayden, and the point is to kill the Hayden on the other team. This mode is highly preferred over Infection, but it still begs the question: Why is there no deathmatch mode where all characters are beefed-up bad-asses?

Another letdown is the story. I don’t mean to say the story is bad, but it really is hard to spot the story enough to tell whether or not it’s bad. There is apparently a lot of history prior to the game’s opening, a history that isn’t fully explained. A comic book that was supplied to me by D3 does give a brief history lesson on Lasria and the unexplained outbreak of the infection, but Hayden remains a mystery.

Finally, the icing on the cake is that the book is only 7 pages with 2 additional pages for the credits (although it’s in 3 languages, so it’s actually 25 pages total). Not counting the table of contents, end user license agreement, and customer support information, the actual instruction booklet is a measly 3 pages. Three pages! Maybe I’m alone in this, but I like sweaty, meaty manuals with big muscles, not these pamphlets we get nowadays — it just feels cheap.

Now that I’ve said all that, you’re probably thinking that I didn’t much enjoy the game. Well, you’re wrong. Despite its shortcomings, Dark Sector is actually a pretty good ride. It is basically the equivalent of a Michael Bay flick — lots of action and explosions with little or no story. Dark Sector’s explosions are mainly of the arterial kind, but the action keeps you interested despite the fact that there is little context to it.

There were so many jokes I thought of for this picture that I couldn’t decide on one…
I compromised by making no joke at all.

The biggest draw would obviously have to be the glaive. Soon after Hayden becomes infected, he gets attacked by a guard and defends himself by birthing a giant ninja star from his hand, slicing his assailant’s chest, and then decapitating the poor motherfucker that walks in a second later. Awesome…

You soon learn the ability to pick up items with your glaive, and eventually you can steer your glaive after throwing it and cut off some limbs in slow-motion. This is one area where the PS3 version had a slight bit of extra cool in that you could use the tilt-sensing to steer the glaive, much like in Heavenly Sword. I personally found the analog stick to be more accurate, though, but that’s just me. I also find the 360 controller more comfortable in general since I’m not 12, nor do I have the misfortune of having little girly hands… but again, that’s just me.

The glaive is also used for a majority of your finishing moves. Wear down an enemy enough and they glow red, meaning you can finish them with a melee attack. These finishers consist of anything between gutting your foe to chopping off his arm or leg. Sneaking up behind enemies also nets you a one-hit kill, and is especially effective in multiplayer.

I also liked the art direction of the game (though I liked the sci-fi Hayden of the early version better), and the graphics themselves are pretty stellar. You may be fooled into thinking this is the Unreal Engine, but it’s not, and it actually runs much smoother. There is no graphical pop-in like in Gears or Mass Effect, and the load times throughout the game are generally only a few seconds.

I also liked how the game starts in black and white and pulses into color when you get infected. The controls after waking up are pretty neat as you stumble around all drunk-like. Clever girl…

Overall, Dark Sector is a good-not-great little game. It was entertaining, like a videogame is supposed to be, but it’s not going to win any awards or hold any special place in history (other than “first next-gen game” even though it came out after so many other next-gen games). If you’ve got a thing for decapitations, however, this game is for you — Dark Sector gives you more flying head than Paris Hilton on an airplane.

What does this score mean? Check out our review scoring breakdown.

It seems that Australia is all up in arms as of late over video game ratings and Rockstar has taken this as a reason to cut some mature material from the latest Grand Theft Auto title.

The folks at Rockstar have yet to reveal exactly what was cut; they’ve only confirmed that they have indeed cut content. What’s slightly bizarre about this is that GTAIV had already been reviewed and given an MA15+ rating, which means it’s A-Ok for store shelves, just not for young’uns. It would seem that the cuts weren’t necessary at all.

Back in December, our own Patrick Steen reported on this very rating, and remarked “So can we expect a tamer GTA experience? We don’t think so.”

As much as I would love to rub in his face how wrong he was, I would’ve agreed with him. Why did they make cuts?

Source: itwire

During GDC, the Ripten crew was privy to an exclusive invite-only shindig presented by the good people at D3Publishing. What did we do? Well, we sat down in front of some system-linked Xbox 360s and proceeded to tear the shit out of each other in a few rounds of Digital Extremes’ new game, Dark Sector.

Steve Sinclair, Project Lead for the game, ran through a bit of the single player with us first. He showed us what is essentially the tutorial, the events leading up to Hayden (Dark Sector’s main character) getting infected with awesomeness, and then skipped around to later levels to show us some upgraded bad-assery.

As you probably know by this point, Dark Sector is synonymous with “giant throwing star thingy that looks like it’s from Krull” — a reference to Hayden’s main weapon, the glaive. Later in the game, you can enter a bullet-time-like mode where the glaive flies through the air in slow motion and you get to steer it around like a UFO.

You can use this time to appropriately slice and dice your enemies, literally. Body parts are sent airborne in the process with a playful amount of gooey redness, just enough to make Jack Thompson weep for the children. Josh Austin, the game’s producer (and the guy holding the controller), said there is even an achievement for cutting off two heads in one throw! Slightly more understandable now as to why it’s banned in Australia, eh?

So after our appetites are adequately whetted (with the thirst for blood, no doubt), we are handed controllers and sent off to kill each other.

The game controls much as you would expect a third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter to control. It does feel slightly slower than, say, Gears of War, as if the character is a little floaty. Maybe I was just used to playing other games, but it didn’t matter — I got used to it in 5-10 minutes.

There were two multiplayer modes available: Infection and Epidemic. Infection pits one buffed-up Hayden character against a group of normals — regular old hazmat-suited soldiers. Whoever takes down Hayden becomes him in the next round. Epidemic is team-based, with one Hayden on each side. He serves as the team’s VIP — protect your Hayden while trying to kill the other team’s Hayden.

Both game types are fairly straightforward, but they offer something most other multiplayer games don’t: bots! Both game types can house up to 10 players, but if you don’t have (or want) enough actual people to play with you, you can fill out the remaining slots with AI-controlled fodder. This is a great feature, something I never understood why it wasn’t implemented in more games.

I was Hayden in the first round of Infection, and I got two kills before being gang-banged. After that it turned into an every-man-for-himself type of deal because everyone wanted to be Hayden. There was very little team play, but I think that’s just because everyone I was playing with was a selfish bunch of dicks. Then again, where’s the motivation to team up and take this guy down if your best bud becomes your enemy? It really is just an exercise in kill-stealing, but it was fun.

In Epidemic, my team was slaughtered repeatedly until I got my turn as Hayden. Once that happened, we won 5 rounds in a row before I was dethroned by a backstabbing insta-kill (sneaky bastards!). Steve showed me where to get a freeze power-up for my glaive, which I then used to “ice” one of my opponents. Ha, see what I did there with the words and stuff? Needless to say, Epidemic was the favored of the two modes.

Overall, the game looked fantastic and felt pretty solid. Steve and Josh both stressed that the single-player game will be constantly evolving, giving you more powers and more things to do. “Never stop learning,” they say. That’s what keeps people interested and driven forward. As for the multiplayer, it will ship with just the two modes, but more are being considered.

Dark Sector is scheduled for a March 25 release on the PS3 and Xbox 360, and I’m itching to play it again.

Dark Sector Screenshot Gallery

19 Photos