Game Ratings In Oz: Yes, We Suck

Kotaku put me on to a great post on abc.net.au by Tom Crago on the current Australian games classification system. Tom is the chief executive of Tantalus and president of the Game Developers' Association of Australia (GDAA) so you'd hope his words carry some weight.

Tom mentions that there are 2,000-odd game developers living and paying taxes (we hope) in Australia yet some of the games they work on can't be sold here due to the lack of an R rating (18+) for games using Fallout 3's effective banning as a good example.

One interesting quote is "Australia's absence of an R18+ category, and the financial imperative of getting a game onto store shelves in a timely manner, means that many games intended for adult audiences (and rated 18+ in other countries) are inappropriately shoehorned into the existing MA15+ category in Australia. Far from protecting minors from adult content, our uniquely incomplete classification system has allowed them, in many cases, to legally purchase and access such content.".

Read the entire thing, it's not long and points out how stupid our government (yes, even you KRudd) is in the eyes of the world.

Get That Last Guy

Man, I love the way the Japanese come up with whacky and wonderful new ways to play games. Take this online version of the upcoming PS3 game The Last Guy. The idea is to save everyone on screen by running around and letting them join your group. When you have enough followers take them to the Escape Zone but don't go too close to the bad guys or the little people will scatter or worse, you'll die.

What makes this fun is that you can choose pretty much any website to use as the play field. The whitespace acts as areas you can travel through with images and dark areas blocking your way. To get a feel for the game I recommend running around on Google or even my blog here.

There's a table of the most played sites on the front page of the Japanese site. Some of them are pretty hard.

Super Lazy Movie News

I'm too lazy to post separate entries for today's movie-related news so here's a nice list for you.

1. Brad Pitt is going to be in Quentin Tarantino's WWII epic, "Inglorious Bastards".

2. Mike Myers finally realises he is as crap as everyone says so decides to make Austin Powers 4, a Dr. Evil-centric "daddy" movie.

3. Mr Pixar, John Lasseter is the driving force behind getting Tron 2 (AKA TR2N) out which is going to be directed by first-time-feature director Joseph Kosinski.

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Qatar Hero III: Sheikh Your Tail Wing

Today's big waste-of-everything story comes from the land of excess where a wealthy Sheikh thought it'd be a great idea to send his black and gold Lambo LP640 in for an oil change. What makes this a big waste is that the Sheikh lives in Qatar and his 'local' service center is in London, UK.

Autoblog Green was suitably miffed by it all and brought to our attention that not only was there a lot of waste in getting it to and from London (apparently it cost $46,644 USD to ship) but the car itself is a big carbon farting machine.

Even the staff of the shipping companies thought it was total bollocks with an airport worker saying, "This car doesn't have a carbon footprint – more of a crater." A London-Heathrow cargo handler added, "It would have been far more efficient to fly mechanics out there.". No duh!

This on the same day as the announcement that Exxon posted record profits making a cool $1,500 USD per second in the last financial quarter. At least our petrol has dropped to around the $1.50/l mark (not that that's cheap but it's cheaper than it was).