games

Some sad news out of Australia: Rather than encourage adult gamers to keep up the pressure on South Australia's game and freedom hating Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson, Bethesda Softworks is modifying Fallout 3 for Australia due to the lack of an 18+ rating in that country.

In other words, should we tell countries like Germany or Australia to "sod off" and rely on the people living in those countries to agitate or illegally import and play computer games, rather than deal with their stupidly authoritarian censorship ratings boards?

I devised this quite some time ago, back when Fallout was new, and I had played through it once or twice. The SPECIAL system that Fallout used for play had this interesting turn-based combat system, where characters would have up to ten points per round to spend on various actions. What I've done is take off the cap, and have things move more "real-time" (in the strategy game sense).

On Saturday, I took part in a D&D launch event at my local library, in which 4th edition was demonstrated. Participants were given a d20 and a special D&D miniature (mine's an 11 point Elf Warlock, 4eGD 4/5). After we were given an explanation of the rules, all us participants got to fight a colossal white dragon in order to let us get used to how combat now plays out. After fighting the dragon (which we didn't have time to kill, but we did defeat), we participants were split into two groups to run through our Game Day adventure.

Sad news comes to us from Rock Paper Shotgun: Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away. He was 69.

It was that great creation of his that helped open my eyes to the possibility of gaming. And not only my eyes – many of the RPGs we play on the computer and consoles these days owe much to Dungeons & Dragons, and ultimately to Gygax and his collaborator Dave Arneson.

Via GameSetWatch, comes news of Toronto's No Media Kings setting up what they call the Artsy Games Incubator.

Over on the Shell Blog, David Vronay discusses some of the work that went into bringing Minesweeper into the 21st century. It's absolutely hilarious, what the design team and programmers at Microsoft went through just to make the game continue to be acceptable. Also good for a laugh is Raymond Chen's coverage and the comments on his blog post.

Now that Iris, the ARG created for marketing Halo 3, has completed, there's been quite a bit of examination of the game (which GameSetWatch summarizes nicely). As there are doings a-transpirin' regarding ARG coverage at the conference, I was interested in reading about how the game played out, and the usual postmortem stuff (what went right & wrong).

With this week, notable online game magazine The Escapist starts it's third year of publication! Unfortunately, part of the celebrations of this anniversary have included killing what made it so unique.

Five days ago, Shacknews put up an interview with my friend and fellow TIGC exec Julian Spillane, about his company's current project, Hippasus. It's a pretty interesting read, and the game itself is damn fascinating.