Lemmings: My Childhood Joy

Remember Lemmings? Not the PS3 remake done by the brilliant Team17. The classic one. This one:

I used to love this game as a kid. I had a CD-ROM of Lemmings when I was a kid. I loved it, and it was probably the only game that I would play that wasn't edutainment. A classic, sold like hot cakes and spawned several sequels. In fact, that CD-ROM not only had Lemmings. It had the sequel, Oh No! More Lemmings! and Lemmings Paintball.

In case you don't know, Lemmings was a game where you had to tell a particularly dim group of creatures what to do in order to get from the beginning of the level to the end of the level.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get any of the puzzles, so I had to use walkthroughs. But it was still excellent and so was Oh No! More Lemmings!.

Oh No! More Lemmings was more of the same puzzling goodness. Which was good, because there's only so many times you can play a level.

Also, Lemmings Paintball was excellent.

Throwing away the original puzzle based job assigning task, the player now controlled one or more Lemmings (you could only control one at a time). Your goal was to get, once again, from the starting point to the end flag. But now, instead of the Lemmings being one united force together for an ultimate goal of freedom, there were enemy Lemmings. Garbed in red shirts, these villainous fools would shoot you on sight with their paintball guns. Fortunately, you also had a paintball gun. So, you had to blast your way through the enemies and get past what ever tricks, traps or trampolines (Yes, there were trampolines) to get to the end flag.

I just wanted to get nostalgic about Lemmings. Unfortunately, we'll never see another PC Lemmings game again, because Sony bought up Psygnosis. Which sucks. Oh well, guess I'll just have to download the games on Abandonia.

Michael Atkinson: Removing Our Freedom Of Choice

Well, it seems like Michael Atkinson won't stop banning our media. Recently, Atknison decided to slip in a law for South Australia that states that a video purchase or rent place cannot advertise R18+ movies, or have flyers and posters. Films bearing the R18+ rating will have their DVD covers replaced with blank covers that just state the movie's title. This could possibly lead to the end of informed choices about critically acclaimed films such as Three Kings and Fight Club.

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Michael Atkinson is best known for his opinions on censorship and ratings, and his most famous fight is against the R18+ rating for video games. And with any new law comes the punishments, and this one has really stupid ones. If you show a poster or a flyer for an R18+ rated movie, you could get fined up to $5000! But take Fight Club for example, it's cover is a bar of soap! Offensive, no! Also, if you do show the cover, it has to be in a closed off area like the adult sections we're used to seeing for pornography. Michael Atkinson doesn't seem to understand that FREEDOM OF CHOICE is a something that we all have. Cutting out the covers of R18+ films is chopping away our freedom of choice.

Movie places are saying that they only just heard about the law.

SUBJECT CHANGE!

As I mentioned earlier in the article, Michael Atkinson has fought a battle against an R18+ rating for video games. He says that interactive games media is more dangerous than films or TV because the player is actually doing the violent act rather than watching it. But little does he know that more adults are playing than children. In a study done by Bond University, results showed that the average age of gamers was 30. And that having that rating would stop less games getting banned and children not able to play them. But Michael Douchebag Atkinson thinks "Oh no! Children could get damaged! We can't have the rating!". But by not having the rating, you're allowing less games to come across our shores and thus RESTRICTING OUR FREEDOM OF CHOICE!

But, luckily, there are like-minded people who care. A group of gamers called 'Gamers 4 Croydon' are planning to run against Atkinson and hopefully eliminate him. I hope that this group accomplishes their goals and I wish them the best of luck.

An interview by IGN with the gaming group.