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.

Click here for a news article!

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.

Packages and Excitement

Last week I recieved a package. It's, well, let me show you.

This is awesome. For those of you who don't know, I'm a MASSIVE fan of the Homestar Runner cartoons. (If you have no knowledge about the awesome that is Homestar Runner, click here to learn.) 5 'episodes' (i.e. short and wonderfully wonderous games) that were originally available for download (as most/all Telltale Games are) from an online store (if you would like to buy these games, go here), but now crammed on to one disc. This disc, as are most other Telltale discs, is a hybrid disc. Put it in your computer to play the games and get some neat little treats for your computer, and stick it in your DVD player to get some fully and completely AWESOME video content.

It's innards. It also came with a neat little bonus.

An awesome little badge for use with your T-Shirt. Now, for my next trick....

Ta da! It's got an inverse cover! You can go from the flashy new version to a classic cover. I've currently got it set to classic. If you're a fan of Homestarrunner.com or you just like brilliant adventure games, go to telltalegames.com to get a free demo and try it out. Trust me, you will want to buy it after 2 minutes with it.

I'd also like to discuss two new apps that were announced at E3 2009. Facebook and Twitter. I can't wait for these! I'm signed up to both and to have them on my Xbox and making them nice and easy to use will be awesome! Also, the Last.FM thing doesn't matter to me that much. I do like the idea of streaming music, though. But, yeah. Facebook will be handy, I don't use it much but it'll be nice. And Twitter is going to be FANTASTIC!!! I use Twitter more than I do Facebook. It's quick, easy and simple to use that even a rat with half it's brain could use it. And the new design for the 360 also looks quite clean and easy to use. Button shortcuts, ASAP updates and avatar use is all friggin' brilliant! Thank you Twitter and Xbox. You've struck gold!

Also, as Twitter followers will know, I'm a bit of an idiot for buying SOMI:SE twice!

Asteroids: The Movie and Call of Juarez 2: Bound In Blood

(Other ramblings here and here)

Today I'd like to talk about two things that are happening in the game industry.

We've all seen terrible game-to-movie deals. They've all failed. Like the Super Mario Bros. movie where the turtles turned in to small dinosaurs (what the hell?) and then that god awful 2 hour long commercial for Nintendo known as 'The Wizard'. But now the Warner Bros. have gone and done it. They've bought the rights to the world's most boring video game. Asteroids. The main plot line of the game was.......well......there was no real plot line. You just sat there, firing small laser-bullets at a bunch of large rocks coming towards your face. What's the movie going to be about? Neil Armstrong sitting in a little spaceship firing laser-bullets at a bunch of rocks coming towards his face? Warner Bros., if you do happen to read this, I love a lot of your stuff, but you must have been undergoing some sort of brain transplant experiment whilst having this idea. This is going to be worse than Super Mario Bros. jacked up to HD.

Now, Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood. I've never played a Call of Juarez game before, probably will download the demo off of Steam later on (might do, might not). But from what I saw in Good Game's review, it looks a lot like Red Dead Revolver. The little scanning thing, the dueling, the whole thing looks a lot like Red Dead Revolver. I can tell that someone was copying from Rockstar. But because I've never played a Call of Juarez game, I can only rightfully say that Red Dead Revolver is the better game.