So - Violence isn't all bad then...

It is pretty much a given in the media (and hence the general public opinion) that playing violent games makes you into a rapid, blood spilling murder. Apparently teen boys are already well on their way to committing a crazed, hate fueled massacre anyway and video games are the final straw that pushes them over the edge.

The general theory goes that shooting someone in a game is just like shooting someone in real life and you get desensitized to it. You start to think it is normal behaviour and before you know it your just wandering through your school shooting people like your mother walks down the shopping isle picking out Cheerios and apples.

Now I have always had an issue with the general theory. Mainly because when I want to kill a real person I find logging into a UT3 session and killing a few hundred fake ones almost does the trick. Since I haven't murdered anyone yet I think I am testament to games actually stopping boys from calmly mowing down their class mates.

Now someone has finally actually done some research on the oft vilified violent game and decided that they may not be all that bad.

The general gist is that most boys are violent crazies to begin with and allowing them to express all this violence in a fantastical way (through play, talking, or games) is vastly better than them losing it.

Apparently developing these violent tendencies is also important for a males mental growth. So if you deny your son an education in the violence you actually may be impairing their growth.

You can read about it in "The Trouble With Boys' by Peg Tyre. I have ordered myself a copy and will post my thoughts once I read it.

Cheers

G.

Games: Hinterland

So I picked up this cute little game on Impulse mainly because I was bored and it was incredibly cheap.



Hinterland is a little indie game that is a cross between a City building sim (like Rome) and a RPG Hack and Slash (like Diablo). Sure it is a scaled down version of each, but that is the general gist.



You play a lord of a tiny town stuck in the corner of a map made up of 'zones' filled with baddies. Most of the 'zones' offer some sort of resource to help out your town.



Visitors also wander into your town from time to time and you can recruit them by building them a house. They each have a profession and provide something to the town such as Farmers making food, Merchants allowing you to sell excess loot and various craftsmen make new weapons, armour and such for you.



Meanwhile you need to go out adventuring to liberate new territory and make some much needed cash to buy new cronies.



Adventuring is the general click to kill style and is quite frankly to simplistic to be much fun on its own. You can take villagers along with you to assist in the killing, but there isn't really any tactical controls and they die far to easily to be much help.

Their isn't a whole lot involved with building your town either. There is more than enough space to build everything and have a bunch of space left over for extra guards and farms and such. The only time you really need to pay any attention to the town is when it gets raided as the friendly townsfolk seem incapable of defending themselves.

A game of Hinterland will take you 3 or 4 hours to play through and the maps are randomly generated so theoretically you could play a brand new game every time you sit down.

Unfortunately there just isn't enough variety in the game play. It's like chocolate muffins. You can have the muffins in all different shapes, but their still just chocolate muffins and sooner or later you are going to get sick of them and wont a banana muffin.

The graphics aren't too bad for the genre (being cheap ugly indie games) but the zoom is a bit too much and makes it really hard to work out where you are. The wide screen support is horrible and their is something seriously wrong with the sound engine and it tries to do positional sounds but seems unable to grasp the simple concept of front speaker = front sounds.

Given i only had to fork out $9.99 for this little gem I can't say I am unhappy or that I got less than I expected. If your bored, have a spare tenner and a few hours to burn this is certainly worth a look.

Cheers

G.

Wow Mr Turnbull

Right. I am about to talk politics and maybe even a little bit of economics. If these topics make your brain hurt, tune out now.

You may know that we are currently in a financial down turn AND that the odd person is even starting to throw the recession word around. Downturns are inevitable and since we had such a huge and sustained boom, it isn't a surprise that this downturn is rather painful.

Kevin, our fearless Prime Minister has proposed a plan to do something to ease the downturn in Australia. That being to lob $42 Billion at the problem. All in all it is a pretty good package. A lob of cash up front to people in the hope they will spend it to kick things along (a strategy that worked in December) and a bunch of building and environmental initiatives to keep things ticking along and invest some of the money.

All sounds good right? Well there is a problem. Our idiot Liberal government voted against the bill and for the life of me I can't work out why. So let look at it then shall we...

First Malcolm gave us a few reasons, the biggest one being that the package will put the federal government into deficit.

Now I hate to break his bubble, but that is what the federal budget it SUPPOSED to do during a recession. It also isn't 'really' a deficit as we have $70 Billion in the future fund we can always go grab if we want.

Second he tells us that the lump sum payments don't work. This is wrong (see Decembers retail figures for instance) and wants to hand out some tax cuts instead.

The problem here is that we are already getting tax cuts in July and pretty much everyone has already factored them into their budget. Moving them forward a touch really doesn't add a lot of money or encourage a lot of crazy splurging on the part of the unwashed masses.

He also crows on a bit about 'fiscal responsibility' and 'burdening future generations with debt'. Clearly he doesn't remember last years $22 Billion surplus which would effectively wipe out this years splurge (as it should be).

So on the fundamentals the guy is wrong. But it is the political aspect I really don't get.

First you never ever vote AGAINST giving people money. People like getting free cash from the government. Turning around a saying no to it makes you the bad guy. No amount of spin can change that.

It also gives Labor a lot of ammo to use in the future. You see, if things get any worse (and they will) Labor can turn around and simply point the finger at the Libs. No matter what happens with the bill, just delaying it will no doubt be the cause of all future economic misery.

It's a stupid decision from any angle and a far cry from the brilliance of the Howard years.

Cheers

G.

Twilight

I didn't really want to take this long to post again, but I had to go to work for a few days and spent the weekend feeling somewhat ill.

I think I have a reason for being ill over the weekend too. You see on Friday night me and my other half went to  the Moonlight Cinema and saw 'Twilight'.

Just to be clear we didn't actually buy tickets to it, we just got them. We actually bought the tickets to take the dogs to see 'Hotel for Dogs', but that got rained out so we got stuck seeing 'Twilight'.

Now I knew a little bit about this movie going in and i emphasise 'little bit'. I'll summarise for you:-

• It has Vampires
• It's for 14 year old girls
• It is based on some low quality fiction (which is also for 14 year old girls)

It starts, predictably enough, with a frankly HORRIFIC monologue by the female lead who's name escapes (yes I was that into it).

But the travesty doesn't start to a little bit later, when our Vampire hero walks in... to a cafeteria... at a school.

There are two huge problems with this scenario. Firstly it's daylight and our friendly vamp  doesn't explode into flames and worse, he sits down to have lunch and lunch doesn't involve eating any of the students.

Now I like to think that after the last few hundred years we have pretty much locked in what is and what isn't a Vampire. There are some hard and fast rules. Like eats people, cant go out in the daylight with out exploding into flames, generally brooding, angry and hard to get along with That sort of thing.

Not sweet, sensitive, understanding and loving dammit.

Turning a ravening, evil embodiment of darkness, terror and violence into a whimpering, uncertain, pathetic emo teenager isn't the only thing this movie does badly.

The story is crap, it flits about, fails to engage and is generally disjointed. This isn't helped by the poor efforts by pretty much all the actors. Sure, half the cast is (allegedly) dead, but that doesn't mean you have to act like acorpse.

The story also hits one of those 'pointless' moments about half way through that renders the entire rest of the movie, well pointless.

I don't mind ruining the story for you (since I actually can't, it is that crap crap) so about half way through some 'bad' vampires (read: pnes that know what food is) stumble across our mortal heroine while she is playing basball with her Vamp boyfriends Vamp family (of all things).

Anyway the 'bad' Vamp wants to eat her and the good Vamps decide they must hide her to save her (or some such rubbish).

This is where it gets stupid. The Emo vamp boy allegedly loves the Emo non-vamp girl. He wants to save her. SO WHY DOESN'T HE JUST FUCKING WELL BITE HER AND TURN HER INTO A DAMN VAMPIRE ALREADY!!!

Surely there is only two ways a relationships with a girlfriend eating creature of evil can end. Becoming a Vamp or becoming Vamp food. As a rule you want your date to take you out to dinner, not for dinner so I  can only assume that our heroine is in this relationship to get Vamped and dance the immortal samba.

Oh and the special effects, the action, the dialoge, the supporting characters and the ending are all either horrible cliches, just plain horrible, or both.

If you are a 14 year old girl with no background in Vampire law, you might like all of the above. If you aren't you should steer clear.

Cheers

AgentVee