Considering the median wage for a lawyer, and Jack has been practising it for quite a while, it’s not a fair stretch to assume he’s alright money-wise, and now because of his disbarment, he’s now been given a time bonus, so if he’s the Jack we’ve all grown to know and love (like a person loves telling an annoying person to shut their trap), I feel he’ll only up his endless quest to sanitize all the games out there until they are peachy and even God himself would feel glad to play a bit of multiplayer. He’ll be able to focus all the time he would’ve used for work-related purposes to letting everything that moves know that violent games turns you into a Terminator.

The big question is: Will anyone take notice any more? Well, yes and no.

A lawsuit is a big thing. You cannot help but notice a lawsuit, no matter how frivolous the lawsuit it. It’s always there, like an annoying itch that doesn’t go away no matter how hard you scratch it. Jack played that game very well, making game developers know that they have a lawsuit filed on their collective asses. With Jack now unable to file lawsuits himself, I would imagine the game developers would take great pride in ignoring his ramblings. And so, Jack has lost his main target audience.

But he still has other cards. Jack has friends in American politics. I would imagine that he would still have influence with those politicians who believe Jack has the right idea. Politicians and public representatives  still have a voice that attract attention, mind you, a lot of people tend to not listen to the ones that are associated with our friend.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I don’t think we have seen the last of Jack Thompson.

My mate Al recently commented on Grand Theft Auto 4’s squeaky clean rap sheet so far from those funny little nerds that call themselves game reviewers. I thought I would throw down the gauntlet just like him and give my two cents on how I find this to be a bad precedent.

Simply put, 10/10, by sheer mathematical definition represents perfection. Or 5/5. Or 100%. They all mean the same thing. By giving any game, not just Grand Theft Auto 4, a top score means the reviewer has implied that the game cannot be topped. Never mind the long-winded descriptions that most gaming publications give about how 5 stars or 10/10 mean near perfection or completely awesome, if the game was near perfection they wouldn’t give it a 10/10 or 100 points, they would give it something lower. The simple fact is, next month, or maybe 5 years now, there will eventually be a game which will top Grand Theft Auto 4 (probably Grand Theft Auto 5). But wait? They can’t represent that numerically, they already gave Grand Theft Auto 4 a perfect score. Ratings are just a silly way of giving a superficial comparison between games, so people who are too lazy to see the context of the review can compare scores of games and make purchases based on this arbitrary numbers.

I believe that we should be getting rid of ratings/scores altogether. A complex review of every facet of a game simply cannot be represented by a numerical value, you really need to read the full context of the review to get the best idea of what the game does and doesn’t do right. Grand Theft Auto 4 certainly can be improved - for one thing, the cops are way too easy to dodge. The graphics, the pop-in, the music selection, they can all be improved. And what would happen if Rockstar happened to re-release Grand Theft Auto 4 tomorrow and it was much better than the first iteration? Reviewers have already given it 10, they can’t mark it up to 11 even though the game has improved more than when they gave it a 10.

And before anyone points it out, yes, my review of Condemned 2 came with its own bunch of ratings. But you know what? With my new found love for rating-less reviews, I removed the ratings from the review, so now you have to read the whole review to get what I’m getting at. And it will be the same for all future reviews.

It is a well-known fact that the average age of the video-gamer is rising, in a recent study it was in the late 20s. However, to many people in the 40+ age bracket, video games are still foreign to them. And it just so happens that the majority of the people in power are in that bracket, the people who make the rules, the people who run countries, the people who manipulate media. Thus, the younger generation is never going to get the justice they deserve when it comes to videogame legislation whilst the older generation still lives.

Take, for example, South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, a man who has publicly stated he does not play video-games. Yet he is in the position where he can deny everyone else in Australia the opportunity to introduce an R18+ classification for video-games, on the age-old and, frankly, quite weak excuse that children could obtain and play the games. He, of course, misses the irony that regulating an R18+ classification would effectively KEEP children from playing those games

How about Jack Thompson, the self-proclaimed ‘worst nightmare’ for gamers out there. Jack Thompson is a Miami lawyer who has, time and time again, legislatively attacked supporters and developers of adult-oriented games. He has frequently traded blows with Rockstar Games, the developers of the popular video-game series of Grand Theft Auto, this blog’s namesake, claiming them to be murder simulators. He has also used terrible tragedies to push his agenda, such as the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres. I don’t know how Jack Thompson has come to the conclusion that video-games make people go loopy, he only has to interview my group of friends to find that we are hardly violent and we play many violent games. In fact, the person who is most violent out of this circle of friends is, in actuality, not much of a gamer.

It is unfortunate to us that we may have to wait many years until the older generation get old and die, in order for more informed people of the video-gamer generation to get into the position where they can actually do something about our sad state of affairs. I only hope I live to see the day that we finally get our beloved R18+ classification for games.

I couldn’t help but feel slightly giddy at the chance to play another game where your main objective is smashing the absolute lard out of the various undesirables that you encounter throughout the game, whilst moving through somewhat atmospherically scary environments.

Being a fan of the first Condemned game, I wanted to see if they managed to keep the same momentum as the first one. Verdict? Yes and no.

You play as the protagonist from the first Condemned game, Ethan Thomas, a former FBI agent who has now been reduced to nothing more than a bum with ripped clothes and a bottle of flaggin’, so in other words, he’s in higher social status that most of the protagonists you see in FPS games these days. Time obviously has not been kind to Mr. Thomas, in the months after the end of the first game. He is still having hallucinations, just like in the first game, and these hallucinations are becoming increasingly more realistic and graphic. Indeed, the entire first level of this game is a hallucination, giving you an indication of Ethan’s state of mind.

Once again, he is thrust into a world he has no idea about when he visualizes his old mentor and one of his only allies, Malcolm Vanhorn, consumed by an unknown force that is overtaking the city at an alarming rate, causing mentally unstable and violent people to become even more violent, actively pursuing and inflicting pain on you and other characters, whilst the law enforcement sits in their helicopters or high-rise buildings picking their noses waiting for the city to implode. Definitely an ample setting to crack skulls and break arms.

As was stated at the start of this entry, this game is primarily a first-person fighting game. For the first time

in the Condemned series, your own mitts are a weapon. Using the left and right triggers, Ethan will punch with his left and right hands. He can block attacks as well as parry attacks, if he blocks at the correct time (usually just before an enemy is about to indent your skull with a crowbar). Introduced into this game as well are combo attacks. Stringing together punches, blocks, kicks and stomps allows Ethan to dish out an insane amount of damage. But your fists aren’t the only weapon. Nearly everything that can be picked up, yanked off a wall or removed from another object can be a weapon. We’re talking steel pipes, baseball bats, toilet lids, fire-axes. Each weapon has 4 ratings - damage, speed, reach and condition. Damage is how much damage that weapon dishes out when swung. Speed is how fast the weapon is swung at the enemies. Heavier weapons will obviously take more time to swing, so they have a lower speed rating, which is more often than not offset by higher damage. Reach is how far in front of you the weapon reaches when swung. If you have a longsword, it will obviously be able to hit people further in front of you than say, a crowbar. Finally, condition is how long the weapon will last before it breaks. Weapons can also be used in chain attacks.

Returning from the previous game are the investigation mini-games. Unlike the previous game however, it doesn’t hold your hand through these mini-games now. You have to actually use your noggin, which is always a good thing. When coming to an area where you need to use the investigative tools, an icon will flash up on your screen with Study Evidence, and that’s as much help as it is going to give you. You’ll have to use all the tools and use your head to find the vital clues needed to continue. All the usual tools, such as spectrometers, UV lights, cameras are back. The only thing that I could fault with the investigative areas are the questions you need to answer. Sometimes you will be asked a question and given multiple choices to answer that question. Half the time though, all the answers are similar that you don’t know which one to pick. In order to get a Perfect rating for that investigation, you must answer the questions correctly.

Now to analyze each of the areas of the game, and pick for faults:

Story

The story in this game suffers from a fate known all too well in the writing industry. It starts off with a bang, and then just slugs towards the end, almost to the point that you don’t really care about the ending. The start of the game sees you chasing after an unknown figure throughout the city’s dank areas, after you find your friend and mentor, Malcolm Vanhorn, brutally mutilated. Along the way, various other people are also killed and you piece together very slowly who, or what, may have killed them. It is during these first hours of the game where the story is at its strongest and most effective.

The story reaches a peak when you realise your old buddy and primary antagonist of the first game, Serial Killer X, is alive and well after receiving a gunshot to the face in the first game. He’s no longer murdering other serial killers however, he’s murdering other people for another reason. I was dumb-struck when meeting SKX for the first time since the last game, and I was cautiously optimistic that SKX was going to introduce a whole new dynamic for this story and make it even strong. Alas I was wrong.

Let’s just say after that point in the game, the story goes downhill. The ending is such an anti-climax, I felt like throwing my controller at the screen.

Graphics

The game engine from the first game is back, LithTech Jupiter EX, obviously tweaked up a bit for this new release. It’s not a huge graphical jump since the first game was quite graphically good, but there’s some subtle differences from the first one, like better use of bloom lighting, more fog and specialized blur to make a sort of muggy, hostile atmosphere.

The environments of the game are suitably dank and unforgiving. The game has fleshed-out more from the claustrophobic corridors of the first game and brought on some outside areas, again, the game is still set at night to keep that unsettling feeling alive.

I could only fault the framerate, which is jumpy at times and can drop to pretty low FPS at times. It has been reported this also happens on the PS3, so there’s no difference, probably just missing some optimization of the graphics engine.

Sound

There is simply no other game available that, when turned up and played in the dark, can unsettle you with sound more than Condemned 2. The game uses minimal background music, and just keeps the ambient effects rolling, right before a masked lunatic jumps out of the shadows and cracks your skull with a locker door.

Make sure you turn the volume up and play in the dark.

Longetivity

The game lasts roughly 10-15 hours depending on your skill level. There is a Bloodshot Fight Club available, which is just basically unlimited amounts of bad guys coming at you and you can set which weapons you want to dish the biffo out. I should mention that the game has online multiplayer, and whilst I haven’t tested it, I have heard it is nothing special. Hence, my 2 out of 5 applies only to the single-player elements of the game.

OVERALL

The game is redeemed by its excellent use of visuals and audio to really amp up the atmosphere. The game is not very long however, and don’t expect a good strong ending.

The other reason is because I have a project coming up with a couple of mates of mine which will be using our gaming blogs to better inform people of the way of gaming in Australia, so stay tuned for that.

Interesting times ahead.