That Gaming Podcast.com

Posted by Ian 

It’s a mere 2(ish) weeks away from release, the potentially biggest game of the year GTA 4 is nearly upon us.

To further celebrate this fact (or ram it down our throats), Rockstar will be releasing their final trailer of the game tonight at 10pm. The trailer entitled “Good Lord, what you doing? AKA Everyone’s a rat!” will be made available online (that’s the Internet) and presumeably Xbox Live too, seeing as that’s how all the previous trailers have rolled out.

No details have been provided about what we might see in the trailer, so to me it feels like Christmas Eve. Also, there’s been no word on when the trailer will appear on PSN either.

Posted by Ian

I was just trawling through the fine website that is Kotaku and noticed they had a picture up of Tanya Byron, the lady commissioned by Gordon Brown to produce a report detailing a new age rating scheme (amongst other things for games) - you can read more about that issue here

Anyway, I noticed that Kotaku actually had a picture of Ms. Byron. She’s actually pretty tidy. So tidy in fact that I decided to post the exact same picture of her here on our website.

So maybe this is the government’s new strategy to get us minions to sit up and take notice. Get your reports written by a hottie, that’ll get people interested in what you have to say. Just ask Ubisoft about that and Assassin’s Creed!

Posted by Ian 

There I was minding my own business, sitting in a northerly direction when all of a sudden there was a knock at the door!

Who could that be? I pondered as I made my way through the living room and into the hallway. As I approached the shining silver handle of our new UPVC door (white on the inside, brown on the outside - y’know like wood) a thousand thoughts raced through my mind, would it be something good, or would it be a middle aged woman asking for her Kleeneze kit back that she’s shoved through my letterbox the previous monday? This was all too much to take, so I just bit the bullet and opened the door.

Well blow me (no, not that way) it was only a UPS guy bravely battling the elements in order to return my repaired 360. What a man. Like an excited child who has just learned to write I scribbled my signature across the screen of his PDA delivery system thingy and snatched the box from his rain soaked mits.

As I opened the box I dared imagine the feelings I would soon experience if, instead of simply repairing my broken unit Microsoft had seen fit to raise me above the masses and elevate my status to ‘important’ by giving me an updated brand new 360 with a HDMI port.

Nope - it was my exact same 360 which, according to the enclosed documentation had had a new motherboard fitted.

So there you have it, I’m just run-of-the-mill scum to Microsoft and got my 360 repaired just like anyone else.

And irony of ironies I don’t even know if it works (and probably won’t find out till the weekend) cos I’ve just had GT5 Prologue drop through the door too. PS3 all the way for me later today.

WOOOO!

22nd May 2008, was the date given by Ubisoft for it’s PS3 shooter Haze yesterday, but now today they’ve only gone and changed it back to just ‘May’ meaning we have no idea of the actual day it will appear.

Originally the game was set for launch at the end of 2007, but it then got pushed back to fiscal Q1 of 2008 (between April and June). It was also penciled in for release on 360 and PC too, but it now seems that it’s staying put on the PS3 after Ubisoft announced it was a permanent PS3 exclusive title.

Haze is a squad based first person shooter that offers up to 4 player co-op gameplay. The rough plot is that you play an ex-member of a private military corporation who send in their guys (for huge amounts of cash) to clean up a ’situation’ oh and to make sure they perform at optimum level while in the battlefield they also fill them full of a drug called nectar.

It’s the use of nectar in the game that makes the FPS different from the normal run-of-the-mill shooter. If a soldier gets high on the drug they will become arrogant and ignore you playing dead, or if you’re more the genocidal type you can cut their feed-tubes so they overdose and start killing each other.

Having seen the game myself at the recent play.com live event in London I can confirm that it looks a lot nicer than I had anticpated. 4 player co-op could see this one turn out to be a bit of a sleeper hit. I’ll keep my eye on it.

Word!

Following the request from british Prime Minister Gordon Brown to address the use of ‘innapropriate interactive content’ by children, a report will be published today calling for movie style ratings for games. In addition, retailers selling games to underage children will face stiffer penalties; a large fine and up to 4 years in jail.

The report, written by Dr Tanya Byron recommends that a new 12 rating (just like they give to movies) be used on games and that the current PEGI system of rating be abandonded as it uses confusing age rating symbols and the rules for deciding on the age rating a game should receive are not strict enough. A single statutory regulation has been recommended.

In her report Dr Bryon says: “We have to make child digital safety a priority. If you are under 18, you should not be able to buy an ‘18′ game and if you are under 12, you should not be able to buy a ‘12′ game.”

The BBC already have posted some extra details about the report on their website. According to them Byron recommends:

You can read the BBC article in full here