Wet

I am a fan of B-movies. If there is such a thing as a B-game, Wet is it.

When Activision and Blizzard went through their cyclopean merging last year and formed the entity affectionately known as Blactivision there were inevitable casualties. Two were Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters, who found new homes in the diamond-encrusted maws of EA and Sony, respectively. Another was Wet, a much lower profile development, and the fact that it has reached retail at all is due to the unlikely auspices of roleplaying powerhouse Bethesda Interactive.

Wet is a game which is nothing but rough edges. There's not an aspect of the game you can look at without seeing how money, time and polish would have vastly improved it. Travelling through its rather short story involves pinballing from limitation to limitation, and the whole thing eventually sputters out in an unsatisfying finale.

But, you know what? It's a blast.

This is a good game. It's a good game not because it is rough, and not despite being rough, but simply through enabling us to not care about it being rough. You can run on walls, you can slow down time, and you can shoot fools right in the muthafucking head, and beyond that really everything else is window dressing. If you get to the end and feel like you haven't shot enough fools in the head, you start a new game, maybe on a different difficulty setting, and introduce more heads to more bullets. It's not the milestones that are fun here, but the process of reaching them.

Wet knows it's a B-game. It glories in it. The graphics are overlaid with artificial film scratches, loading times are covered by drive-in cinema adcruft, and the plot is ripped straight from a 70s blacksploitation epic with a gravel-voiced Eliza Duskhu shoehorned into the leading role. Characters with improbable names like "Tarantula" abound; the game treats them with a completely straight face but never manages to elevate them to more than a gun-toting freak show.

Other games have gone down this path; House of the Dead: Overkill is a recent example. But Wet is somehow more authentic, because we, the audience, can see that this could have been a different game. All that separates Wet from something like Devil May Cry is six months in development and a budget to match. It's in the finest tradition of B-movies - reaching for the stars but settling for cardboard and glitter, and like B-movies of old it makes the perfect fit for the bottom half of a double bill. Enjoy a week of Brutal Legend, and follow it with a chaser of Wet.

Wet was clearly never destined for preorders and midnight launches, and in that sense it's a got a refreshing freedom of movement. It's firmly in the "stylish action" genre but it's free to borrow tricks from sources that haven't enjoyed Devil May Cry's level of commercial success. A "never stop running, never stop shooting" philosophy is lifted from Bizarre's The Club. Stylised swordplay and dry humour evoke No More Heroes. A kinetic variety of parkour-inspired motion brings to mind Mirror's Edge. But Wet picks and chooses from these very idiosyncratic games and it largely picks wisely.

Largely. It features one level so rage-inducingly-awful as to nearly make me give up in disgust. About halfway through the game, you find yourself exploded out of a plane in mid-air, and forced to dodge burning pieces of that very same plane while in freefall, while shooting at and being shot at by faceless goons who, like you, are also falling out of the plane, all with the intention of catching up to and utilising a mid-air parachute. It should be the game's definingly awesome set-piece but purpose-built mechanics, cheap one-hit kills, an inability to effectively read the environment and a complete lack of checkpoints make it a brick wall in the path of fun. Once you've solved it once it gets easier on replays but that's poor consolation to those struggling the first time around.

Wet is not anyone's Game of the Year. It's not a critical masterpiece or a roadsign along any of the streets that lead to the gaming nirvana. But it doesn't have to be. Even among mediocrity there is the good and the bad, and in that halfway house Wet is some of the best there is. There is room for the B-game, for that mixture of passion and compromise, of vision and clumsiness, and when a game like Wet emerges from the very heart of that territory it is a joy and a treasure that should not quickly be passed by.

Fallout 3: Australia Censors The World

It turns out that the rest of the world will get to "enjoy" the work of Australia's Classification Board. Rather than create different versions of Fallout 3 for different territories, developer Bethesda has decided to just release the single edition, that edition being the one which was edited to keep Australian censors happy.

Doubleplusgood.

Full story at Kotaku.

Q&A on Game Classification: Bad Questions, Terrifying Answers

The video above is from last night's episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Q & A, which allows audience members to pose questions to a panel consisting of politicians, community leaders and the media. This segment deals with the question of games classification, and represents two profound failures: firstly a failure of our leaders to have even the most basic working knowledge of the issues involved here, and secondly of the Australian gaming community to effectively represent itself and its position.

Featured here are Heather Ridout, Chief Executive of the Australian Industy Group; Independent South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon; NSW Labor Senator Mark Arbib; Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce; and Christine Jackman, journalist and author.

The discussion in the clip uses the recent example of Besthesda Softworks' Fallout 3, a narrative-driven game in which survivors of a nuclear apocalypse struggle to adapt to The World The Bomb Built. While many details of the unreleased game are still under wraps, it is known that the world of Fallout 3 is a largely lawless one, and that the player is challenged to find their own unique way of interacting with it. As part of the suite of choices available to the player, the player may choose to buy, use, and sell a range of pharmaceutical substances, either as medicine or as stimulants.

The Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification recently refused classification to Fallout 3. This means that the game was deemed too mature to fall into the OFLC's "M15+" rating and has the effect of banning it from sale. Australia has no R18+ rating for games. It is believed that the OFLC's decision was largely related to the game's depiction of drug use.

In the clip above, the audience member is technically accurate when he agrees with the moderator's description of the game. Fallout 3 will offer situations that can be resolved by combat (among other methods), often resulting in the death of other characters in the game. One option in approaching these battles is to use stimulants to get an "edge" in combat. Other ways of overcoming problems in Fallout 3 would include negotation, trade, and avoidance. If Fallout 3 stays true to previous games in the series, these options would for the most part have realistic consequences, with violence damaging the player character's reputation and drug use leading to addiction and ill-health.

It is fairly clear from the clip that neither the panelists nor the moderator have any direct knowledge of Fallout 3. It doesn't stretch belief that in fact none of the panellists have played a videogame of any sort.

There are currently 5.2 million current-generation gaming consoles in Australia. That's one between every five Australians. And that doesn't include multi-purpose tools with gaming functionality including personal computers and mobile phones. This is not a minority. This is not a niche market. This is a gaming Australia. It's an Australia that's completely unrepresented on the political stage.

The range of opinions expressed in the clip above is frankly terrifying. Mark Albib seems happy to take the view that "because it's banned, it must deserve to be banned". Barnaby Joyce doesn't know the term "avatar", confuses it for the title of a game, and then suggests that the classification issue is in some way related to sex crimes. No one present seems to have an understanding of Australia's current classification system and not once is it raised that game censorship is a freedom of speech issue. Nick Xenophon reaches out to a shallow and inconclusive pool of evidence but doesn't quite know what to draw from it.

Christine Jackman fairly reasonably poses the question to the audience member: "Why do you want to play this game?" Said audience member muffs the answer; he begins to cite the merits of the game.

The correct answer is simple: because I want to decide for myself.

Censorship is odious because it removes community choice. Censorship says that the thought is the action; that the common person can't distinguish between depiction and actuality. Censorship says, "I know better than you." Censorship says, "Let me decide who talks."

And games are talking. They're talking very loudly, to a great many people, in strong and clear voices. They're speaking in places that have never read a newspaper and in houses which have never listened to politicians. It's okay to be worried by what games are saying. It's okay to disagree. But it's not okay to stifle those voices. It's not okay to kill the game.

Don't be afraid of ideas. Just present better ones. Engage in the debate.

Classification is about allowing the community to make informed choices about their media exposure. Under our current system, not only has classification been suborned into censorship, but Australians are being deprived of accurate information for deciding what games are suitable for themselves and their family.

Support an R18+ rating for videogames in Australia. Let's hear what games have to say.

Fallout 3 Banned In Australia

Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) has today handed down a decision refusing classification to upcoming next-generation RPG Fallout 3.

Under state and territory law, games refused classification in Australia cannot be sold or advertised. The decision has the effect of banning Fallout 3 from the Australian market.

While the OFLC does not provide reasons for its decisions to the public, speculation is that the ruling is based on the extensive drug use running through the Fallout franchise. In previous games players have had the option to use a variety of pharmaceuticals including morphine, usually with realistic consequences, to negotiate the post-apocalyptic Fallout world. If this is the case, it seems unlikely that the game can be edited for the Australian market so as to fall within classification guidelines.

Previous games banned by the OFLC have by and large not been top-quality titles, including names like Manhunt 2 and Shellshock 2. While censorship in this fashion is unjustifiable wherever it occurs, those games have boasted little in the way of compelling gameplay or artistic merit. However, Fallout 3 was expected to be a top seller, and judging by the history of the franchise and the back catalogue of developer Bethesda it seems likely to have boasted an impressive and relevant plot and a visually breathtaking setting.

The remit of the OFLC is to assist the Australian public in making informed decisions about their media consumption; however, more and more in the realm of gaming they are acting as censors. Not only are Australians prevented from engaging with the thoughts and ideas contained in these games, but they are prevented from deciding for themselves the merits or otherwise of these titles.