Game Damage TV pilot

My friends Yug (aka Guy Blomberg) and Matt (aka Matt Burgess) over at Australian Gamers and their friend Yahtzee (aka Ben Croshaw) of Zero Punctuation fame have put together a video game review TV show pilot called "Game Damage."

You can view the pilot over at their site www.gamedamage.net. Please spread the news and link around, as the more word of mouth they get, the better the chance they have of getting it picked up.

Here is their emotional plea for your support:

It's taken us a VERY long time to get to this point, but we're proud to say we have uploaded the pilot for our potential gaming TV show 'GameDamage' onto the interwebs.

Goto http://www.GameDamage.net to check it out!

The 23-minute show is a pilot episode to stir up interest. Game Damage represents a new face of gaming media; fronted by three proven individuals with a genuine love and enthusiasm for games, it combines light and squashy gaming humour with a delicious crunchy centre of reviews, previews and 'discussions' on the many facets of the subculture (read: shouting arguments).

But creating a series with this level of professional quality (ha ha) doesn't come cheap, and if we're to live the dream we need all the exposure we can get. Gamers, non-gamers, come one, come all to http://www.gamedamage.net, watch the video, browse the site, join the forums and tell us what you think. We promise to at least pretend to listen.

You know I say, "My friends over at Australian Gamer" but the only time they answer my emails now is when I disguise them as porn advertisement spam. What is up with that?

All your XBox 360 faceplates belong to me!

As a follow up to my "I post all my own ideas" post regarding the Australian Gamer forum, it turns out that my reply post to El Taco was nominated for the October Post of the Month. So get on over there and stuff the ballots voting for me so I can win another XBox360 faceplate. Never mind the fact that I don't own a XBox360. Its those region coding issues I've gone on about numerous times before. Anyway, the "I do all my own stunts" t-shirt is pretty cool, I'd wear that.

Speaking of the Next Gen Console systems (shouldn't we call them 'This Gen' by now) I did try to rent a PS3 from Blockbuster Thursday night. They rent them for $50 bucks a night. $50 bucks!!! And they only have one, which was already rented and not due back till Monday. With that kinda of return on investment why do they only have one?! And Mr. PS3-Renter... if you are going to spend $200 bucks, assuming it was Thursday that you rented it, just go and buy one!

I Post All My Own Ideas

I noticed Kotaku has split up to have an Australian Version. My link over on the left used to just be www.kotaku.com but it would translate to www.kotaku.com.au for me when I used it. I’ve edited it to be us.kotaku.com which is the direct link to the U.S. version.

What’s the deal though? Why? It would appear at a cursory glance that the U.S. version of the site appears to be exactly the same except with more stories. The U.S. version appears to have all the Australian specific articles as well. It’s just the Australian version that has less stuff. What is up with that?!

Okay, that isn’t really why I gathered you all here this evening. Back in April I did a 10 question interview with Australian Gamer. I also managed to get myself into a bit of controversy when my fictional story in a ‘relationship’ thread was nominated for the April Post of the Month. I found myself going up against another post that was really nothing but a number of parody pictures of that guy from the move ‘300’ yelling “This is Sparta!!!” I found out that he didn’t actually make any of those pictures, he just collected them from across the internet and posted them. I said something about that in the thread.

Here is my original blog post about it. Go and read that PotM thread and ask yourself who is being an ass. You might even be tempted to say nobody. But I certainly don’t see any of my posts as being overly rude.

Okay jumping forward to the present day. The October Post of the Month thread. About halfway down you’ll see this post from El Taco:

Because it's a shirt+faceplate, I'm expect Joseph4th to come in here, make one post, get angry at me for winning then never posting again.

What an ass.

Why did he do it? Why did he say my name and summon me so? He's young and doesn't know any better. Now the first version of my response was a bit over the top and probably a wee bit too cruel. I toned it down quite a bit during the editing stage. I also was originally planning on changing the faceplate in the picture as well as the t-shirt. I was going to turn it into a Del Taco faceplate but since they don't have Del Taco in Australia it would have been a lot of Photoshop work with little humor value in return.

Anyway here is the link to the October PotM thread so you can read it all for yourself. Share and enjoy.

10 Questions with Australian Gamer

My "10 Questions" Interview is up at Australian Gamer. There is a forum link at the bottom where people can discuss the interview and I am supposed to answer questions. I am thinking about posting the rap lyrics I wrote to the Lord of the Rings back in 1990 instead. Well see.

But thats not why I gathered you all here today. I wanted to tell you about my post. The day before yesterday I created a forum account and started poking around reading various topics. I stumbled across the ‘relationship’ thread. It was nine pages long and had a few humorous posts but mostly it was a car wreak that I couldn’t stop reading. When I got to the end I just had to add a post of my own.

I met her while I was working as a soldier in the pay of the Argentine government. Her name was Rachel and was an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency charged with the training of counter revolutionary anti-Sandinista Guerrillas opposed to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Read More

The post has even been nominated for Post of the Month!!! That’s right baby! I could win a Ghost Recon II t-shirt and Xbox 360 faceplate! You can be damn sure I’ll be reminding you when it comes time to vote!

Brisbane Australia Gamers Meetup

Yug from Australian Gamer and Hawk from Game Arena had a Brisbane Gamers Meetup party this last weekend. There are some pictures and links to youtube moves here.

Everybody loved my t-shirt which Connie had gotten me for Christmas.

Eventually some people from Auran turned up, including Michael and Joseph (who definitely won the prize for best t-shirt of the night).

It has a graphic equalizer display on the front that lights up in response to ambient audio input just as you would expect a graphic equalizer display. Yug took some pictures of it but I don't see any posted. If you look at the picture of the 3 girls dancing you can see me talking in the background on the right. See that yellow-ish smear of color? That’s my shirt.

You can buy one for yourself from Thinkgeek.

Read the Wii on the Wall

Friday night was the monthly IGDA (International Game Developers Assoc.) get together for the local Brisbane chapter. It was hosted at Yug’s new apartment. Yug is also one of guys who runs Australian Gamer. You might remember I mentioned meeting them at the Game1 expo in Melbourne. They were the guys who had the Sonic and Shadow mascots playing Sonic in their booth. Here are the clips of they posted on Youtube.


Sonic & Shadow in the Australian Gamer booth at Game1 in Melbourne, part 1.


Sonic & Shadow in the Australian Gamer booth at Game1 in Melbourne, part 2.
Anyway, he has this new apartment in the Valley. It is right above all the fancy restaurants and a block away from all the party bars. The best part is the fact that his apartment is on the top floor with a GIANT balcony. We had the BBQ (or barby as the Aussies say) Now being the computer nerds we are, we got a projection TV up there and a Nintendo Wii.


It was a little bit of trouble at first setting up a table for the projector and finding a place for the IR thingy. Then we realized we had to rearrange everything because we had to stand behind the projector. Say what you want about the graphic quality of the Wii compared to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 but it look pretty damn cool up there on the wall. Also being computer nerds those of us who weren’t playing were deeply involved discussing the nuisances of the Nintendo paradigm and the way games like Wii Sports lets complete video game neophytes jump right in feet first and have fun competing against hardKore players.

You can find more pictures in this thread on the Australian Gamer forums if you actually have that sort of time to waste.