Universe’s Tech Blog

In many ways Australia is seen as a laughing stock by the world’s gamers. We seem to ban more games than even those fun-hating Germans do, usually with the sort of reasons people laughed at when they were first brought up in the 80s. I mean really, refusing classification to a game about graffiti? What next, banning flat-tops and breakdancing gangs?

It now seems Australia isn’t getting some obscure Japanese game called Rule of Rose, apparently because there’s been some outcry about the game on television here. It hasn’t even been submitted for classification, it’s just not being released. A similar thing happened in Europe last week, with the developer announcing it wouldn’t bother releasing the game after outcry.

Over the past few months I’ve seen a few trailers for it and I can’t work out what the heck is going on. It’s weird, and has a sort of psilocybin induced Alice in Wonderland unreality to it - but theres nothing that indicates outcry or scandal beyond the shamefully emo nature of the whole thing. It’s a horror game, its not targeted at children.

But it’s a horror game involving a young girl and that must be evil. It’s these kinds of ‘it lets you graffiti so people will graffiti’ assumptions that turn the depressing mess that is the Australian game classification system into high farce.

I honestly think you could get any game pulled this way, so I’m starting my own campaign against Microsoft and Rare’s pokemon-esque attempt a mass media franchise, Viva Pinata.

For those unaware of this game, it’s premise is that the gamer - in this case a small, impressionable (they are never non-impressionable are they?) child is tasked with nurturing a race of creatures whose sole aim is to breed with random strangers and eventually be smashed open so their peers can feed on the sweet goodies inside. Not only is it telling children sex-slavery is A-ok, its encouraging cannibalism.

Now, all someone needs to do is dangle that paragraph in front of one of those public interest groups that will give negative public comment on anything you tell them is ‘evil’ - you know, the ones that push for stronger ratings then complain when a game rated the maximum MA15+ is unsuitable for small children. Get this picked up by a few media outlets and before you know it Microsoft’s PR agency will be sending out press releases explaining why their kids game has been refused classification for ‘cannibalism and sexual depravity’.

It would be hilarious if not for the fact it’s not that far from reality.

Microsoft is so keen to get Vista and Office 2007 into the hands of early adopters, it is giving copies away.

If you can handle sitting through three videos on each of Vista and Office 2007 explaining their new features, Microsoft will reward you with a free copy of Vista Business and/or Office Professional 2007.

No, it’s not a joke. The promotion, which is running till February, is called PowerTogether, and it is obviously designed to ensure that tech enthusiasts have a thorough understanding of the new functionality in both Vista and Office 2007 so they can convince neanderthal “Office 97 is good enough for me” managers to upgrade.

As a result, there’s also going to be a heck of a lot of people out there running Office 2007 and generating (and emailing) documents in its new, and non-backward-compatible file formats.

Blind Freddy can tell that there’s going to be corporate resistance to takeup of Office 2007 because of the dramatically changed user interface and file formats that are incompatible with the rest of the world.

We might be cynical, but this seems like a clever way to get a large corpus of people generating documents that everyone using an older version of Office won’t be able to open. (Caveat: there is an Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003.)

It’s not a bad little marketing idea from Microsoft though – getting people to watch tutorials and how-tos about a product and then send them a fully-functional copy. However, the length of the promotion — three months — is a rather extraordinary risk to actually, you know, selling the product.

There’s a very weird video on YouTube promoting the promotion: it’s weird in a kind of way that only one of the world’s largest PR companies could think up. You can watch it here.

There’s a teeny-weeny catch though: it’s only available to those who live in the US. If you’re not fortunate enough to be a citizen in the Land of the Free don’t feel too miffed – even Canada missed out. And all of Europe too – you know, the place where all the history comes from?

We asked Microsoft Australia what it was doing for us yokels, and the answer was a deafening silence. But then again, Microsoft was gearing up for its media and analyst launch of the two products in Australia tomorrow (featuring Uncle Vamos and the senior executive crew), so our enquiry may not have gone straight to the top of the list.

It strikes us that using a US-based mail forwarder could work around the US-only limitation entirely. Not that we’d suggest playing the system like that in the absence of an equivalent offer for Aussies…