Features// SPOnG's Review Of 2006: September

Jack Thompson Tells Radio Interviewer He Wants to Kill!
11/09/2006

American attorney and opposer of violent videogames, Jack Thompson said the above, not SPOnG. If someone comes into our house we want to kill him with our hands.

Do you want to take a guess at how September kicked off? Yeah, we know. Too easy. Bad news for Sony. It became apparent that none of the PS3 launch titles would sport the much vaunted 1080p HD standard. The only title making use of the PS3’s blu-ray technology would be Gran Turismo HD, a re-working of GT4 put together for demo purposes only.

Then came the real sting. Sony finally announced that we Europeans would not, in fact, receive the PS3 until March 2007. This came as no big surprise for the realistic (read: cynical) cads among us, but for those Sony fanboys who had been clinging to the hope that Sony would deliver on its promise of a global launch, it felt akin to sitting on something large and pointy. To SPOnG it felt insulting that Sony had kept us dangling for so long in the face of the bare facts of its production capabilities.

In response to PS3 hardware shortages Microsoft quickly got to rubbing its corporate hands gleefully. It outlined plans to release the Xbox 360 core system in Japan at 29,800 yen (around £135) on November 2nd in outright defiance of an indifferent market.

My personal favourite nugget of news in September came courtesy of Jack Thompson. He told an interviewer at OUT-LAW Radio that "...America is becoming the land of the free and the home of the utterly depraved". This is thanks, of course, to videogames. Jack was speaking in reference to a tragic high school killing by Alvaro Castillo, a troubled teenager who had been exposed to (amongst other forms of entertainment) games.

In an incredible feat of backwards logic Thompson said; “I'm not giving up my gun because if somebody comes in my house I want to be able to kill him... Unfortunately, when you have a country that is awash in guns, you have got to do something about the stimuli to use those guns." I could say more, but this would just turn into an exercise in how many nasty things I can say about Jack Thompson. That statement says more than I ever could.

Nintendo managed to make us smile in September by simply not disappointing us. The European Wii launch date and price were announced. We were to get the Wii on December 8th at £179 (249 euros). It could have been a few weeks sooner, and it could have been a shade cheaper, but SPOnG felt content.

The month ended with something rarer than a dodo in pet shop: good Sony news. Well, good if you happened to live in Japan, anyway. Sony decided to slash the price on the 20Gb PS3 to 49,980 yen (£225, US$427) - alright for some.

The reason Nanako Kato, a spokesperson for Sony, gave was "In Japan there is a perception that one yen is the same as one dollar and one euro, so Japanese people feel it's a little expensive." Ignoring the fairly blatant flaws in the maths, the basic message SPOnG took from that explanation is that the Japanese are paying less because they don’t understand currency conversion.

Anyway, a bunch of games came out. Unfortunately, not many of them were much good. Of note were the brilliant Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy on every platform you can think of, Tekken getting its first PSP outing with Dark Resurrection and The Godfather, if only for being utterly inescapable.


Look back at SPOnG's review of August