Features// SPOnG's Review of 2008: June

"Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.

"He defended some of the adult content as 'funny' but conceded that other postings were inappropriate."

12/06/2008
Video Game Reviewing Judge in Animal Porn Pic Admission


June! A sort of summer - if you closed your eyes, stood beneath the local pub’s heat lamp and imagined really, really hard… None of that seemed to matter to PlayStation 3 owners, however, because they got to shoot baddies and pretend they were crates in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Some people got to play it a little before others, however, because somewhere in the world, someone flew in the face of retail etiquette and old-fashioned fairness and broke the street date for MGS4, despite Konami UK swearing that here, at least, the date would be adhered to.

Early June also brought us a huge great announcement. Funcom, the company behind Age of Conan, let fly with the news that Rock Band 2 was on the way. An MMO developer in no way associated with the game. Not even kidding! While no-one had much of any doubt that Rock Band 2 was on the way, Harmonix, MTV Games and EA can’t have been too happy… That didn’t stop them waiting ‘til the end of the month to make their own announcement, however.

The start of the summer months, sadly, saw the world of games sitting in the shadow of a scandal. Who would have expected a games-related scandal to involve sex, farm animals and a US judge, though?

EA also made us happy when it gave the world its first taste of Spore with the Creature Creator, back before the game had turned into something of a damp squid.

Sony hadn’t proven immune to the kind of rumoury and scuttlebutt that had plagued Microsoft with chatter that it was ripping off Nintendo with a motion-sensitive controller of its very own. Sony got the treatment, too. Too bad that the stories of a break-apart motion-sensitive peripheral that more closely resembled the Wii Remote than the Sixaxis looked a lot like they were two years old…

As the month drew to a close – more scandal! This time, of a less amusing sort than the escapades of US judges and their barnyard buddies. It was alleged that Atari got all legal and heavy-handed with regard to the breaking of an embargo on Alone in the Dark. The company later clarified that it would not be taking any legal action, but the bad publicity was already out there.

Enough talk of legal wrangling, though! June brought us games. We got LEGO Indiana Jones (see SPOnG’s look at it here) and the PC version of Mass Effect.

On the subject of ported titles – two other games that were once supposedly platform-exclusive, Okami and Overlord: Raising Hell, getting released on second systems prompted Gavin SPOnG to ask, are third-party exclusives dead?

Sony might well have told you, ‘no’, when MGS4 finally got released. Thankfully, it did a damn fine job of living up to the hype. Another worthy Japanese title came in the form of Ninja Gaiden 2, giving Xbox 360 owners cause for thanks.

Other titles worthy of note included the afore-mentioned Alone in the Dark, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (previewed here) and, of course, Super Smash Bros. Brawl.