Or was it scheduled? Who knows. The site went down again last night, and stayed down all day today. My provider had a crypic message on their site saying they are replacing the disks that failed a few days ago.

Pingdom reports Darkgate was down this time for 22h 15m, almost as long as the first outage.

Surely it doesn’t take 22 hours to replace a few disks…

Well… that wasn’t fun. Yesterday arvo Darkgate went off the air, as did the website for my hosting provider. Calls to the tech support and sales lines went straight to voicemail. Not happy.

I’ve just been able to log into the server now and it has an uptime of 23 minutes.

Pingdom reports the total time Darkgate was off the air: 27h 45m.

Am logging a support ticket now to find out what the hell happened.

I keep reading this article over and over. It seems to be a fairly logical argument from a person who obviously doesn’t have any love for gaming (nor an irrational fear of it).

This particular paragraph really gets me, it’s something I hadn’t though of until this guy put it so plainly:

Indeed, it is curious that so many pro-status-quo arguments revolve around the impact on minors, as this implies scepticism of not just the proposal at hand, but the entire structure of the classification system. While the protection of children from disturbing and/or inappropriate content is indeed a valid consideration, the very purpose of classification and ratings categories is to serve this concern. The fact of a minor’s possession of a game that had been deemed inappropriate for his or her age range would not represent a failure in the guidelines; it would represent a failure in the application of the guidelines. A rejection of a classification category based on lack of confidence over the correct application of the criteria can only imply a rejection of classification schemes as a whole.

Surely, if people like Atkinson campaign against R18+ games because they don’t trust the system to stop these games from getting into the hands of minors, then their problem isn’t with the games… it’s with the classification system ITSELF.

They don’t trust the system, and if that is the case… we’re having the wrong argument.

On a side note, I noticed that Modern Warfare 2 has received an R18+ rating in every other country apart form Australia. Here, it got a MA15+ rating, but really/probably should have been banned in Australia because we don’t have an R rating.

But how can you tell the Australian retail games industry they won’t get the opportunity to sell the greatest selling game OF ALL TIME? All that revenue is going to go to overseas sites like amazon, dvd.co.uk and play-asia. You just can’t… so you give the game a MA15+ rating instead!

So now Mum is at the game store and little Johnny the teenager is begging her for Modern Warfare 2 since all his mates have it and it’s the most awesome game ever. She picks it up, reads “MA15+” on the label, and probably think’s it’s appropriate for little Johnny and pats herself on the back for being such a good parent.

Only in Australia.

South Australia’s Attorney General on a radio interview regarding the propsed R18+ classification for computer games in Austalia. You know, the rating every other developed nation in the world has. That would allow me as a 33 year old adult to decide what I want to do in my own spare time.

Atkinson: “We’re talking about games such as the Japanese game game “Rape Play” where one scores points for raping a mother and daughter.”
Mares: “But as I understand that’s not allowed on sale anywhere outside Japan even in countries with R18 classifications.”
Atkinson: “Yeah, but I wouldn’t put it past the classification board to make that an R-rated game frankly.”

Oh YES!! Of course they would! Even though it’s banned in every other country, we’d classify it!

Seriously, I don’t know what planet this guy lives on. But its very very far away from here.