It's about time I posted a video from Sweden!

Right, well I've lived in Sweden for more than a month now and haven't talked about it at all.  I still don't really have anything to say but you can have a video I took from a palace I went to today.  Some guards changing over or something, I dunno

Swedish Lan Tax

I like living in Sweden, it's great here!  The people are friendly, the area I live is green and very scenic and the finals for Starcraft 2 at Dreamhack were broadcast on live TV so I was able to watch it in HD on a massive TV.

But then I discover something about Sweden that pisses me right the fuck off.

http://www.friatider.se/lan-party-tax-hits-swedish-gamers

This article (written in English, don't worry) is about a tax that gamers will have to pay if they want to have LAN events in Sweden.  You can go read the article, it doesn't give an exact value for how much one would have to pay, but it doesn't sound fucking cheap.

Anyway, the tax itself doesn't really effect me, I'm not the kind of person who participates or manages LAN events.  It really sucks for you guys who do but my wallet isn't going to be affected so me being angry about the cost wouldn't mean much.

That said, what does upset me quite greatly is how video gaming is viewed by the Swedish government or whoever the hell is in charge of this shit.  Basically, the people who made this decision was the Swedish Gambling Board.  They said, and it's a quote in the article, that there is no difference between video games and slot machines.

Now this really pisses me the fuck off, not because of what was said, but because what it implies about people in positions of power.  It's quite clear from that quote, that people in government positions, and not just in Sweden, don't have the first fucking clue when it comes to video games.

Every controversy over violence, sexism or anything like that, every shitty badly researched news story and shit thing to come out of a politicians mouth when it comes to gaming is because they don't have a fucking clue what's going on in this industry.  What's worse is that it's these clueless fucksticks that are allowed to pass rules on whats OK and what's not and all if you have to do is look at places like Australia and Germany to see how well that's going.

If news outlets and government bodies are going to start making reports and passing rules on stuff related to gaming, they need to hire some people who are actually clued in.  Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if that whole image of gamers being an angry, whiny bunch would fall away once stupid bullshit like this stops happening.

Piss off Gamestop

I hear a lot of bad things about Gamestop, but after doing a bit of shopping in my local Stockholm branch, I'm not seeing any of the terrible service stories that I hear so much about online, that must be an American thing.

There is one thing that really pisses me off though and that is the stupid little extras they try and offer you when you purchase a game.  Yesterday I found that they were having a sale, so I was picking up a cheap game and as I'm paying the person says "Do you want to protect it for a little extra?"

Not only was I not told how much extra it would be, but I don't even know what the fuck that means.  What can they possibly do to my game to "protect" it?  Do they mean there are going to give me some kind of insurance so that if I fuck it all up I can replace it? 

I've been gaming since I was 4 years old and NEVER have I personally fucked up a disc to the point where it wont work.  I don't know anyone who would treat their games so badly that they disc would stop working and I don't think anyone on earth in their right mind would do that, so this game "protection" thing just seems like a massive fucking con.

I fucking hate retail, the amount of trouble and bullshit I've had with shops like GAME and Gamestation in the UK makes me seriously hope that the company goes under.  Since Gamestop is also into conning people I think they should piss off too.  Digital downloads or online shopping is the best way to go, you don't get pricks offering you useless bullshit or acting unprofessionally. 

Maybe I'll share some GAME horror stories one day...

A Different Kind of Card

Think of this post as part 2 of things I found inside Swedish arcades.

So if you remember a long long time ago, I made a post talking about stat cards in Japan.  I used a picture of my old E-Amusement pass as the image and it looked like this.

Just so those who didn't read that post last summer don't have to dig through the archive, these cards are used for certain games inside Japanese arcades for tracking your play records and unlocking new things within the games.

Now if you look back to the first picture, you may notice there is a card reader strapped to that crazy taxi machine, but it's not for stat cards.  Sweden, unlike Japan or the UK doesn't have this nice convenient coin that you can just drop in like a £1 or 100 yen.  If my memory serves me correctly, the standard price for 1 credit in the arcade was something really awkward like 16 Kroner or some such nonsense so you have to swipe some kind of credit card in the machine in order to get a credit.

At least I think that's how it works, I don't know any Swedish and the one Swedish guy I do know doesn't know anything about games.  Still, the awkward pricing of arcade games out here just makes me yearn for a good Japanese game centre or even just a simple Time Crisis cabinet in a British cinema that takes a single fucking coin.

Now That's Some Bullshit #6: Region Locking

Time for some more ranting and raving as I pick out one of the things that annoys me the most, region locking on hardware.

Now before I start hearing about the "pros" of region locking, I'm going to tell you right now to fuck right off.  With that out of the way let us talk about how region locking is a load of ass.  So as you may or may not have figured out I am currently living in Japan and if you have been following my story of all my games being stolen, you may also know that my family now live in Sweden after moving from the UK.

So after spending so much time living in the UK and then suddenly moving about everywhere, I have a lot of PAL video games.  Now in terms of games I own, everything Sony related I have no problem with.  The PS3, PSP and the Vita (which I don't own yet) are all region free, so all the moving around basically had no effect on that, same for the DS.  But my Xbox and Wii games, I just flat out cannot play anymore because I've moved country, and THAT is bullshit.  However, those games appear to have been stolen, so even if I was still in Europe I couldn't play them right now anyway.

That said, I own a 3DS, one that I bought in the UK, and this fucking thing is region locked too so I can't buy any games for this fucking thing because I'm living in Japan.  I don't want to hear any crap about how region locking a system is good for business or some shit.  Your average everyday gamer doesn't give two fucks about importing for cheaper prices (or knows how for that matter) and on top of that, companies are probably losing money by not allowing people like me to pay for games that aren't available to them in the country that they live in.  Disregarding that point for a second, the DS was fucking region free so why did Nintendo suddenly feel the need to lock me out of their library of games just because I moved house? Assholes

Long story short, stop fucking region locking, the companies that don't region lock their stuff aren't exactly suffering for it, so you basically have no reason to fucking do it as far as I know.

A Dark Day for My Game Collection Part #2

If you remember a while back, I made a post about a large chunk of my game collection going missing and the disaster of a situation being caused by the courier company that was supposed to be shipping my stuff.  Well there has been a little update on that situation that I wanted to share.

So there was this box that was stuck in Germany that I could track and had not yet been delivered and I was fairly convinced that it was that box which contained all my shit.  Fast forward about a month and we still have no word.  So contact is established with the company who then tell me "err yeah, we can't find it".  So what they're telling me, is that a box full of 4 games consoles and a heap of games has just vanished into the ether?

Yeah fuckin' right!  I don't buy this for one goddamn second!  The whole reason the box wasn't shipped from Germany or whatever was because it was "too heavy" apparently, so you don't just go losing something that fuckin' big.  I don't know what the outcome will be yet so I'll save this info for part 3, but there is also evidence that my stuff got tampered with too, so this whole situation is smelling really badly of someone just making off with all my games.

So to cut a long story short, I'm fairly certain my games got nicked.  Will keep updating on this situation just because it's such a huge fucking mess.

A dark day for my game collection

Well, I was gonna use this space to write about Castlevania 3, but the most insane, idiotic thing has happened and it feels like it would be a crime not to rant about it.

Basically, at the end of May I moved to Japan, and previous to this my family moved to Sweden.  While all this shit was going on, I was attending university in a city called Preston and I couldn't exactly cart 5 consoles and all those games to Japan with me, so I sent them to my new home in Sweden. 

Anyway, I fuck off to Japan and I'm having a grand old time when I hear there are some problems and the boxes are being thrown back and forth between Preston and Germany like some kind of shitty fucking tennis match and eventually I just give up paying attention to the situation and bank on them arriving eventually.  I mean after all, even if they arrive I can't use them for a year at least, so no point worry about it, as long as they get there right?

FUCKING. WRONG!  So today, a single box arrives in Sweden filled with SOME of my stuff.  The majority of my rarer PS1 and Gamecube titles are intact but the consoles, and 4 sleeves worth of Xbox360, PS2 and Wii games are still not accounted for at the moment.  In place of my consoles and a shitton of games, I got a metric crapton of cutlery and dolls of Bill fucking Clinton.

I mean seriously, what the fuck, how do you fuck this up so bad?  I give the company NOTHING but video games, and they some how mix it in with fucking Bill sodding Clinton dolls?!  Oh yeah, and on top of that there is an assortment of Jay-Z CD's and some other artists that I've never heard of and are probably wank.

Now while writing this post, I got an update saying there are 2 boxes just milling about in a German depot somewhere that need to be delivered, so hopefully they contain all the shit, or at the very least the 100+ titles in those sleeves.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to the gaming and not post personal rants on how my shit that I can't use or talk about on here has gone missing, but this story is so stupid it needs to be told.