Australian Government Rolls Out R18+ Game Rating Guidelines

The Australian federal government has released draft guidelines for an R18+ videogame rating that would strengthen the MA15+ rating but impose "virtually no restrictions on the treatment of themes" for adults.

Slowly but surely, Australia is dragging itself toward recognition of videogames as a legitimate entertainment medium. Gamers down under have struggled for years with a dysfunctional classification system that topped out at MA15+, which meant that games were often edited for the Aussie audience or just banned outright. Resistance from one or two individual state-level Attorneys General kept the system in place but it appears that finally, the country is ready to acknowledge that grown-ups play videogames too.

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Heroes of Newerth shut down in India due to Cyber attack

S2 Games, developers of one of the most popular strategy games Heroes of Newerth, have just announced that they’re stopping all of the game’s related services in India as a result of a recent cyber attack against their servers.The attack can be traced back to recent discussions on the forum of the game, where Indian players were complaining about the lack of their country’s flag in the game’s customization options (while most other countries had their flags as a choosable option for players, India’s flag was strangely missing). Though the developers kept assuring people that this was a small oversight which they would correct soon enough, parts of the community were rather impatient – and in an immature way, too.

A group claiming to represent the Indian HoN community launched a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the servers of the game’s developer, S2 Games. As a result, the company has decided to cut their service in the region until the issue has been resolved – which, for now, is set for “indefinitely.”

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