I wonder if there’ll be any comments complaining about Junglist being axed.

Here’s your Good Game episode preview host… better known for his work previewing last week’s episode of Good Game, Jeremy Pencil!

It’s that time of the week where we pull Bajo and Hex out of their refrigerated oxygen tents and force them to tell you fine folk what’s on Good Game this week.

* We dress up like a Renaissance-era Peter Andre and teach unsuspecting powermongers a lesson in manners in Assassin’s Creed 2.

* Bajo makes our ears bleed as he tackles a Singstar double-bill with Take That and Motown and, adding insult to injury, shonky Wii clone uSing.

* We take a shrink ray to the face and make a round-the-world trip with LittleBigPlanet as it wanders onto the PSP.

* And we spend some quality time with the Official Galaga World Champion – Phil Day. PEWPEWPEW.

Catch Good Game Monday nights on ABC2 @ 8.30pm, or late Friday nights before rage.

Watch any episode at www.abc.net.au/goodgame

Or, catch a higher quality version on ABC’s iView service

Enjoy the show!

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.

This review was submitted by David Fowles. If you’ve played Dragon Age: Origins, or just want to ask David more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Dragon Age: Origins (360)

Bioware’s long-in-development high fantasy epic was released with surprisingly little fanfare. Lost in the shadow of Mass Effect 2’s year-long hype, this reviewer had to question whether Dragon Age was being deliberately hidden as the ugly brother or if they simply felt Bioware + Dragons = No Marketing Required.

Having just completed a single 60 hour + playthrough, I can see it’s a bit of both. Like its namesake, Dragon Age is both awesome and terrible.

Loved

The writing: Rises above its generic subject matter through character dialogue which is almost constantly engaging or amusing. Also, for people who love to read there is a cartload of purely-optional history logs throughout the game.

Moral quandaries: There are some hair-pulling hard choices in this game, not just the vanilla “Good/Evil” choices other games are proud of. There are some grey, grey areas to take your Grey Warden.

The talk: The voice acting is always adequate but is more often superb, particularly from your companion NPCs, whom you can expect to be talking to a lot.

Hated

The gameplay: The manual and what tutorial there is fail to explain the controls. Frustration and error are your guide. There’s nothing intuitive about the interface. The codex and quest data is a confusing mess (though this rarely matters.)

The broken auto-saves: The game autosaves… sometimes. It’s possible to lose hours of play because the game does not save between areas as you might expect.

The broken difficulty: On Normal mode, the game range’s between passably easy to occasionally, unexpectedly impossible.

The bugs: On 360, Dragon Age’s bugs have fleas. The most aggravating involves resuming savegames after a party wipe – do it manually, as the game will not always choose your most recent save.

The length: Some sections of the game seem to go on forever. If you were put off by Fallout 3’s underground metro, get ready for pain; at least the metro was largely optional.

The effort than went into crafting the choices and characterization in Dragon Age is obvious and there is a wealth of replayability to the game because of it. It’s just unfortunate then that, like Mass Effect, the gameplay is so terrible that you wouldn’t want to go through it all again. The choices available seem to have a more interesting and meaningful impact than those in Mass Effect, and I’m certainly more interested in replaying Dragon Age than that game, but I’m not in a hurry to.

If Bioware pony up a bug and balancing patch the size of a watermelon this game could tip over into win, as the elements which are brilliant are brilliant. From all accounts I’ve heard, this game is vastly better on PC. If that option is available to you, save yourself the hassle of the buggy, shoddy Xbox 360 port.

Reviewed by: David Fowles

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

Thanks to our friends at AFA Interactive, we’ve got five copies of the game, plus five extremely limited edition art books, to give away all this week. The art book contains gorgeous concept art (pictured below) from the game’s artists and there were only 130 of them printed worldwide. Yours will be hand-numbered and everything!

One unique feature of A Boy and His Blob is that it has a hug button. Yes, a hug button. A button for giving hugs.

To be in the running to win, we want you to give a hug, too. Send us a photo of yourself hugging someone or something. The five hugs that most warms our heart with love and affection will win. It’s as simple as that.

Entries close at midnight, Sunday, November 29. Good luck!

[Terms and Conditions]

Speaking to Radio National, Atkinson was asked for his views on the recently released game, described by interviewer Peter Mares as “violent and bloody and graphic and confronting.”

“I’ll be appealing against that classification, I think it’s wrong,” said Atkinson.

We have approached Activision for comment regarding the proposed appeal, but they have yet to respond.

The Member for Croydon, who will be challenged for his seat at the March 2010 state election by Australia’s first gamer rights party, went on to admit he had no faith in the Classification Board to do its job properly.

“It doesn’t surprise me. The Classification Board in Australia does everything to try to get games in under the radar. But just because the system is not being applied properly, it does not mean that the principles of the system are wrong.

“What I want the Classification Board to do is to apply the guidelines properly. What I don’t want is the extremely violent, sexually depraved, drug use games in Australia at all. At the cinema, we can stop people under 18 going in to see R18+ rated movies. We can’t stop these games that are extremely violent and depraved from getting into the home or getting into the hands of children.”

Atkinson raised the example of “the Japanese game Rape Play where one scores points for raping a mother and daughter.” Mares noted that this game is not available anywhere outside of Japan, even in countries that do have an R18+ rating. But Atkinson suggested that “Rape Play” (sic) would be released in Australia.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it past the Classification Board to make that an R rated game, frankly, on their previous form,” he replied.

Atkinson also described an unnamed game in which “the player straps explosives to himself and blows himself up in a market and scores points for how many people he kills.” (Anyone know what game he’s talking about? I honestly have no idea.)

When it was suggested to Atkinson that, as Attorney-General, he would be responsible for drawing up the guidelines for an R18+ rating if it were introduced, and thus he would be able to ensure that such “extremely violent, sexually depraved, drug use games” would still be refused classification, he once again reiterated his lack of faith in the Board.

“I have no trust in the Classification Board to apply the guidelines sincerely and correctly,” he said. “And thus to draw up such guidelines would be to do so in sure and certain knowledge that they would be stretched and then broken.”

Finally, Mares asked the minister whether he knew the status of the Commonwealth discussion paper on video game classification, originally scheduled to be released to the public in April this year. Mr Atkison denied any knowledge of why it has not yet been issued.

In the second half of the segment, Mares spoke with Gamers 4 Croydon founder David Doe. Hit the link below to listen to the full interview.

Does Australia need an R18+ rating for computer games? [Radio National, via Screen Play]

You move a coloured ball, which is submerged under the water filling half the play area. Other balls drop into the water at a steady rate, occasionally bouncing off the plank floating in the centre of the screen. If you touch a like-coloured ball, you’ll collect it for points; if you hold down the mouse button as you touch a different coloured ball, it will bounce off but you’ll take on its colour. If a ball falls all the way to bottom of the screen, the water level rises, and it’s game over when it overflows.

Things start fairly slowly, with just two colours making things readily manageable. But once a third is introduced, my brain struggled to adjust with juggling the necessary colours. It all gets a bit too frantic. Maybe you’ll fare better?

Deflectorpool [Minijuegos]

We asked you to write a limerick beginning with “There once was a Sackboy…” You can read all 341 entries here and here. But only two can win.

This is them:

Brent Harrison
There was a sackboy named Michael,
who thought banning games was delightful,
Until one day,
Voters sent him away,
By electing his political rival.

Ryan Stalgis
There once was a sackgirl named Rose
Who picked a loose thread from her nose
She soon felt dim-witted
For since she was knitted
She unraveled right down to her toes!

Congratulations guys, I’ll be in touch later today to arrange delivery of your prize.

Thanks to our friends at Namco Bandai, we have one Section 8 statue (valued at 700 bucks) and three copies of the game on Xbox 360 to give away. One of you will walk away with the statue and game; two runners-up will get the game.

Section 8 is a large-scale, sci-fi first-person shooter where fast-paced action meets military strategy in the far reaches of the galaxy. It has a single-player campaign and a full suite of team-based multiplayer modes.

You take on the role of a member of the 8th Armoured Infantry, essentially a suicide squad called in for the most dangerous missions of all. Hence the name: Section 8 is a US military term used to refer to those discharged for being “mentally unfit” for service.

To be in the running to win, we want you to show us why you deserve to receive a Section 8, too. You need to prove to us just how mentally unfit you are, and thus just how mentally fit you are for this game. Send us photographic proof of your madness to the usual address. (Just make sure you have the Kotaku “K” logo in there somewhere.)

This competition closes at midnight Sunday, November 29. Good luck!

[Terms and Conditions]

I’ll update this post with the answer at 5pm today if no one has guessed before then. Or if you do guess it before then, feel free to share your memories of a classic game.

Good luck!

It was an accident!

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be any way I can recover said deleted post. And I don’t have time to rewrite the whole damn thing again. So I’ll keep this brief.

In short: this week’s release are pretty terrible. There’s a whole bunch of licensed nonsense, family-friendly music games, and mediocre movie tie-ins, none of which (except possibly if you dig the tracklists for Band Hero or LEGO Rock Band, pictured) would be of much interest to Kotaku readers.

Comfortably the best game this week is Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles for Wii. Pro Evo 2010 on Wii is decent, and so’s Tales of Symphonia, also on Wii and delayed from last week. Other than that though, it’s slim pickings.

(And if I manage to recover the lost post, I’ll replace this one.)

You can talk about games. Or movies. Or politics. Music. Food. Science. Sport. Insert your own miscellaneous off-topic discussion here. Just keep it clean.

I’ll be promoting this post each morning until Sunday to let the conversation continue all week. Makes more sense than starting a new comments thread every day.

Talk amongst yourselves below…