To be fair and in spite of some pundits declaring hypocrisy, NRA: Practice Range is not a violent video game. The only shooting you can do is at painted targets, as at most practice ranges in the real world including those used to train our police and militaries. It's no more violent than a game of darts.

But leaving aside the political situation behind this release, is the game itself any fun?

In short... no. It isn't.

Controlling your weapon is achieved one of two ways, either flailing your phone wildly in front of you with the gyroscopic controls or using a small onscreen joystick and an onscreen trigger button. And no, you can't invert the y-axis on the joystick, if you're used to flight sims.

While both methods of control track your movements with a fair degree of accuracy, moving the crosshair on the screen does require quite a bit of real world movement when using the gyroscopic controls. Use on public transport is not advised.
Unfortunately the accuracy of the controls is offset by the half second delay between tapping the screen to fire and your gun firing.

Perhaps that half second is there to give you time to reflect on your actions?

Three practice ranges are on offer. An indoor range with vaguely humanoid targets that appear and disappear in place, or slide back and forth across the screen at higher difficulty levels. The outdoor range is a field with various holes for targets to pop up through and a skeet shooting range where the discus style clay pigeon flies out from behind your shoulder.
Each range has different weapons available. The indoor range is for handguns, the outdoor for rifles and skeet shooting for shotguns. The game comes with one of each gun category unlocked and additional guns can be purchased for 99c each.

It's unclear how they expect to sell additional guns when the standard weapons sound dull and are animated poorly, on top of there not being anything particularly fun to do with them.

If this app cost any money up front it would be a travesty. As a free app, it is merely a wasted opportunity. Even the gun safety tips, laws and hunting season information is just links to websites. A dorky little gun trivia quiz could have made that section a bit of fun, at least.

Also, it crashes a lot. So even if you somehow enjoy the gameplay you'll keep getting interrupted by it breaking.

An all round awful waste of time.

But that's half the fun, isn't it? Ask five random gamers and you're not going to get the same answer out of all five and the same applies when it's five separate groups of ill informed clowns.

Of course some places are objectively wrong, and you should absolutely tell them that. Loudly. And often!

But in the spirit of flailing a hand in the air and begging for attention, here's my not at all comprehensive list of games I thought were really pretty great in 2012.

- Overall Game of the Year: Mass Effect 3

As if it could be anything else. The conclusion to an epic storyline that has played out over the course of three games. So many of the loose threads from the previous two games (and even some of the DLC) were tied up neatly before the end and the fate of the galaxy was decided. Commander Shepard's tale will likely remain unmatched in gaming for a long time.

And even the multiplayer, that I had dismissed prior to release, proved to be one of the most fun experiences of the year.

- Shooter-y RPG-y Game of the Year: Borderlands 2 (My review for Player Attack)

A bazillion guns and dozens of skills combined with a fun storyline and a bunch of memorable characters make this an obvious choice for any shooty/rpg award once Mass Effect 3 is taken out of the equation. I've yet to dip into the various bits of downloadable content (including an entirely new character to play) but I have lost countless hours exploring Pandora and I'm sure I'll be going back, despite having finished the main storyline. A shooter with replayability! Such a novelty.

- Honourable Mention: Sniper Elite V2

Creep your way behind enemy lines with just a handful of explosives and a sniper rifle and change the course of World War II. But make sure you switch the "realistic" bullet physics on, so you have to account for bullet drop over distance and wind direction. It turns the game from a fairly boring stealthy snipe-em-up to a really fun, challenging experience.

- MMO Game of the Year: Guild Wars 2 (My review for Player Attack)

Not a lot of competition in the field this year, surprisingly. Excluding expansion packs for existing games it really comes down to two, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World. And anyone putting The Secret World on a game of the year list clearly has poop instead of brains. Guild Wars 2's cooperative open world gameplay and questing along with the lack of a subscription fee make it a surprisingly fun experience. At least until you get bored of grinding out level after level after level...

- Adventure/Indie/Strategy Game of the Year: FTL

Both a delight and a dastardly plot to ruin lives, FTL gives you a starship, a crew to fly her and sets an overwhelming force to chasing you through the galaxy. And even if you make it through the various jump gates you still have to face the extremely tough command ship at the end, putting all the weaponry and ship upgrades you've accrued to the ultimate test. Most don't succeed on their first attempt. Many don't by their tenth. I've still not beaten the darn game but I will not give up!

- Open World Game of the Year: Far Cry 3

Whilst certain areas were inaccessible without completing story missions and the real open world bits don't start until you've completed a lengthy tutorial, once you get past those caveats the islands of Far Cry 3 have been the most fun.

- Strategy Game of the Year: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Went from being announced to release in under a year, a pattern more games should adhere to. A reboot of a game from the 90s that didn't try to reinvent itself too much... unlike the now-delayed shooter based on the same game. Combines old school turn based strategy with modern graphics and gameplay concepts like a perks system for your troops. One of the most pleasant surprises of 2012.

- Mobile Game of the Year: Hill Climb

Drive a jeep, motorbike, monster truck or race car over various kinds of terrain to collect coins and upgrade your vehicle to better drive over the terrain and collect more coins... Simple but insanely addictive. Have already upgraded all my vehicles and am hoping the guys at Fingersoft will release a few more in 2013...

- Facebook Game of the Year: Marvel: Avengers Alliance (My preview for Player Attack)

Remarkably similar to many other social games, but with all the Marvel heroes and villains to play with. Does ultimately fall to the curse of requiring willing friends to further your advancement in the game, but a fun combat system and a good roster of famous faces make this a lot of fun for a week or two.

- Disappointment of the Year: The Secret World (My review for Player Attack)

Fascinating lore and clever social marketing can't save a poorly conceived quest system and a rushed release. Simple things like fall damage didn't make it into the final game so it shouldn't be surprising the game is a horribly unbalanced and bug riddled mess. Announced a switch to free to play, rather than subscription based, just months after release but it may be too little, too late. With the giant World of Warcraft still looming over everything in the MMO space companies must learn patience and only release their games when they are truly ready.

Here endeth the list. At least until I remember some other amazing game, invent a category to put it in and edit this post accordingly. :-)

Watch the entire clip here on YouTube.

There's been a lot of back and forth over whether it was or wasn't assault, whether the women were in on the gag and if there was anything wrong with his behaviour in the first place.

One look at the video has been enough for most people. Many can't even finish watching, the behaviour is so disgusting. Two of the women involved have said they were not prepared for his line of questioning, though the one who was "motorboated" gave her consent at the time and has since said she has no issue with KSI. The woman referred to as "Massive Tits" has since accepted KSI's apology for any offence caused. It was clearly not planned prior to the camera being switched on. The question of whether it was or wasn't assault would ultimately be up to the courts, if anyone chose to press charges - which seems unlikely.

What has ruffled a lot of fan-feathers is the publication of the article which originally drew attention to the video. Some KSI fans feel that the women themselves are the only ones with the right to complain about their treatment and that it's not the media's place to object.

Well, that's just rubbish. It is absolutely the media's place to shine a light in the dark corners of society and it always has been.

Further, it's the responsibility of the community to stand up and say that this behaviour is not okay. KSI has a quarter of a million followers on Twitter and who knows how many others via other sources. Whether he sees himself as influential or a role model of sorts, he is one. A lot of people will watch that video and think what he is doing is just harmless fun. And, if he had gotten away without punishment, they may have tried to emulate him.

Fortunately since then the Eurogamer Expo has banned him from future shows. I would imagine shows run by other companies will be keeping an eye on him, too. Or perhaps that is wishful thinking.

In any case, fans have leapt to his defense on websites and Twitter, attacking anyone daring to express dismay or disgust. Julie Horup merely collated some of the responses on her blog and received a bunch of angry tweets in return.
I tweeted about it once - once! - and managed to get someone on my case. Admittedly, I laughed as they told me to get a life after they'd clearly gone searching for someone to harass... :)

I can only imagine the torrent of hatemail Wesley Copeland and Ian Miles Cheong must have received for writing and publishing the original article.

And all because they dared to suggest people shouldn't be disgustingly disrespectful to others.

We need more of this, not less. The more people avoid the issues because it's "not their problem," the longer this sort of thing will continue. Yes, it's often uncomfortable challenging such entrenched behaviour, particularly from such well known figures.

Yet if nobody is holding them accountable, why would they ever stop doing it?

Guild Wars 2 has things to see and do in obscure locations, but even if it didn't, I think I'd still waste a bunch of my time exploring...

Climb ALL the mountains.

And that's neat.

But Zombie Driver stores a player's Slaughter-mode high scores on the internet via Steam. So you can see exactly how well your friends have done on any given map and set yourself a target.

The bit I really like? While playing the game your next highest scoring friend has their name in the upper right corner of the screen, alongside how many more points you need to surpass them.

Keating, you are bad at this game.

It's such a small thing to include and many may never even know it's there. But I like it.

Zombie Driver is just $10 on Steam, if running over zombies while competing against your friends is stuff you like.

This isn't a gender identity issue, I don't think I'm a woman trapped inside the body of a manchild. And it isn't the oft-repeated reason of other male gamers - if you're going to stare at an arse for hundreds of hours it may as well be a ladybum. Nor do I ever pretend I am a lady in real life, mostly because the people who ask such things are only asking because they're sleazebags.

No, the reason I do it is because when it comes to customising a look and choosing an outfit and all the rest of it, it's a lot more fun doing so for a woman than it is a man. In part because it's not something I could do ordinarily, where I could dress a bloke up however I wanted, whenever I wanted, because I am a bloke.

But also because most games offer a more interesting set of options for female avatars. Sometimes that just means more "revealing" clothing or a slider for boob size, but not always.

I know it seems a little silly, especially in games where designing an image for a character is lost on most due to combat oriented gameplay being at the forefront.

But what it comes down to is that this:

My white haired avatar in Guild Wars 2.

Is much more interesting to me than this:

My boring red clad dude in Guild Wars 2

Maybe it is an issue that exists more in my mind than in reality. Most games do offer plenty of options when creating male characters and have heaps of clothing/armour to choose from. Yet most of the time I get sick of trying to create a guy I'm happy with and start the creation process over as a chick.

I really wanted to post some more pictures of past female characters but it turns out that, even when I do remember to take screenshots, I don't have any sort of plan to keep track of the resulting files.

Since I have a blog, I might start taking a nice picture or two of my character/s when I inevitably play more games. Maybe I'll include a little bit about whatever the game is, what that character's goals are... maybe I'll just throw a picture up.

Maybe I'll forget altogether and this will be the last entry on the subject.

But why? Why isn't it okay to say a Team Fortress 2 map is gay? Or the pen that keeps running out is gay? Or paying extra for pineapple on your pizza is gay?

Because every time you use it that way you're reinforcing the notion that "gay" is synonymous with "bad". And therefore being gay is bad.

You may not mean it in the sense of homosexuals being bad. It likely doesn't cross most people's minds at the time they utter it. It's become so ingrained in some people that they'll actually defend their usage of the word. They think it's been "reclaimed" or somehow repurposed to not refer to homosexuality anymore, despite the prominent usage in various advocacy groups and celebrations like the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

If you really don't mean it that way then you're really not a horrible person, honestly. The problem is actually not so much your usage, it's the licence it gives to others to also use it when they do mean it as a homosexual slur. By trying to legitimise it as an insult you're giving people a free pass, whether you intended to or not.

It's all part of the way certain sections of society try to keep others down. And it's not like this is anything new. We did it for countless generations with "the coloured folk" and the many disparaging slang words that were invented to ensure they "knew their place". Now we're doing the same thing all over again, marginalising people for being different.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to this issue due to some of the marginalised people being among my best friends. Or perhaps it's my own previous usage of such words...

My school years were the 80s and early 90s. Homosexuality wasn't quite the secretive thing it had been in decades past but if you were even suspected of being gay, you were likely in for a rough time. Nobody in my peer group came out as openly gay during their time at school, though it would later turn out that a few were. Some were surprising, some weren't.

Did I ever call any of them gay or a fag? I honestly can't recall. Neither was a word I ever used very much but I'm certainly not going to pretend the words have never left my mouth. The idea that I might have called a friend who was struggling with their sexuality anything of the sort, either in anger or in jest, frankly horrifies me. How could it not, after supporting newer friends through their own trials associated with breaking the news to family and friends, and seeing some pretty devastating reactions at times?

Maybe I overcompensate as a result, I'm not sure. Is it really so wrong to want people to knock it off? I have tried to be a bit more lenient when it comes to people using it as an impersonal insult, at least partly because it's not a battle I want to have seemingly all the damn time.

Surely there are other words to express the depths of your disdain? I have to believe that there are.

I say that a lot, especially of late, but I don't think people really understand why. It's not false modesty, or fishing for people to tell me I am one, or that I am good at it. It's that I think the standard of writing required to be labelled a writer is markedly higher than my own skills in the field.
Compiling recaps of The Biggest Loser isn't much more than transcription with a few swears and observations thrown in. It's more about having the ability to type a decent amount of words per minute than it is any particular ability with shaping those words into something worth reading.

Doing a piece for Player Attack is more about babbling on about a game (or concept, recently) until I feel like I've said enough that people might read it and be interested by something I've blurted out. It's been great for me, I've learned plenty of things about writing from the editorial skills of Ms Jessica Citizen after she neatens up whatever I send in, but other than that one super (un)popular Guild Wars 2 article I'm not too sure what any of the people reading my bits have thought.
Plus there's always the niggling thought at the back of my mind that I only get asked to do such things because I obviously have so much free time and can readily spit out a great quantity of words on most any subject.

And that's mostly true, I do often have the free time to write something and, especially if it's something I'm interested in, can generally mush together my thoughts into some words on the subject.
And that's mostly untrue, in that I doubt I would keep getting asked to write something if it was just because I can do so in relatively short order. There are plenty of other people who have thoughts and ideas and they all tend to be more qualified than me. As in they write about gaming things and big magazines pay them money for those words. Or they have some kind of a degree from a university.

Or they at least did the fancy English course in High School. Something other than just reading a lot of books and not knowing when to shut the hell up.

Perhaps my time in school is where some of the writer-insecurity comes from? Oh, not the usual tale of a bullied nerd, but the lack of any real recognition or encouragement when it came to anything writing related. The closest I got was encouragement to stick with the debating team.

Yes, I was argumentative in school, too. But scribbling notes on cue cards and having to turn those into speeches defending a point of view mostly came easily to me and it's probably influenced my writing more than most things.

Maybe I would have stretched further in my English studies if I hadn't been so heavily discouraged by the attitude of my Year Six teacher, Mrs Zotter? In her mind if you weren't writing in cursive you were doomed to mediocrity. And the high school teachers would mark you down for it. So you have to write in cursive!!!
As it turned out, high school teachers didn't give a crap so long as your writing was legible. So all those times she harangued me into doing the much slower cursive lettering were a waste of everyone's time, not to mention quite discouraging for a youngster who thought the content of the writing should be more important than the neatness.

Then in Year Seven or Eight I had a teacher who set us Macbeth to read. Only it was Macbeth in comic book form.

I sometimes wonder how much of my language skills were learned in school past the fourth grade. I suspect I learned more about good sentence structure and fancier words from reading a lot of books and subconsciously assimilating the knowledge from there.

The insecurity surrounding my abilities as a person who writes things might also have something to do with severe depression and a generally poor outlook on life and future prospects, particularly in the area of employment.
The most creativity required of me in any previous employed position was figuring out how to get to and from work every day while getting paid only marginally more than the price of my weekly train ticket.
I didn't keep that job, in case you were wondering how that turned out for me. What the guy was doing was actually illegal and the employment agency who set it up for me were none too thrilled when I reported back to them the conditions.

Anyway, creativity, it's not really something I think of possessing either. And it's another thing a writer should really have, right?

I seem to have strayed a long way off track here.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I hear the word "writer" I think more in terms of book writers, screen writers, newspaper and magazine writers. People who write professionally, because someone thinks their words are worth money. People who write poetry or songs. People who do research and write about important things in society. People whose words I want to read.

Not some clown with an opinion and an hour to clumsily mash the keyboard.

What you've experienced is what Sony Online Entertainment dubbed the "New Game Experience", commonly abbreviated as the NGE, introduced in 2005 in a misguided attempt to recapture player interest in the game.

But what came before the NGE? How did players develop their characters before the dark times?

It all started with visiting one of the Novice level trainers for a starting profession - Artisan, Brawler, Entertainer, Marksman, Medic or Scout - and paying to unlock the first box in what, nowadays, looks very much like a talent tree from any number of other MMOs.

A partly developed Artisan.

Each starting class then has four branches of development. In the case of the Artisan, the base crafting profession, you can advance in the Engineering, Domestic Arts, Business and Surveying lines. Each branch typically required a different kind of experience gain to advance. Engineering, for example, could be advanced via crafting weaponry or simple structures like moisture vaporators or small mining excavators. Domestic Arts would require cooking food or crafting clothing. Business, if I recall correctly, required a "General" type of XP you could gain from crafting items like chance cubes or some backpacks. Surveying, unsurprisingly, required Survey XP which you would gain from using devices to track down mineral deposits and digging those deposits up out of the ground.

Other base classes had a similar system - Marksman had branches for Rifles, Carbines, Pistols and Support. In order to reach the Master box for a profession you would need to fill all four branches of the tree. Meaning a Master Marksman had not just gained the experience required with a rifle, they'd also done the same with a carbine and the same with a pistol - the XP required for Support would generally come on the way to the fourth box to one of the other branches.

The perks for reaching Master in a profession don't always end at a fancy title and some more skill modifiers and abilities. Mastering the Scout profession would unlock the elite Ranger profession for training, giving you better bonuses when harvesting creature hides, larger camps to construct and a greater ability to negotiate difficult terrain. Mastery of the Medic field leads to the Doctor profession, with an expansion of your healing abilities and the addition of some very useful buffs.

Not all the elite professions required mastery of a base profession. If you just want to stick with rifles you can enter the Rifleman profession with just the rifle branch of Marksman. Entry into the Dancer profession required the dancing boxes and the "support" tree of Entertainer, known as Entertainment Healing.

Then you have the hybrid advanced professions. If you wanted to train as a Bounty Hunter you had to pick up both Novice Scout and Novice Marksman. You needed one complete line, Exploration, in Scout and you had to achieve Master Marksman. Commando required the Unarmed line from Brawler and Master Marksman. Squad Leader? The Support line in Marksman and the Exploration and Survival lines in Scout.

But at no point are you railroaded into any of these options. If you want to be a Rifleman by day and a Dancer by night? Completely free to do that. You're bound only by the limit of 250 skill points in total, with boxes higher up the Starting Profession trees costing more points and boxes higher up the Advanced Professions taking fewer.

This obviously opens up a lot of options for players looking for some diversity in their combat. A popular combination for a long time was Rifleman for ranged combat with Teras Kasi for melee fights and the handy Meditation skill, which would boost your damage and defenses before a fight.

It wasn't limited to just the fun or the diverse, either. People discovered that the bonuses to skill modifiers you gain through certain professions would stack additively with the bonuses from others. The bonus to your Dodge rating from Fencer would stack with the one from Pistoleer, meaning someone who has mastered both professions would have a very high chance to dodge attacks, whether wielding a pistol or a one handed weapon.

And part of the genius of it all was that you weren't restricted to just filling all these boxes by visiting your trainer and coughing up your credits - any player who has already learned a skill can then go on to teach any other player, assuming they meet the requirements. Both a vast improvement over other games both before and since but also a great community building mechanic. Having a friend or guildmate of the appropriate profession as a mentor meant you had someone on hand to train you as you reach the XP requirements and, generally, they wouldn't even charge you for the training!

But what if you don't like your chosen profession?

Surrender your skills, start over again! (Source: MMORPG.com)

Yes, Star Wars Galaxies had a respec system. Back in 2003 a game featured such a thing and the world didn't end as a result. Take that, respec haters!

Surrendering a skill box removed any bonuses provided by that box and refunded the skill points used, allowing you to select a different box instead. And you could do it as often as you like, for free, anywhere and on any planet. Of course surrendering all your skills among nests of rancors on Dathomir was not advisable, but if you had a mentor along you could work your new skills back up without returning to town.

Or you could give up the adventuring life and take up crafting or entertaining for a change of pace, if being rancor bait no longer appeals.

An unprecedented level of freedom in character development and one of the deepest systems ever to appear in an MMO and... they replaced it with a WoW/Everquest system clone.

MMO developers are strange.

Reading the linked email on Reddit from "Mike" to the unlucky Lauren, I can see why it would be a topic of debate, especially on The Twitters, where we love to talk about everything and forget we only have 140 characters. Though I'm not sure why anyone would want to friend zone Mike. He seems like a real catch!

But what I really want to talk about is the lack of friend zone issues experienced by Draqul, or more exactly, my chronic and perpetual friend zoning by every female, ever. And why it's not actually a terrible curse.

There's a number of reasons I am eternally in the "just a friend" box, from being beaten by the ugly stick to living in the wrong state to just plain being a dude when the lady in question prefers anything but men. And every possible reason in between. I'm sure this is not an unfamiliar situation for a lot of people on both sides of the gender-fence. And it causes a lot of angst, for some.

But think about it for a moment - okay, you might not get to touch The Boobies. But there must be other things you like about this person, right? They enjoy the same sorts of movies, or music or outdoor activities? Maybe they're a big fan of video games or philosophy books. Or they tell great jokes and funny anecdotes. Perhaps they too collect stamps.

Regardless of what it is, you still share that with them and thus they are likely to be a good friend. And while most everyone is a fan of boobies, having friends is hardly the worst thing in the world.

If it was only a physical attraction to begin with then there really are plenty more fish in the sea. Probably ones with which you share interests and who are also open to a relationship with you. Perhaps that girl who put you in the friend zone will introduce you...?

Just don't be like Mike and not recognise when it's time to let it go. Calling someone "impolite, immature, passive aggressive, and cowardly" is not the way to their heart.

And if all else fails, high class call girls/boys are probably cheaper anyway. :-P