Shatter is a fresh take on the retro brick breaking genre made popular in the 70′s & 80′s by Breakout and Arkanoid. Shatter features innovative controls, physics effects, power-ups, special attacks, and boss battles.

There’s already been some great coverage in the gaming press, including 1UP, IGN and PlayStation Blog.

Shatter will be released worldwide on the 23rd of July for US$7.99 and NZ$9.90.

For more information visit the Shatter website and forums.

Update: The government has stalled the law and is now considering throwing it out!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10558313

On way of describing the game is Jenga with sticky balls of goo. Engineer structures by connecting the goo to get from one side of the level to the other.

Not many commercial games get a Linux release, hopefully if World of Goo and others are successful we may see more games on Linux in the future.

It would appear that in the opinion of Australian politicians, gamers are all children. There is no need for an R18 rating because adults don’t play video games. The consequence of this is many games are modified for the Australian market or are just banned outright. Take2, the publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series have been down the Australian censorship road before. To avoid trouble this time they’ve pre-emptively cut some of the more mature content from the game for the Australian market.

This kind of thing doesn’t normally effect New Zealand. We have an R18 rating – because adults play games. However many of the games sold in NZ for economic reasons are the Australian version. As is the case with GTA IV. So thanks to another countries brain-dead game classification laws the game New Zealanders will be playing is censored.

A great visual example of the difference between taking the car and alternative forms of transport.

That’s the default install. I’ve tweaked it a fair bit. For a start the default music player “Helix Banshee” didn’t work with my iPod Shuffle. I upgraded that to a newer version of Banshee that fixed that. I was quite intrigued by the features of Beryl. I was also finding the package management that came with openSUSE not that great. There seemed to be two package managers installed, Zen and Yast. Neither of which were that great, the main problem being that they were both incredibly slow to check for updates. Instead I installed a new package manager called Smart. It’s really fast and a breeze to use. Hopefully it’s included as standard in a future version.

Despite all the beta software I’ve installed it’s still pretty stable. I genuinely think that this desktop setup is nicer and easier to use than Windows XP. I can burn DVD+Rs again and my PC doesn’t reboot several times while trying to boot the OS and I can use ethernet without it dying every couple of minutes like it was on XP.

Although I installed a dual boot Linux/Windows configuration, I don’t think I’ve actually booted Windows since I finished reinstalling it.

In other GripShift news the boffins in the marketing department have uploaded a new trailer to youtube just in time for the European launch. HD trailer downloads are coming soon.

The country is finally coming out of the closet to declaring their Lamb Love with a national day.

Agriculture Minister Jim Anderton stated, “New Zealanders had no reason to be embarrassed about their sheep … we hope all New Zealanders will recognise … this milestone and mark it by enjoying lamb for dinner on Feb. 15″.

Oh, we’re celebrating eating them then. Fuck off Jim I’m vegetarian.