If your ego takes a front seat to your desire for privacy, you can now put your face on your online character in Rainbow Six Vegas [via war and video games and ve3d]. From what I can gather it involves taking  head-on and profile shots with the Xbox 360 Vision Camera which should hopefully lessen the chance of you using someone else’s (unauthorised) photos. Here’s some video of the creators chatting about it [via war and video games and kotaku]

After an interview posted early Tuesday morning in the Melbourne Age, SCE Australia boss Michael Ephraim was quoted on American and English gaming sites for what have been construed as controversial remarks on the various price points for next-gen consoles – particularly in reader comments. It’s a shame when honest responses are punished in such a way, and leads to the usual sound-bite PR mentality that gamers and journalists profess to rail against. You can read Ephraim’s response to the hoo-ha here.

The “cutscene dilemma” is an interesting one, because it gets to the heart of problems regarding immersion, embodiment and character in video games.

Unless you’re playing an RPG with a Lvl 1 character from the age of 0, the game is going to have to drop you in the deep end somewhat. There are innumerable tricks of the trade to get the player up to speed (let’s see if I can squeeze another cliché in there): amnesia, slow reveals, etc.; but the easiest is probably the cutscene.

If you take our cutscenes, you take our ability to work out what the hell is going on. Or, to put it another way: You can take our cutscenes, but you can never take our freedom (not to buy your confusing game)!