Gameplanet‘s editor Daniel Cheer spoke to Tim Neale, presenter for “The Wire” on 95bFM today, in regards to Grand Theft Auto IV and censorship issues. Tim also interviewed Gordon Copeland, an independent Member of Parliament, who is calling for the game to be banned outright.

Copeland’s poor arguments for his cause will likely be enjoyed by gamers, as he advises multiple times that the game has “no redeeming features” and suggests that it is a simulator for learning how to kill in a similar way that a simulator trains astronauts to go into space.

Interestingly he doesn’t call for any other R18 material to be banned, despite his claims that children getting their hands on the game are his primary concern and there is certainly a lot of material out there which is inappropriate for children. Oh, and he also calls the game “Grand Auto Theft Number 4″ at one point.

You can listen to both interviews over at Gameplanet.

Things have gotten a lot better in recent years with regard to the delay between US and NZ release dates for video games, but often when there is a delay for a PAL release, the UK is a good market to watch because Australasia usually isn’t any more than a few weeks behind.

It was with great interest therefore that I read EA’s announcement yesterday that Rock Band would finally be releasing on May 23rd in the UK after having been unavailable anywhere but the USA since last year. I’ve spent countless hours playing the Guitar Hero series and have been looking forward to Rock Band for a long time.

So that’s the good news, because purely on that information it means that NZ might have a chance of seeing the game before the end of next month.

The bad news however is that the game has been priced at a whopping 180 pounds. Once converted to US dollars, that is more than double the price that US consumers have been paying. What a shocker. That potentially puts the New Zealand price up over $400 and possibly even as high as $500; and the higher the price gets the less likely the game will even make it to NZ. I’m suddenly wondering if our market is big enough for Rock Band… and I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.

Fingers crossed I’m wrong.

Gameplanet has word of a new Starcraft II trailer. I never really got into the original Starcraft, but I’m looking forward to this -- Blizzard historically just doesn’t make bad games and it’s been a long time since a real-time strategy game has interested me. Here’s the trailer:

I read on the forums last night that EA Games president Frank Gibeau has noticed that sales of Need for Speed: ProStreet weren’t quite as good as EA had hoped. And I quote:

Noting that sales of last year’s Need for Speed ProStreet didn’t live up to EA’s hopes for the game, Gibeau said he thinks it was because the series drifted too far from what consumers expected. ProStreet had dropped the tuner culture and police evasion aspects of previous installments in favor of perfectly legit closed track racing. For the next Need for Speed, Gibeau promised that the series would be getting back to its roots with a number of features, including open-world racing and a new highway battle mode.

Personally I wonder if the drop in sales is more to do with the fact that EA has released one or more new NFS title almost every year since the series debuted way back in 1995 – the only years without a release were 1996 and 2002.

Face it, guys – you’ve been milking the franchise for so long that its nipples are sore and swollen. It’s time to give it a rest. Move the schedule to a new game every two years, make every new release worth its asking price and restore some confidence in your brand amongst critical gamers.