Here's a strange story: a truck full of PS3 games was stolen twice, the second time from the cops themselves. The Sun reports that "the lorry" carrying £600,000 ($1.08 million) in games was originally stolen while the driver was resting. After it was recovered by the cops, it was then stolen a few hours later from a "tightly-controlled" police compound. The truck was later found completely empty.

The police claim that arrests have already been made, but it isn't clear if they're in relation to the first or second theft. The authorities also say they're keeping an eye on eBay. How efficiently can one fence seven pallets (tens of thousands) of games?

[Via GI.biz]

On Thursday, British government officials are proposing many of the regulations asked for in the Byron Review, which will also expand the roll of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Much of this is old ground, as sniping has gone on back and forth for months between BBFC and PEGI supporters about which system is better.

The part we're a little stuck on is where the Telegraph reports the new proposals seek to classify online interaction. The standards will be overseen by the new UK Council for Child Internet Safety, to be established later this year, and the online classification seeks to set a "single set of standards and good practice for managing the risks of online gaming." How anybody can look into the abyss of trying to classify online interaction and not see the darkness staring back at them astounds us.

[Via GamePolitics]

The Prison Service in England and Wales will not allow prisoners to play 18-rated games after September 30. The BBC reports that well-behaved residents and those at risk of suicide will still be allowed to play games -- we hope the suicide folks aren't playing Persona.

The government apparently spent £10k ($19,763 USD) last year on consoles and games for inmates. Effective immediately, inmates will have to buy their own consoles and games. Those who can't afford the video game distraction are sure to occupy their time with more constructive ventures ... like shiv production.

[Via GI.biz]

The BBC reports that British game companies are experiencing a skilled labor shortage. David Braben, chairman of Frontier Development and spokesman for the industry's "Games Up?" campaign, believes 95% of video game degrees aren't preparing students for the real world of development. He says that there is no standardization and only four out of the 81 British universities have Skillset accreditation for video games degrees, which he believes makes the other 77 schools a "waste of time."

Braben went on to say the "dearth" of math and science graduates is hitting the British game industry hard. Business types also point out that Britain's lack of tax support isn't helping either, as the nation slipped from third to fourth place in game development behind Canada in 2006. We miss the simpler times when it was all about tightening up the graphics on level three.

[Via GameDaily]

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has decided to postpone this year's announcement of its prestigious game awards for 2008 to March 10, 2009. The move is intended to avoid some of the timing issues with last year awards which required some games to be evaluated before they were done (at least one nominee wasn't even released until 2008). The postponement will also avoid conflict with the competing Golden Joystick awards, which last year were announced just a few days after the BAFTAs.

Not willing to wait for the BBC to get its act together and release a PS3-compatible version of it's iPlayer streaming video web site, an enterprising hacker has pieced together his own version and put it out for the world to share. PS3iplayer.com works by making the PS3's web browser pretend it's the Wii's Opera browser, tricking the BBC web-site to serve up the official version designed for Nintendo's system. Compatibility is reportedly a little spotty, but the site does seem to show how easy it would be to port the web site over to the PS3's built-in web browser, despite vague complaints of Sony's controlling imposition.

For his part, the BBC's head of digital media technology, Anthony Rose, writes in a blog post that the hack is impressive but not necessarily "the best possible iPlayer proposition for that console." Rose assured readers that his team is looking into creating an official version of the player for the PS3 "in due course." Like when someone on the digital media team gets a free lunch hour, perhaps?

Good journalism is almost always based on real shoe-leather reporting -- working the phones, hitting the streets and talking to people to find out what's really going on out there. Or, alternatively, you could just offer to pay people for a story that fits your preconceived notions of what would be "juicy."

That seems to be the idea behind this StarNow posting which bluntly asks, "Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?" According to the posting, a national British paper will pay "hundreds of pounds" for the right tale of game-inspired crime. The site doesn't mention which newspaper is searching for the stories, and the free listing could well be a prank (we are dangerously close to April 1), but the whole thing seems entirely plausible to us -- checkbook journalism is pretty common among the English tabloids, as are sensationalist takes on our favorite hobby.

While other similar postings on StarNow insist submitted stories be "true" or "real," the video game violence offer simply promises that "if it's something we like, we'll call you straight back." We're almost tempted to encourage our British readers to write in with the most ludicrously false stories they can come up with, but that plans runs the risk of having a ridiculous fiction actually running as the truth in a major British newspaper. Decisions, decisions ...

[Thanks Randy]

You'd think the BBFC's official unbanning of an edited version of Manhunt 2 would officially end the battle over the game's release. You'd be wrong though, as Kent Online reports that Kent MP Julian Brazier is working to introduce a "public appeals process" to overturn BBFC decisions, like the one that paved the way for Manhunt 2's release.

Brazier's Private Members Bill to reform the BBFC was discussed and eventually stopped in Parliament late last month, but that hasn't stopped Brazier from trying to revive its political chances. Brazier insists that the eventual decision to release Manhunt 2 "shows once again that the BBFC and its appeals system do not meet the concerns of the public" and that "the public wants a significant tightening up in this vital area." Earlier this month, Brazier accompanied Gordon Brown in a meeting with Giselle Pakeerah, a mother who believes the original Manhunt contributed to her son's murder.

Like trying to resuscitate a year-old corpse, the UK's Telegraph attempted to reinvigorate controversy about Bully now that it's coming to Wii and Xbox 360 in March. The Telegraph gets mileage out of the non-troversy by pulling a Manhunt 2 and explaining that acting out movements with the Wiimote is what makes this game relevant again as an issue. What also seems to stick in some people's craw is that the ridiculous renaming of Bully to Canis Canem Edit (Dog eat Dog) in the UK is out and the original name is back in.

Now that the game has been out for a while, is it too much to ask that critics play the game before commenting on it -- scratch that, of course it is. Anybody who has played Bully knows that it is a smart satire of boarding school and protagonist Jimmy Hopkins is clearly more of a lover than a fighter. We're just hoping that the Wii and Xbox 360 versions of Bully are precursors to a sequel announcement.

[Via GamePolitics]

Dennis McCauley contributes The Political Game, a column on the collision of politics and video games:

Suddenly, surprisingly, the UK has become Ground Zero in the political and cultural war surrounding video games.

For a long time, England was a backwater in this fight. The video game struggle raged primarily in state legislatures and federal courthouses around the United States. Oh, there was Keith Vaz, of course, a Labour Parliamentarian who made some noise about the original Manhunt in 2004 and would occasionally surface to criticize this game or that.

But in 2007 the video game issue simply exploded in the UK as one major game controversy after another made headlines. At the same time, game legislation tailed off in the US. While six states passed laws in 2005-2006, none have been passed so far this year. American politicians, seemingly, are getting the message that games are protected by the First Amendment. Not so in Britain, however.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a wide-ranging review of media violence, including video games, at his monthly press conference Tuesday. Brown said he hoped the review would lead not to state censorship of violent and pornographic content, but instead to a voluntary agreement between content providers and parents to protect children.

"This is not the government telling people what they should do ... this is society reaching a conclusion with all those people involved about what are the legitimate boundaries," Brown said. "I think we have got to look at this as a society. I hope this is one of the areas where there can be common ground between all parties."

The review comes after a similar call to curb media violence by Conservative leader David Cameron. "We are never going to deal with crime unless we look at the broader context ... and that includes, I think, video games and things like that where we do need to think of the context in which people are growing up," Cameron said last week. With new parliamentary elections possibly coming as early as this fall, media violence is shaping up to be a serious point of contention, with both sides trying to prove they're more serious about the problem.

[Via Gamasutra]

Wii sales continue to stay strong around the globe, despite supply issues caused by manufacturing problems. We're just wondering what the Wii numbers would be at right now if there weren't all these supply issues. At least Wii owners got a refreshing glass of Metroid this week to quench their parched gamer soul.

No, probably not. But he is, according to an Associated Press report, prone to gaming. The tech nut in question is David Miliband, the new foreign secretary of Britain. Last year, he was the first British Cabinet minister to post a blog, but perhaps most exciting is this line from the report: "A technology buff, he also has an avatar in Second Life."

OK, fine, so it's not exactly a six-digit Gamerscore. But do you really want a world leader complaining about a guildie ninja looting his shoulders when he's supposed to be on a plane to the G8 summit? No, of course you don't. We think this is one case where it's OK for someone to remain a newb.

[Via GamePolitics]

Ezekiel Maxwell, a 17-year-old paranoid schizophrenic on "skunk cannabis," stabbed a woman to death because the "gangster voices" from Grand Theft Auto told him to do it. Although this incident is just being reported now as part of Britain's supposed "skunk cannabis" epidemic, the murder actually occurred last September.

Maxwell believed he was Carl Johnson from GTA: San Andreas when he committed the murder and believed the game was telling him to "stab a woman for seven days, it had to be a black Afro-Caribbean woman." The voices took over his thoughts and "made him do things." According to reports he was playing GTA and smoking skunk cannabis for months to the exclusion of everything else before the killing. Maxwell has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yesterday he was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The same Xbox 360 commercial we posted last November improbably showing the release date for Halo 3 has been banned in England. The Advertising Standards Agency says the advertisement "could be seen to condone dangerous driving," despite the prominent text stating "Dramatisation. Professional stunt. Do not attempt." Apparently ad agency McCann Erickson worked closely with the ASA and were given clearance to run the ad after 9 PM. The ASA decided to ban the ad anyway stating it "reinforced the sense that the events were real, rather than fantasy, and were therefore capable of being copied." Sorry England, looks like you're just going to have to watch the ad over, and over, and over again here on Joystiq ... what a shame.

The Reuters story doesn't say how long the advertisement was in circulation, but like we said, it's been on our radar since last November. If it's been in rotation in England since that time, bless the ASA, they just gave that little commercial a second life through controversy. This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of odd behavior. Boston's transit authority banned ads for M rated games after a minor Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories controversy. The thing was that nobody raised a fuss a year prior when Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories ads were all over the same system.