Adam Jones

Update 06/11/2020: Zero Latency reopens on Wednesday, November 11. Bookings can be made now. In the zombie apocalypse, it pays to watch your back. That's the valuable life lesson I walk away with following my session at Zero Latency, a virtual reality gaming arcade in North Melbourne. Situated a zombie's lurch from Macauley station, Zero Latency specialises in multiplayer, free roam (meaning no pesky wires) VR games, where up to eight players work together to explore alien worlds, investigate strange disturbances on spaceships and – yes, Walking Dead fans – battle hordes of the undead. Today, I'm trying out Zombie Survival, a 'hold the fort' style game in which players must resist waves of zombie attacks while waiting to be evacuated to safety. With rifle in hand, I'm expertly lining up headshots from a safe distance when my display flashes red. I'm taking damage; but from where? I wheel around and find myself nose to decaying nose with two reanimated corpses, their eyes glowing a radioactive green. Startled, I leap backwards and fire off several shots, forgetting in my panic to pump the weapon between rounds to reload. I pull the trigger over and over, achieving nothing, as the dead close in. Swiftly, and not for the first time, I die a groan-inducing digital death. As my avatar reloads, I feel a sliver of embarrassment creep into my cheeks, aware that I must look at least faintly ridiculous to the gamesmaster, who observes from the sidelines and makes sure the gameplay prog

Imagine telling your friends to meet you on Vegemite Way. Thanks to the City of Melbourne, it's now a possibility. Cook Street in Port Melbourne (the home of food manufacturer Mondelēz) was officially renamed Vegemite Way at a special breakfast event on Monday morning. Introducing himself as "a Vegemite boy since 1955," Lord Mayor of Melbourne Robert Doyle said the decision to rename Cook Street after the beloved breakfast spread was an easy one. "Vegemite is part of the story of Melbourne," the Lord Mayor told a crowd of assembled media, Vegemite enthusiasts and factory workers. The history of Vegemite begins in 1922 in Southbank, when the Fred Walker Company (later Kraft Foods) hired a young food chemist to make a palatable, spreadable paste out of leftover brewer's yeast. First launched in 1923, it took almost two decades, an aborted name change and the outbreak of the Second World War before Australians came around to the dark, salty stuff. Lyle Fowler, Bonox and Vegemite delivery van, 1947 © Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive By the mid 1950s, when the 'Happy Little Vegemites' jingle was first unveiled, Vegemite was well on its way to 'national icon' status. More recently, the spread has been the subject of several controversies; some with good reason (remember iSnack 2.0?) and some because of brainless morons. The change from Cook Street means all future jars of Vegemite will now be emblazoned with a very sweet postal address: 1 Vegemite Way. It's also created a new sp