I personally can't wait to see what happens when this is released and Roger Ebert gets alerted. Are video games still not art? I mean, I'm still personally grappling with the issue. I think that MOST games are not art, but there are a select few that cross the border from entertainment to intellectual experience.
It will be interesting to see what happens when this game comes out. Lots more "Is it art?" debates in the future I suppose. Heavy Rain has a good chance of making Ebert eat his words I think.
I played the uncut version of Indigo Prophecy and I remember thinking "Wait, how the hell was this supposed to get an AO?" The sex scenes are fairly tame even by cable TV standards. I always figured AO was explicitly a rating created entirely for porn games. Hell, the movie Highlander has a far more prolonged and graphic sex scene in it than anything in Indigo Prophecy, and I see that uncut on late night TV pretty regularly. Kids are a lot more likely to be flipping the channels at 10PM and suddenly find themselves face to face with Christopher Lambert's naked ass going to town on Roxanne Hart than they ever were to stumble across and play Indigo Prophecy.
What do you think the odds are that the GTA IV DLC (what with its full frontal male dangly parts and, especially in Gay Tony, fair number of on-camera sex scenes) would've been slapped with an AO if the ESRB didn't have Rockstar and Microsoft breathing down the back of their collective neck?
Hopefully Quantic really will stick to their guns and the ESRB will have ejected their octogenarian review staff and evened out their ratings standards by the time this hits.
@Malloc: The same thing happens in the Film industry as well. You see movies get away with a crapload of stuff and still get a pg13 where as other movies with maybe a f bomb here and there get slapped with a R. Its been often said that pg13 movies are far worse then R rated ones.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy was in the process of being given an M rating, when David Cage got a call and was told it was going to be given an AO because of the GTA situation days earlier.
The ESRB: Spinelessly pandering to family groups and politicians since ages ago.
@Jonny_eh: I think the most blatant thing in my eyes is LOTR. Im not saying LOTR deserved an R, but if a movie gets a R for having the F word a few times i dont see how a movie that involves multiple decapitations gets a pass.
To be fair, they did eventually release an AO, uncensored Indigo Prophecy stateside. Though, I wasn't among the tens of thousands upset that content I never knew existed was missing from the game.
It was my opinion that that game never should have left the PC anyway. As to whether the game should have been AO, I think it was only for the sex scene being interactive, which indeed is something an R-rated movie wouldn't and cannot have.
It wasn't obscene, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can understand the notion of it being 'adult content'. Though, I can't argue that it's any more 'adult' than most interactive content in M-rated games.
@Heliophage: I actually played an imported copy of Fahrenheit on Xbox. The game was excellent and both me and my wife enjoyed it.
What would make you say it "never should have left the PC"? It controlled well and looked great. Are you seriously suggesting that game consoles are only for less mature gamers?
The way it played just felt awkward in comparison to how it felt on the PC. I'm more of a console gamer than a PC gamer (though, as of late, it's growing toward a balance), but I still recognized that the gestures seemed better suited to a mouse.
@FireflyPunk: Well I prefer Heavy Rain to be in the spotlight to represent "games" for the general public in this imminent nutballs-going-thing rather than GTA or CoD.
@FireflyPunk: Of course I can't tell with confidence either, but knowing the past of the devs, and knowing Heavy Rain is a mature and stylish adventure game (I loved the 90s and the abundance of epic adventure games on PC), I think that I could maybe say I'd be less ashamed as a videogame player to see Heavy Rain on the news being criticized for "partial nudity" than I would be if the same happened with GTA. I just hate it when people think "games" are basically Halo, GTA, CoD and Mortal Combat. People should know more about the Icos and SotCs of this world! Maybe even the Rezs! I could see Rez on the news: "Four kids die from epileptic seizure."
@Cameron Barker: 15 year old's love boobs, this is true...however, they seldom have the patience for wading through deep context to get to them.
this is the laziness factor.
this game will not be for them unless it ships with a 'boob mode'...though such a thing already exists in real life.
Thought I suppose the concept is somewhat new and shiny to many of those stumbling into puberty.
But that can of worms is currently writhing through my fingers and I have no desire to progress further into the tangled snare of sexual whosits that boils around the madness caused by the natural anatomical object - the breasts. (And all the other 'no-no' parts)
I couldn't put my finger on why I thought that screenshot was so interesting. Then I realized that it was a shot you simply couldn't get with a camera.
@kainzero: That part of that game confused the hell out of me... He was dead... not what you would call a zombie, but not alive. He was cold to the touch obviously because he had no blood flow. He didn't have fangs so he wasn't a vampire. Yet, lack of blood flow be damned he was able to nail that police officer chick. That game was cool as hell but the game went from cool detective story to... wtf just happened...
I never understood why companies aim for a certain rating.
I dont approve of it, but most parents these days dont give a shit, theyre just as likely to buy an 18 for there kid as they are a T.
@Blore07: If they get an Ao in the states they can't be placed on shelves and no company will promote them. That doesn't mean they can't do it, they just have to foot the bill for literally everything and only sell it in specialty stores or online.
@Blore07: Well, it's up to the stores, actually. You'd have to either store the games in the back or behind the counter where unsuspecting kids can't get ahold of them. Since nobody wants to be labeled as "not a family company" anymore, it has the same effect as no company selling them, but really if Joe Schmo Porno Store wanted to sell an AO game, they could put it out for anyone in the store to see.
An AO rating is a karate chopping action death-strike to a company's bottom line. Ultimately the project has to payoff, and it won't if people have to go out of thier way to buy it.
See, game designers understand 2 fundamental truths about Americans:
1. we like sex and violence.
2. we are very lazy, and won't go out of our way to get those things.
Striking that balance is what counts. So you often get skimpy outfits and fountains of blood with a T rating, because it hits the largest market available while incurring the least risk to a successful payback.
Of course, it would be interesting to compare average sales of say, Mass Effect, which got tons of 'negative' press in the states, with sales in a country with free-er views on sex. One wonders if pushing the sex envelope is actually a strategic business plan to generate free press in the US.
@Gravidos: The tone that Uncharted carries is fantastic. You do feel like you are controlling a movie at times, whereas with MGS 4 (I know that the rest of MGS were similar, just using the latest) you had to sit through a movie while trying to play. I preferred Uncharted.
@Pombar: I think games are labelled as such. The 3DO, Mega-CD/Sega-CD and Phillips CDI really pushed them and all went from strength to strength. PC also had many (usually designed by companys with word multimedia crudely inserted their name...ouch).
I credit you with a touch of irony. To be fair their seems to be a lot more to this in terms of interaction than many people give credit. I wish it was a little more robust myself. It does not seem a million miles away from the likes of Shenmue which many still clamour for. Especially using Farenheit as a template. Which I enjoyed a lot. Adventure is the most reasonable label, walking the line between pretention and criticism.
@Pangolin: Yeah, I was referring to how a perhaps more accurate term is avoided because of its unsavoury history, even so long after the fact. Was wondering when it would become kosher to call games that way again - if ever, of course.
@Pombar: I think the term has become like nuclear fallout. Its effects will linger long after the various catastrophies it happens to be associated with.
I don't think any of the fine writers of Kotaku would be able to resist printing a headline next to a picture of Night Trap, if it were to pop up in a press release of a big title.
Huh. Well, that's just another plus to this game. It's making it really hard to say no, after that trainwreck at the end of Indigo Prophecy.
(For the record: No, it's not a plus that the game is all full of HURRSEXX, it's a plus that it's not going to be censored like IP was. No, Ubisoft, even us innocent little Americans don't shower in empty apartments in our bikinis. How they made one of the single most unique and immersive [for the first half, at least] and then decided to kill immersion entirely by pretending that people are all prudes and sex is for bad guys, I have no idea.)
@play_eminence: Yes. I mean open by thr fact that you get no direction where to go or what to do. . Sure there are mini games at points but much of the actual gameplay is left open for you to figure out.
For example, the opening sequence int eh cafe which can be completed a good 5-6 different ways.
It was fun at first, but i got tired of being penalized for overlooking certain details and having to redo the level again and again.
Well, Mario games typically (typically) don't have quick-time events; Mario's possible actions are, for the most part, set in stone. The difference between Mario and Indigo Prophecy would be that in the former game, the player is tasked with finding out which of Mario's abilities can get him past a given obstacle, and in the latter game, the player is tasked with, essentially, finding out what to trigger.
@dracosummoner: I meant it more like a 2D Mario and how you don´t need to figure out that you come from the left and go to the right. That is something no one needs to ask for because they find it out after 5 seconds. And the part with the trigger is what I compared with an adventure, not with a Mario game. It´s like "find out what to do with what", like a LucasArts adventure game, only with fewer items and places at a time.
@kitsuneconundrum: me and my roommate living right across from a police station with a big white wall did that, except, we weren't really playing a game. they weren't happy :S
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What do you think the odds are that the GTA IV DLC (what with its full frontal male dangly parts and, especially in Gay Tony, fair number of on-camera sex scenes) would've been slapped with an AO if the ESRB didn't have Rockstar and Microsoft breathing down the back of their collective neck?
Hopefully Quantic really will stick to their guns and the ESRB will have ejected their octogenarian review staff and evened out their ratings standards by the time this hits.
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Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy was in the process of being given an M rating, when David Cage got a call and was told it was going to be given an AO because of the GTA situation days earlier.
The ESRB: Spinelessly pandering to family groups and politicians since ages ago.
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12/18/09
It was my opinion that that game never should have left the PC anyway. As to whether the game should have been AO, I think it was only for the sex scene being interactive, which indeed is something an R-rated movie wouldn't and cannot have.
It wasn't obscene, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can understand the notion of it being 'adult content'. Though, I can't argue that it's any more 'adult' than most interactive content in M-rated games.
12/18/09
What would make you say it "never should have left the PC"? It controlled well and looked great. Are you seriously suggesting that game consoles are only for less mature gamers?
07:36 AM
No, I'm not.
The way it played just felt awkward in comparison to how it felt on the PC. I'm more of a console gamer than a PC gamer (though, as of late, it's growing toward a balance), but I still recognized that the gestures seemed better suited to a mouse.
12/17/09
And I say, let em'.
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It looks to be a project which younger children wouldn't be into anyway. It seems more cerebral than that...and for that I am grateful.
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this is the laziness factor.
this game will not be for them unless it ships with a 'boob mode'...though such a thing already exists in real life.
it's called google with safesearch off.
12/17/09
I recall when I was a young man trying to get Morrigan in the original Dark Stalkers to show her boobs. But then, I was still on 14.4kbps back then.
12/17/09
Thought I suppose the concept is somewhat new and shiny to many of those stumbling into puberty.
But that can of worms is currently writhing through my fingers and I have no desire to progress further into the tangled snare of sexual whosits that boils around the madness caused by the natural anatomical object - the breasts. (And all the other 'no-no' parts)
12/17/09
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They made me not wanna play any game to completion for fear of the story not making sense anymore.
12/17/09
I dont approve of it, but most parents these days dont give a shit, theyre just as likely to buy an 18 for there kid as they are a T.
12/17/09
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12/17/09
12/17/09
An AO rating is a karate chopping action death-strike to a company's bottom line. Ultimately the project has to payoff, and it won't if people have to go out of thier way to buy it.
See, game designers understand 2 fundamental truths about Americans:
1. we like sex and violence.
2. we are very lazy, and won't go out of our way to get those things.
Striking that balance is what counts. So you often get skimpy outfits and fountains of blood with a T rating, because it hits the largest market available while incurring the least risk to a successful payback.
Of course, it would be interesting to compare average sales of say, Mass Effect, which got tons of 'negative' press in the states, with sales in a country with free-er views on sex. One wonders if pushing the sex envelope is actually a strategic business plan to generate free press in the US.
12/17/09
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12/17/09
Curious how people're still avoiding labeling games as such.
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I credit you with a touch of irony. To be fair their seems to be a lot more to this in terms of interaction than many people give credit. I wish it was a little more robust myself. It does not seem a million miles away from the likes of Shenmue which many still clamour for. Especially using Farenheit as a template. Which I enjoyed a lot. Adventure is the most reasonable label, walking the line between pretention and criticism.
12/17/09
But even this year to a lesser extent, Uncharted 2 just screamed "Ha, I'm now more awesome than Indiana Jones!" when I first played through it.
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12/17/09
I don't think any of the fine writers of Kotaku would be able to resist printing a headline next to a picture of Night Trap, if it were to pop up in a press release of a big title.
12/17/09
12/17/09
(For the record: No, it's not a plus that the game is all full of HURRSEXX, it's a plus that it's not going to be censored like IP was. No, Ubisoft, even us innocent little Americans don't shower in empty apartments in our bikinis. How they made one of the single most unique and immersive [for the first half, at least] and then decided to kill immersion entirely by pretending that people are all prudes and sex is for bad guys, I have no idea.)
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You can see naked people on TV before 6pm (made up for example as "documentary" about plastic surgery...). 0_0
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Maybe he means less in the "go where you want" sense and more in the "find out what to do next" sense.
Ie: No handy-dandy mission guide with objectives and maps.
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12/17/09
For example, the opening sequence int eh cafe which can be completed a good 5-6 different ways.
It was fun at first, but i got tired of being penalized for overlooking certain details and having to redo the level again and again.
12/17/09
Well, Mario games typically (typically) don't have quick-time events; Mario's possible actions are, for the most part, set in stone. The difference between Mario and Indigo Prophecy would be that in the former game, the player is tasked with finding out which of Mario's abilities can get him past a given obstacle, and in the latter game, the player is tasked with, essentially, finding out what to trigger.
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12/17/09
Ah, all right. Sorry!
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