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Well, Jack Thompson isn't afraid of Chuck Norris, after all, Chuck Norris is only a subject of an 8-bit game, and while he has made a comeback in Oblivion, Thompson already got Oblivion demolished. Or something.

Action shot shown here http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/48/18/116668.jpeg

There were also EVO and Evolva.

There were also EVO and Evolva.

Mine kept breaking the plastic insert that hit the contacts on the board. Decathalon was a killer for them. And those tiny keychain games in an Atari stick? Broke it the first day. And it didn't have the authentic version of Yars' Revenge.

Or do you mean the paddles? I've never had one of those break, but then I didn't have any games they worked with, other than making tanks drive faster in Combat.

The first time I realized that I could make a career out of this fun computer stuff was when a guy "paid" me to get his SilenType printer working with a 16K RAM "language card" for my Apple II+ (about $300 IIRC). That was great since my giant 48K memory was still not up to the requirement for playing Zaxxon.
My first real job with a paycheck was before I could drive, cracking educational software for a school system. Kids were constantly ruining the floppy disks so my job was to copy all the originals and send out only copies to the teachers. I was willing to do that just for fun and they offered to pay me. What a deal! They even bought me a copy of Locksmith, CopyII+ and an NMI card. I continued doing that through my first year of college. Bought the cool new Apple IIgs for that, then my first Mac (IIcx) afterwards when I finally gave up on my beloved II. I'm happily working away on my MacBookPro. Life is good.
For some odd reason, this still sticks in my head
poke 1014,110
poke 1015,165
makes your & key do a "CATALOG". Lots less typing.
Beagle Bros actually had a hack that would alternate starting up your two floppy drives to sound like a steam train chugging.
My cousin used Zoom Grafix to print out a 5x5 foot mickey mouse. Took days on his Epson MX-80 and was much lighter on one side than the other because the ink ribbon was wearing out. They had the Graftrax+ chip added to the printer so they could print actual graphics, not just letters.
Everybody had a Nibble Notcher to make their disks double-sided.
I still have an article somewhere describing how to snag the read/write track sector (RWTS) from a protected disk and use that to read a copy protected disk and write it out in unprotected format. Was going to submit to Hardcore Computist but never got around to it.
I spent hours combing through games to change references from $C030 to $C020 with Inspector so the sound output would go to the cassette port and thus to my boom box.
I remember the first time I got to see double high-res graphics on an Apple IIe with the extra video RAM. Amazing.
I gave up getting a pair of cross-country skis for Mask of the Sun, which turned out to be not that great.
I've forgotten how painful it was to do wordprocessing at 40 colums with no lower case and no spell checker on AppleWriter. I did have a third-party spell checker but it came on 6 disks. So one spell check required flipping in and out a pile of floppies and a lot of waiting. Had to do the Shift Key Mod running a wire from the shift key to the game paddle button to make the shift keys work. How did I ever get those school papers written.
We had fun pretending that Fire Organ actually matched up with the music we were playing.
And while I'm geezing, it sure was expensive reading about the 84 Olympics or downloading adventure game walkthroughs via my 300 BAUD Hayes Micromodem II over a long distance call to Compuserve for another $12/hour. Ahh, the good old days.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/rescue-raiders

A book like Hitchhikers Guide would make a poor game (IMO)

Actually, I thought the game was quite good.

and others agreed:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/mobyrank

More details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(computer_game)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

A book like Hitchhikers Guide would make a poor game (IMO)

Actually, I thought the game was quite good.

and others agreed:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/mobyrank

More details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(computer_game)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

Vision Videogames of Towson, Maryland received a Space Act Agreement from The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) earlier this month to develop their PC/PS2/Xbox game, SpaceStationSim, due for consumer release this Christmas season. The Space Act Agreement is a continuation of one received by GRS Games before Vision Videogames management bought out the company in March 2006... (more)

Something similar is Destination: Mars, which unfortunately I can't find my copy of (old floppy diskettes who knows what shape they'd be in?) or I'd upload screenshots. Basically though, the player had to crew various aspects of rocket missions. From what I remember, a lot of it had to do with telemetry and orbits and etc... and the manual was essential. Maybe that's why there's no copies of it floating around the abandonware... everyone assumes it's unplayable.

I'm actually more partial to this one.

Seriously, this game still is one of the deepest, most engrossing games I've ever played. =) Especially fun when you're trying to out-compete an opponent's station. This game cries for a modern remake. =)

Anyone remember this gem of a game? I played it for the C64 but the PC screenshots bear a pretty close resemblance.

Don't remember too much about this game except it was kinda like a mix of Raiden and Starfox.

found a link though: linky

I was curious too, so I went digging around. I think I found some diagrams depicting the technology they are planning on using. Once they implement this technology, we won't have to worry about those pirating thugs any longer.

Amen to that, TFA's list starts way too modern. Martin Galway and Matt Gray remain my C64 music heroes. Gray's Driller theme still gives me chills. Elegant in its simplicity, the 9-minute piece winds its way from menacing, to lonely, hopeful, determined, and around to just plain hollow. It's a perfect complement to the devious puzzles, menacing environment, and desperate time limit that the player is up against. Driller is my favorite game music of all time, and it's almost old enough to drink...

On the PC, the modfiles in Star Control 2 (rereleased as The Ur-Quan Masters set a new standard. From a variety of composers, the mood of each piece helps the player get to know the helpful alien races from the devious ones, and while some are downright zany (with samples including scooby-doo), others are powerful rock, worthy of consideration on their own. The game spilled onto four floppies to accomodate the volume of music, and I groused about the space requirements for installation, until I played the game for a few minutes and the bulk justified itself.

If we're allowing recorded compositions, The Fat Man's work on The 7th Guest again elevated the art. As one of the first PC games to come on CD-ROM, the redbook audio on Disc 2 was a chance to play with the medium and include real recorded music, and the in-game music not only set the mood but brought a new emotional level to the characters' interactions.

This could be quite a long list, but if I had to pick the most notable omissions, these are my choices.

Sorry, the second link should have been this one, accidentally linked to the 1997 game again.

I've got a game called Virus that does this (action RTS with Descent-style FPS mode) but I don't think it was made by David Braben. Braben's Virus was about aliens attacking Earth and probably didn't have any computer references.

Virus 1997 action RTS
Virus 1988 arcade game by David Braben also known as Zarch
V2000, more or less a sequel to Braben's Virus

I've got a game called Virus that does this (action RTS with Descent-style FPS mode) but I don't think it was made by David Braben. Braben's Virus was about aliens attacking Earth and probably didn't have any computer references.

Virus 1997 action RTS
Virus 1988 arcade game by David Braben also known as Zarch
V2000, more or less a sequel to Braben's Virus

I've got a game called Virus that does this (action RTS with Descent-style FPS mode) but I don't think it was made by David Braben. Braben's Virus was about aliens attacking Earth and probably didn't have any computer references.

Virus 1997 action RTS
Virus 1988 arcade game by David Braben also known as Zarch
V2000, more or less a sequel to Braben's Virus

Just so you know, Nobuo Uematsu wasn't involved in the Chrono Cross soundtrack; that was Yasunori Mitsuda.

[citation needed]

That is not my argument. My argument is that the top 10 games in a year represent a significant portion of most people's gaming time and for the most part, that situation is not very bad for Mac users. The casual gamer can easily find 1 to 3 games to play in a year and that is all most people buy. If their tastes are average, they're even better off. I don't think the games available are a large deterrent to the average person, even if it is the the relatively small hardcore gamer market. This isn't even taking into account the console gaming market's mitigating effect.

Nobody should hold IW against Warren Spector, in fact a lot of the changes in the game he objected to.

The travesty that was DX:IW can be laid at the feet of one Harvey "Witchboy" Smith. I will never buy another game he's involved in, even if it's hyped as the greatest game ever.

I just hope they get Tom Hall to do some voiceover work again. His Walton Simons is one of the creepiest characters ever (right up there with Terri Brosius' Shodan) and his voice in the trailer was the main selling point for IW (too bad it turned out to be an incredibly insignificant character in the game)

Sorry about the character-set confusion. here is an extended ASCII chart of the type I was referring to in GP. There are other possible sets, such as the IBM PC set, which many of us probably fondly remember as the graphics blocks from the great 1980s adventure game Rogue. Ahh, memories!

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

I have been left off several of the credits for games I worked on*.

It sucks at the time. After all credit is just that... being given credit for the work you did. Not being given the credit you earned is kind of a blow.

The thing you really quickly realize is that there's almost never actual malice behind it. A marketing drone or some exec's PA is given the task of gathering the names of everyone involved. When they don't know the dev process well enough to cover a chunk of one department, get the names of the people who're out that day, get the names of people who did the original build but are now on a different project, etc... those people get missed. There's no malice, just a complete lack of awareness from someone who has no notion of what the credit means to the people who sweated over the game.

So, you can get bitter about it and spend energy blaming and hating people... Or you can accept laziness and lack of consideration are unfortunate but they happen.

*Ironically, the MobyGames list misses me from all of the Planetside games - the one place where my ideas actually got directly included in gameplay whereas I'm credited for plenty of games where I only did behind the scenes work.

Er, you ever look at the credits for movies from 40 years ago? They're darn short, and a whole lot more people than that were involved in them. They were never heavily credited up front. At most, the only thing that's changed is that they've dropped the names of the musical directors. But the standard format has always been "moneymakers" first: stars, then the exec producers/producers/writer and finally the director.
"Bought and paid for" was the modus operandi back in the fifties. And you know what? Unless you can commoditize credits, many video game companies will skip them.

"Display of a credit"? Come on, it's never been that way. I went through a couple years in the game industry, working (paid) on dozens of titles, and the only game in which my name appears is Macintosh Armor Alley (=for those of you data mining my ass, you now know exactly who I am; and for those of you not, could someone go over to the MobyGames entry and confirm that Testing 1, 2, 3... most assuredly existed, but was almost never credited).

If memory serves, the WASD+mouselook interface was really pioneered by SkyNET, a Bethesda Terminator game that came out a short while before Quake. It's the first game that used mouselook as the default AFAIR -- the original Quake still required the player to enable mouselook manually, I believe (+mouselook).

That was one of my first games. I agree that the Bioshock version was substantially easier, especially with the use of slow plasmids etc.

More info: http://www.mobygames.com/game/pipe-dream

Call me a pussy but I have cried 4 of 6 hours I played this game. And I couldn't sleep properly for a week, feeling too much grief (tried to be the perfect brother and got one of the intellectual endings).

Read this review, the guy felt the same.

### The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.

Excuse me, but if people already fail to understand the current simple rating system, how is making it *more* complicated going to help? Just for the record the current rating system *already* has more in-depth informations then just C, E, T, M, AO, just look at the back of the box:

GTA IV: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs
Halo 3: Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Violence

Hard do understand? Nope. Not detailed enough? I don't think so, all the core issues are listed. Anything that isn't provided by this info? Maybe, a link/url to a webpage that contains more detailed informations about the game would be nice for parents, but you can't really fit all that much more info on there without covering half the cover.

In my opinion there are basically just three things how the rating system could be improved:

1) Use age instead of letters, since age is much easier to remember then what any of that eC, E, E0, T, M, AO is going to mean, especially since movies have a completly different set of equally hard to understand letters. USK, BBFC and PEGI use age and I think its far easier to understand. And of course the ESRB as age due, but written in a tiny font above the big huge letter.

2) Keep the detailed list as is, but move it to the front of the box, so nobody can miss it. PEGI sucks in that area due to cryptic symbols, USK doesn't provide a detailed list in first place, don't know about BBFC, ESRB is doing by far the best in this area.

3) Make ratings mandatory, forbid sales of video games to people below the recommend age. Now I am sure many people will disagree with me, but I for one much prefer a state enforced rating system then one that is enforced by marked dominance alone. Beside it being equal to all, it also has the advantage that you can go against it if it gets out of control, unlike a privately enforced one which is much harder to attack. PS: Yes, I have seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated and I don't really want to get the video game rating system borked in such a way.

### The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.

Excuse me, but if people already fail to understand the current simple rating system, how is making it *more* complicated going to help? Just for the record the current rating system *already* has more in-depth informations then just C, E, T, M, AO, just look at the back of the box:

GTA IV: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs
Halo 3: Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Violence

Hard do understand? Nope. Not detailed enough? I don't think so, all the core issues are listed. Anything that isn't provided by this info? Maybe, a link/url to a webpage that contains more detailed informations about the game would be nice for parents, but you can't really fit all that much more info on there without covering half the cover.

In my opinion there are basically just three things how the rating system could be improved:

1) Use age instead of letters, since age is much easier to remember then what any of that eC, E, E0, T, M, AO is going to mean, especially since movies have a completly different set of equally hard to understand letters. USK, BBFC and PEGI use age and I think its far easier to understand. And of course the ESRB as age due, but written in a tiny font above the big huge letter.

2) Keep the detailed list as is, but move it to the front of the box, so nobody can miss it. PEGI sucks in that area due to cryptic symbols, USK doesn't provide a detailed list in first place, don't know about BBFC, ESRB is doing by far the best in this area.

3) Make ratings mandatory, forbid sales of video games to people below the recommend age. Now I am sure many people will disagree with me, but I for one much prefer a state enforced rating system then one that is enforced by marked dominance alone. Beside it being equal to all, it also has the advantage that you can go against it if it gets out of control, unlike a privately enforced one which is much harder to attack. PS: Yes, I have seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated and I don't really want to get the video game rating system borked in such a way.

Bungie also teamed with another group of developers to create that one - it wasn't an in-house project. It wasn't very profitable and had a lot of cost-overruns. If anything, I'd expect to see a "Myth: The Fallen Lords" sequel or a new franchise.

The original founder are no longer with Microsoft, so who knows what direction it will take. Alex Seropian is at Wideload games, Jason Jones keeps a very low profile, but apparently is at Arena:Net (see Moby Games). Artist Colin Brent disappeared after Marathon, and that's about all I know of him. Strange that MobyGames is missing all the early Bungie titles (!Gnop, Operation: Desert Storm, and Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete) - 2500 copies sold or not.

Because on the PC a game selling 50000 copies can be considered a hit

Since when. Daikatana was one of the biggest flops of all time and it sold 200,000 copies according to this site.

I can't comprehend that at all -- WoW "crummy", just because it doesn't look as good as the bleeding-edge games? It's sad to think that someone would pass up a whole slew of amazingly good games (though I'm not including WoW in that) just because they're a few years old.

But then, I'm someone who still loads up Darklands and the QFG series and Deus Ex once a year or so. Because somehow, they still represent the pinnacle of gameplay in their respective niches.

I can't comprehend that at all -- WoW "crummy", just because it doesn't look as good as the bleeding-edge games? It's sad to think that someone would pass up a whole slew of amazingly good games (though I'm not including WoW in that) just because they're a few years old.

But then, I'm someone who still loads up Darklands and the QFG series and Deus Ex once a year or so. Because somehow, they still represent the pinnacle of gameplay in their respective niches.

I can't comprehend that at all -- WoW "crummy", just because it doesn't look as good as the bleeding-edge games? It's sad to think that someone would pass up a whole slew of amazingly good games (though I'm not including WoW in that) just because they're a few years old.

But then, I'm someone who still loads up Darklands and the QFG series and Deus Ex once a year or so. Because somehow, they still represent the pinnacle of gameplay in their respective niches.

I was a game developer almost 8 years ago (no where near my full C.V. but just to prove I'm not blowing smoke).

Further... until recently I ran two Gentoo boxes and on Debian box at my house, set up more than one IT shop on Linux and Samba and was the black sheep at my last job in a Windows/.NET shop. I've been running at least one critical system on Linux since about 1998. I know and love Linux.

With that said... there is not a chance in hell that I, as a game developer, would ever release a game for Linux (in it's current state).

What platform are you running on?
What distribution are you running?
What build?
Is 32 or 64-bit?
What video card are you using?
Are you using the vendors drivers or open source drivers?
What sound driver are you using?
What front end are you using (KDE or Gnome)?
Have you updated to this version of libc?
Have you enabled/disabled this option in your kernel (you can see where it goes downhill from here).

The problem is that Linux is a victim of it's own success. You can do anything with it... and, as a consequence... expose developers and support technicians to a version of hell worse than they ever imagined.

The support costs for Linux systems are substantial. And just not worth it. Besides the requirements are now substantially different. By a 360/PS3/Wii to fulfill your gaming needs and buy a lower powered PC rigged for power saving for your 24/7 needs.

I thought the SNES/Genesis TNG game was pretty good, too, but I'm not sure how widespread that opinion is.

There are a TON of games with substantial artistic value. Some notable older ones I can think of offhand:

-MDK
-ZPC
-Alice
-Myst (plus Riven and the Myst sequels)
-Unreal

more recently:

-Bioshock
-Okami
-Zelda Twilight Princess

I mean, I could go on, but I'm getting tired of copying & pasting all these URLs.... ;)

There are a TON of games with substantial artistic value. Some notable older ones I can think of offhand:

-MDK
-ZPC
-Alice
-Myst (plus Riven and the Myst sequels)
-Unreal

more recently:

-Bioshock
-Okami
-Zelda Twilight Princess

I mean, I could go on, but I'm getting tired of copying & pasting all these URLs.... ;)

There are a TON of games with substantial artistic value. Some notable older ones I can think of offhand:

-MDK
-ZPC
-Alice
-Myst (plus Riven and the Myst sequels)
-Unreal

more recently:

-Bioshock
-Okami
-Zelda Twilight Princess

I mean, I could go on, but I'm getting tired of copying & pasting all these URLs.... ;)

There are a TON of games with substantial artistic value. Some notable older ones I can think of offhand:

-MDK
-ZPC
-Alice
-Myst (plus Riven and the Myst sequels)
-Unreal

more recently:

-Bioshock
-Okami
-Zelda Twilight Princess

I mean, I could go on, but I'm getting tired of copying & pasting all these URLs.... ;)

...that is, this game which had an "infinite" universe. The book Infinite Game Universe has some good discussions of this sort of thing, too.

The Columbine RPG note brings up a fact I found funny - that the shooting by Kimveer Gill was apparently "blamed" on the Columbine RPG. What the media didn't really mention is that Kimveer listed on his website quite a few other games that he had played. More significantly, one of them in common with what Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had played avidly: Postal. Frankly I think the violence and "disturbingness" factor of this game well exceeds Doom or really any other game of the time.

You basically ran around with the sole purpose of killing a sufficient percentage of "hostiles" in the city. Wounded people would crawl along the ground leaving a trail of blood, crying in pain saying things like "I can't feel my legs!" or "I can't breathe!"... The audio in this game really completes the disturbing atmosphere. The ambient sound is some of the most creepy stuff I've heard in a game since, especially during some of the loading screens.

Oh, did I mention the infamous marching band scene? (A marching band is parading through town playing music - you can guess as to the craziness that ensues when you lob a molotov cocktail in the middle of the group)...

During all of this, whether you're on a senseless killing rampage or simply defending yourself from people trying to kill you is left for you to speculate - the loading screens give a bit of diary-style text written from the perspective of the player character, but that's all you have to go on. While he claims everyone is out to get him, as you progress further into the game you really begin to feel like maybe 'you' are just a psycho killer who is completely delusional, killing innocent people who are only armed because they know there's some rampaging killer on the loose. Gee, sound familiar at all to the "everyone is out to get me" attitude of basically every school shooter in recent history? Not to mention that the player character is wearing a full-length trenchcoat, no less.

So, after hearing all this, and the fact that it was a game avidly played by at least three of the most infamous school shooters, I have trouble believing it wouldn't be a larger influence behind someone's violent actions than a low-tech "fan made" style of game (not to mention that Kimveer very likely just put "Columbine RPG" on his list of favorite games for the sheer purpose of maintaining a certain image of himself).

Of course, I just spent all that time explaining something that any journalist would never even have been aware of - they just jump on the Columbine RPG thing just because of its name and reputation, despite how blatantly more extreme and disturbing Postal is. Regardless, Postal is definitely a key game that has gone largely overlooked despite its significance/value to at least a few notorious school shooters...

The Columbine RPG note brings up a fact I found funny - that the shooting by Kimveer Gill was apparently "blamed" on the Columbine RPG. What the media didn't really mention is that Kimveer listed on his website quite a few other games that he had played. More significantly, one of them in common with what Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had played avidly: Postal. Frankly I think the violence and "disturbingness" factor of this game well exceeds Doom or really any other game of the time.

You basically ran around with the sole purpose of killing a sufficient percentage of "hostiles" in the city. Wounded people would crawl along the ground leaving a trail of blood, crying in pain saying things like "I can't feel my legs!" or "I can't breathe!"... The audio in this game really completes the disturbing atmosphere. The ambient sound is some of the most creepy stuff I've heard in a game since, especially during some of the loading screens.

Oh, did I mention the infamous marching band scene? (A marching band is parading through town playing music - you can guess as to the craziness that ensues when you lob a molotov cocktail in the middle of the group)...

During all of this, whether you're on a senseless killing rampage or simply defending yourself from people trying to kill you is left for you to speculate - the loading screens give a bit of diary-style text written from the perspective of the player character, but that's all you have to go on. While he claims everyone is out to get him, as you progress further into the game you really begin to feel like maybe 'you' are just a psycho killer who is completely delusional, killing innocent people who are only armed because they know there's some rampaging killer on the loose. Gee, sound familiar at all to the "everyone is out to get me" attitude of basically every school shooter in recent history? Not to mention that the player character is wearing a full-length trenchcoat, no less.

So, after hearing all this, and the fact that it was a game avidly played by at least three of the most infamous school shooters, I have trouble believing it wouldn't be a larger influence behind someone's violent actions than a low-tech "fan made" style of game (not to mention that Kimveer very likely just put "Columbine RPG" on his list of favorite games for the sheer purpose of maintaining a certain image of himself).

Of course, I just spent all that time explaining something that any journalist would never even have been aware of - they just jump on the Columbine RPG thing just because of its name and reputation, despite how blatantly more extreme and disturbing Postal is. Regardless, Postal is definitely a key game that has gone largely overlooked despite its significance/value to at least a few notorious school shooters...

. . . a hot cybernetic female welcomes me to the Cybernet every time I plug in.

I've been following this very closely. I find the "double standard" presented here amazing and disturbing. As I said in an earlier slashdot comment where I was feeling rather pissed off, it bothers me greatly that this game can be effectively banned from even being published because of a rating, while other extremely psychologically disturbing games (Silent Hill for example) are sold and available everywhere, undoubtedly being sold to people under the age of 17 or 18.

Personally I have a huge interest in these games that push the boundaries of what is socially/morally "acceptable". Going onto a bit of a tangent here but when I was 13, I bought the game Postal, which my parents totally amazingly allowed. I was of course happy as hell since I had played the beta and was STOKED about the extreme violence and harshness in this game! I was going through really rough times at school and had a really hard time handling it - until high school I was really socially accepted and quite popular, but that changed and became quite the opposite, which I had never dealt with before... Anyway so I pretty much took out my anger in games like Postal and Quake all the time. For me (and probably many others over the years), it was about the only option to deal with anger and stuff - either that or I'd end up kicking the shit out of people at school who picked on me. I'm pretty sure playing some violent video games (and hugely improving my hand-eye coordination and stuff) was a pretty good alternative to getting expelled or having some assault charges on my record, because I can guarantee some serious shit would've happened had I not had some non-harmful way to cope with how I was feeling.

OK, so my whole point is that these kind of "barely acceptable" games really gave me a chance to live out my anger in a harmless manner. It probably wasn't the most efficient way to deal with things but honestly being able to go into a virtual world and blow people away was a very satisfying experience. This stuff kept me from having anger build up to the point where I'd just resort to violence and end up snapping on some asshole fellow student one day. Yeah yeah, I can hear you saying "you just have anger issues" but considering I am doing totally fine now, it's pretty safe to say the school environment is what the root problem was here. ;)

So, I'm not trying to say that games like Manhunt are going to keep kids from committing violent acts, but the point is that some people really value these types of games. Of course not everyone is going to value such a game the way I did back then (some will just find it entertaining in a less serious way), but...:

How are developers expected to push the boundaries of creativity and come up with games that challenge ideas and push the envelope, when they're just going to be told "oh, no platform in the world is going to release your game because some ratings board gave it the Adults Only rating"? Are we just going to be kept in a closed shell of only being provided with confirmist politically-correct entertianment for our entire lives, even as fully grown self-aware and responsible adults? Is it really acceptable that, despite the creative goals of some software developers (and huge $$ expenditure), we're not even being given the chance to experience or observe the creations of these people even if we have full interest in them?

It seems small enough of an issue when it's just some random guy on Slashdot saying it, but when you really take a minute to think about this, the implications regarding the video game & entertainment industry are quite serious...

Elvira was quite the franchise in them days ... there was even a computer game made in 1990. Take that, Lara Croft!

... as a sequel to RoboSport.

(of course, a FPS would completely screw up that game)

Now, if they could figure out how to make a FPS out of Marble Drop, I'd be scared.