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2005's 10 Most Violent Games
Andy writes "The family media guide has released a statement detailing the 10 most violent videogames of 2005." Gamasutra reports: "Ironically, the games that the Family Media Guide singles out include some of the ESRB M-rated titles (not buyable by those under the age of 17) which have been most critically acclaimed so far this year, including Capcom's Resident Evil 4 (of which the site notes: 'it's possible to find the corpse of a woman pinned up on a wall -- by a pitchfork through her face' ..."
The Family Media Guide 10 Most Violent Games of 2005.
Also Known as "My Amazon Wish List."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
http://www.familymediaguide.com/features/EditorsPi cks/ViolenceUnderTheTree.html
Here is the list, with the games ranked in no particular order:
2005's TOP 10 ULTRA-VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES
- Resident Evil 4 - Player is a Special Forces agent sent to recover the President's kidnapped daughter. During the first minutes of play, it's possible to find the corpse of a woman pinned up on a wall -- by a pitchfork through her face.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - Player is a young man working with gangs to gain respect. His mission includes murder, theft, and destruction on every imaginable level. Player recovers his health by visiting prostitutes then recovers funds by beating them to death and taking their money. Player can wreak as much havoc as he likes for no reason without progressing through the game's storyline.
- God of War - Player becomes a ruthless warrior, seeking revenge against the gods who tricked him into murdering his own family. Prisoners are burned alive and player can use "finishing moves" to kill opponents - like tearing a victim in half.
- Narc - Player can choose between two narcotics agents attempting to take a dangerous drug off the streets and shut down the KRAK cartel while being subject to temptations including drugs and money. To enhance abilities, player takes drugs including pot, Quaaludes, ecstasy, LSD and "Liquid Soul" - which provides the ability to kick enemies' heads off.
- Killer 7 - Player takes control of seven assassins who must combine skills to defeat a band of suicidal, monstrous terrorists. The game eventually escalates into a global conflict between the U.S. and Japan. Player collects the blood of fallen victims to heal himself and must slit own wrists to spray blood to find hidden passages.
- The Warriors - Based on a 70's action flick that set new standards for "artistic violence," a street gang battles its way across NYC in an attempt to reach its home turf. Player issues several commands to his gang, including "mayhem," which causes the gang to smash everything in sight.
- 50 Cent: Bulletproof - Game is loosely based on the gangster lifestyle of rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. Player engages in gangster shootouts and loots the bodies of victims to buy new 50 Cent recordings and music videos.
- Crime Life: Gang Wars - Player is the leader of a ruthless street gang, spending time fighting, recruiting new gangsters, fighting, looting, and of course, more fighting. Player can roam the streets and fight or kill anyone in sight for no apparent reason.
- Condemned: Criminal Origins - Player is an FBI serial killer hunter in one of the first titles for the Xbox 360. Game emphasizes the use of melee weapons over firearms, allowing players to use virtually any part of their environment as a weapon. The next generation graphics provide a new level of detail to various injuries, especially "finishing moves.
- True Crime: New York City - Player is a NYC cop looking for information regarding the mysterious death of a friend. Player can plant evidence on civilians and shake them down to earn extra money.
How about that horrible game where innocent civilians are subjected to a slow toture of being crushed under successively heavier and heavier weights (while enduring some nasuea-inducing motion) until they're shot into the vacuum of space and burned alive in a giant hydrogen explosion?
Parents, keep your kids away from Katamari Damacy!!
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
"the Family Media Guide singles out include some of the ESRB M-rated titles (not buyable by those under the age of 17)"
Anyone can buy a game with an M-rating, unless a store chooses to enforce the ESRB system. It's voluntary, not a legal requirement*. Parents need to be aware of this, and not trust stores/government to police what games their children purchase.
*Yet. May no longer be true in your jurisdiction. Laws pending. Beware the thought police.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I really get tired of reading about games that I should not allow my son to purchase (not that he can just yet, hes turning 4 soon but still), if you are a parent and stupid enough to let your child play a game that you even for a moment have to think and sit down and read the box, then I really dont care that your child is outside being evil and trying to blow shit up its your own damn fault. The parents need to mod more and pay attention, I dont need a list to know my son will not be playing anything listed (or how about UT, CS Condition Zero, Call of duty, etc/etc/etc). For someone that is going to buy a game and not read it, your stupid, thee end! Now go get me some of those games.
Is there anything ironic about violent games also being critically acclaimed? At all?
Where's the ordered list? "top 10" implies that there would be a bulletin-style list, ranked in order of most violent.
.... nothing. End of article
I click the link and see a few names tossed up, with no references as to why they made it save for a couple, and then
Where's the list?
(the following uses segments taken from the San Andreas review, but a quick browse through any other review will show the pattern exists elsewhere)
:)
When listing "Profanity details", some words are not censored, others use "fill-in-the-blank" censoring, while others are viewed as so horrid as to be referred to only by their first letter:
"F-Word, C-word, A*s, A*shole, Balls, B*stard, B*tch, Christ, C*ck, Crap, C*m, Damn, D*ck, God Damn, Hell, Jesus, N*gger, Piss, Pr*ck, P*ssy, Screw, Sh*t, Tw*t"
I also note that though not listed in the profanity section, the "sex details" section additionally lists "tits" and "wanking"
I'm not sure what exactly this means, but I do find it fascinating. Does anyone have enough understanding of how the minds of these people work as to be able to explain this behavior?
Hmm.. I do wonder if the lameness filter will let those quotes through
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
"F-Word, C-word, A*s, A*shole, Balls, B*stard, B*tch, Christ, C*ck, Crap, C*m, Damn, D*ck, God Damn, Hell, Jesus, N*gger, Piss, Pr*ck, P*ssy, Screw, Sh*t, Tw*t"
When I was young we used all of those words, even though our video games didn't say them. I clearly remember using every one of those in the same sentence when my NES got that damn,b*stard,Sh*tty,.... blinking screen thing.
- Bart
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
After reading what they had to say about Resident Evil 4 I kinda want to play it now.
Has this list sold anyone else on one of these games?
Who is left motivated to notice any pain but their own? Won't even that be suitably ignored by drugs?
They came for the jews, but I was not a jew.
They came for the gays, but I was never gay.
They came for the dissidents, but I never thought about politics.
Then they came for me to do terrible things... and no one was left to stop them.
Many societies fantasize about many things: superiority, greedy domination, dehumanization, self-imposed ignorance. Whenever the dam breaks in history you'll see the longest-thought/planned fantasies are usually the most horrific chapters of real history.
Nietzsche is dead - God
I'm sick of seeing unwarranted paranoia about violent media. Violent/graphic media are not inherently evil things, and they alone do not turn a kid bad. It's always bad parents who are to blame for bad kids, period. A bad parent is always more of a danger to society than any video game, movie, or music could ever be.
What I'd like to see is a published compiled list of bad parents. That way the government would know who to sterilize, and the rest of us would know who to watch out for.
Instead of a headline reading, "Grand Theft Auto encourages violence and prostitution", I'd like to see a headline reading, "Mary Jones of Seattle, WA, never says 'No' to her child, raises spoiled brat with overinflated sense of self-entitlement".
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
How is their system so much better?
It is more descriptive which is great (there write up that is, their classification is less), but they seem (on a sample of 1) completly in agreement with ESRB.
Inuyasha: Feudal combat (from heir front page) is:
Explicitly Violent
Explicitly Prophane and
Suggestivly sexual
No age judgement
In a system that is unclear except for maybe the red (a logo that involved a stop light might make things more clear, but white being none is still hard to squees into the metaphore).
ESRB
Teen (13+)
Mild Language
Suggestive Themes
Violence
The only disagreement is in the language, but I would think the use of "damn it!" is mildly prophane. Also, what is graphic prophanity? That just doesn't make sense. It is like they wanted to do a 1,2,3,4 but decided to make it confusing, what they really need is three thermomiters with AO content showing it bursting M being topped and T being middle blah blah. Or a slider in a green to red gradient with a number next to it, so we can at a glance know the context of where this falls in the scheme.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Incidents: Cigarette smoking by adults. Themes of kidnapping, terror, and peril. Supernatural themes involving cults, hideous monsters, mutations, and mind control. Urinating.
Yeah, because thank goodness in real like NO ONE under the age of 18 EVER Urinates...
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
1. The list seems accurate. In other words, they describe the games "as-is", without any editorializing that I can see.
2. The list is not calling for banning of the games. Every time someone mentions "violent video games", the morons among us get out the Jack Thompson Rant Guide (JTRG) and start typing.
3. The list is a tool for concerned parents. Part of the JTRG (see above) states that any mention of violent games must be followed by a post that states "Teh Parents must parent their kids". Well, geniuses, THIS LIST IS ONE WAY FOR PARENTS TO LEARN WHICH GAMES ARE VIOLENT.
If you kids had a semblance of internally consistent logic, you'd be applauding the list, not condemning it.
BTW, Resident Evil 4
Oh look another stupid anti-video game article. Let's see...
They've created a new rating system that's "superior to the existing ESRB (Electronic Software Ratings Board) industry association-based review approach which assigns ratings based upon the subjective opinions of three individuals who do not even play the game."
Their results: 10 Mature rating games that aren't suitable for younger audiences. GASP! and I thought that's what M-Mature (17+) meant.
Typical day at home... Oh look our sons are playing a new FPS type xbox game. I can't imagine why mom would approve that? Mom says, "OMG! That's horrible stop playing that now. Never play that again." Gives me a dirty look (I did get the xbox once upon a time)... I ask, "Where did they get that?" She says, "I got it at the video store, they asked for it." I start to look for the container to check the ESRB rating, and she says, "Shut up! I know," and storms out before I reach the box...
We don't need the government to protect people from being stupid. People need to take responsibility for their actions. Too bad stupidity is easier.
This isn't loony Jack Thompson here, these are the people who are actually behind the current legislation. Why are they upset?
Well, here's what I believe happened. In the original crisis, the one that created the rating system, the two games that drove the rating system were Night Trap a pretty mild probably PG-rated vaguely interactive B-Horror movie and Mortal Kombat a game where poorly animated cartoon characters killed each other in humorously gruesome ways. (I can't give more info on how bad Night Trap actually is because even though I was one of 5 people in the US with a SegaCD, I didn't buy it. I'm going by the footage they showed during the hearings to damn it. Oh, and someone will probably argue that the characters in Mortal Kombat aren't cartoon characters. Well, then when Monty Python made cartoons using cutouts of photographs, those weren't cartoons either.) Huge amounts of hyperbole about these video games came out of Washington, and the games industry basically allowed Washington to get away with it (indeed the game industry itself was divided, with Nintendo being one of the causes of the crises trying to harm their competitor, SEGA. Nintendo sent the video tape to their friends in Congress that precipitated the whole thing.)
Well, those two games became the top of the ratings, the M-Rated games, but they were milder than what kids could see in an episode of Beavis and Butthead or indeed The Simpson's (really there is some gruesome stuff on The Simpson's remember the fog that turns people inside out?).
So, the games industry came out with a rating system, and I guess they figured they didn't need to try to license the movie rating system, so they created their own. While the system was roughly analogous to the movie rating system, the truth was that at least on the top end, an R-Rated movie could be much more graphic than an M-Rated game. Oh, and the wonderful full-motion video thing that people tried to foist on the game playing public collapsed, so you ended up with years of poorly animated cartoony games especially when polygons became big. (Really, go back and look at some of those old 3-D Playstation games. They didn't exactly have realistic imagery, did they?) Oh and no nudity or real profanity in the games at all.
So, people got used to defacto censorship in video games. Nothing really worse than Mortal Kombat was allowed. Really the 90's were a kind of golden age for the pro-videogame censorship people.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
This is great. now i can search for the most violent sexual and profane games :)
so you're saying you're jewish.
That explains a lot.