I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
You DO realise that you just described a TV commercial, right? It's also likely that no one told these children not to hit the dolls in the room. There's a major difference. Do you really think that children are these blank, will-less zombies that can be programmed at the drop of a hat?
Sure, show them a violent game, then let them play it, and chances are that they'll play it. Show them a violent movie, AND teach them about morality, and it's exceedingly unlikely (barring some mental disorder) that they'll go out and kill someone. I try to avoid using this line in an argument, but... "c'mon, it's common sense!"
Anyone remember the +5 back scratcher from the DM's guide ?
Yeah, there are some awesome magic items. A friend of mine was in a campaign where the DM kept giving them cursed joke items from one of the sourcebooks. They managed to kill a dragon by giving it tons of their cursed items.
I can't remember the details, but it involved giving it "omelet of the plains" then "cloak of blending."
(Omlet of the plains: A typical airline food omelet in a styrofoam container. If eaten, another one shows up in the container daily. Very poisonous.
Cloak of blending: Not the kind that makes you blend into your surroundings, this one blends you (with spikes) if you put it on.)
Actually, that's pretty much it. When some friends of mine rented "Saving Private Ryan," so they could show me all the so-called "kickass gib scenes" ("look at that! His LEG flew off!"), I fell asleep several times during the movie because if you're not shocked by any of it, it's just a long, colorless, noisy, boring action scene. (Forget the "touching story," it seems to be a small excuse to show hundreds of guys getting gorily dismembered. Another "war is hell" movie IMHO.)
If you ask me, this (cliche warning!) "ultra-violent media culture" isn't turning kids into demented killers whether or not it desensitizes them. It is, on the other hand, kind of absurd when you step back and look at it.
("Check it out, in this game you can tear out your opponent's still-beating spleen!"
"Oh yeah? In this one you can rend his tonsils out!"
"Oh yeah, my character just did a root canal on the other guy!"
"Ha! That's nothing, if you press all the bottons at once you can do triple-bypass surgery!")
Yeah, you can only violate the rules if you're a house robot (RobotWars.)
(most visibly, using a flame thrower, and going for a good half-minute after being told to stop.)
Hm... that's interesting. I never do full-put "lucid dreaming," but if I need to intervene with something, I've been known to pull down a Quake-like console and enter commands. (And try as I might, I just can't accurately remember what it's like to have my entire vision filled with a console.) For example, if I'm being chased by guys with guns, I drop the console and think "gun" and there it is. It's also the fastest way for me to wake up. (Although one time I tried this, and it quit to a dos prompt for a minute, THEN I woke up. It bothered the hell out of me (not having a body and everything.))
That's right, kids, I've seen it happen to good friends of mine. You get a Gameboy, and they give you a little Tetris, just a sampler. Well, pretty soon you've got it mastered, and you have to move on to other things, maybe a little Puzzle Fighter now and again at parties. Everyone knows it's not addictive...
But HEED MY WORDS! If you keep it up, you'll be importing Puyo Puyo games before you know it, and that series has no end in sight!
And stay away from "Puyo Puyo DA!" at all costs! You get into those Japanese music games, and you're a gonner! Beatmania, Pop'n Music, DDR, they'll pull you in, and before you know it you'll find whole days missing outta your calendar BEWARE!
Actually, what I couldn't stand was when I was taking a course in C++, and I'd wake up with a brilliant code fix/neat little program all planned out, so I'd rush to my computer, fire up CodeWarrior, and get the code started (just past the includes,)
...then I'd realize that the trick wouldn't work because there was no such function as the one I was thinking of! (And being a beginner's course, I wasn't about to write one.)
Japan is safer than most places, but keep in mind that nationally, it is a master of appearing better off than it is.
Just yesterday, there was news of a man who "accidentally" burned 6 women alive while robbing a jewelry store.
Although there are many more disturbing things like the Aum Shinrikyo (sp?) sarin attack, the recently caught boy who beat his mother to death with an aluminum baseball bat, the disturbing increase in poisoned food cases, etc...
A 15 year old boy was accused of peeping through windows at a neighboring family's 16 year old daughter. Angered by the accusation, he killed 3 of the 6 family members.
A 70 year old man was taking out garbage one morning when a 19 year old boy ran up and started bludgeoning him with a hammer. When the man's wife ran out to help, she too was attacked.
A 17 year old boy in Osaka hijacked a bus, stabbed 3 people, and made demands for a bullet-proof vest, a handgun, cash, and to be driven to Tokyo. Police negotiated with him until riot police stormed the bus and captured him the next morning.
In Aichi prefecture, a 17 year old boy stabbed an elderly woman 40 times because he wanted to know what it was like to murder someone.
Most of these stories (I think all except Aum Shinrikyo) are from May 2000 to present. I've also heard there are problems with people getting beaten and robbed in Osaka lately. Japan appears to be all under control, (don't get me wrong, I'd love to spend some time there,) but there is a lot of underlying crime that is quickly forgotten and swept under the rug. It's not as neat and tidy as it seems from here.
(Also, a story I thought was interesting but didn't really fit: Yakuza stormed a Right-wing political office, armed with knives. Their attempt failed because the people at the office had guns. (illegal in Japan.))
Actually, in Canada here (Alberta, I think it applies to other provinces though,) Everyone has to register all of their firearms with the government, effective... soon. (I think it's another 3 days before the cost of a posession licence goes from $10 to $60. That's right, possesion licence. You need it to keep guns you own, or buy ammo.)
Get this too, crossbows, certain pellet guns, and (AFAIK,) realistic looking replicas are counted as firearms.
Also, there are 3 licences (4, but 3 that count if you live in a city.)
One for possesion, one for acquisition of most rifles, and one for restricted weapons. (Handguns, and certain rifles, that is. It's pretty near impossible to legally own an automatic weapon.)
Funny technicality in the arms laws here:
It's illegal to own knives that open by spring, gravity, or centifugal force, or that you otherwise just press a button to open. It's also illegal to have a FOLDING knife with a blade over 4". The funny thing is that there's no blade length limit on non-folding blades, and the police here even agree that it's legal to walk around downtown wearing a sword, as long as it's not concealed, or brandished.
Man... that's weird. Where I work, in the shop the lathes are P133s (I think.) They run Windows NT. It was really weird the first time I saw them, this machine the size of a van, with a desktop showing on the side.
(The operator was locked out once because he'd been playing in the control panels. This is my official endorsement for L0phtcrack. It's awesome! It had the lathe running in a couple of hours.)
LOL! I can picture it now, this guy in shades and a trenchcoat standing at a bus stop, playing a flight sim. He's just standing still for a while, then suddenly he looks straight up, yells "WAAUGH!" and falls over backwards.
I think it would be pretty awesome if they made a design that's a bit more suitable for a robot... like a face hugger from the Alien movies. With that many legs, they could probably pay less attention to balance, and make it so that it could walk fast enough to follow you around. Maybe give it the option to make screeching sounds instead of beeping.
It'd definately be an interesting conversation piece, and I'll bet something with 6 or 8 legs would be even better at robot soccer!
I don't know, if it's anything like the Sony store here, it'd be pretty impressive if they had the Aibo for Xmas. They had 1 here for 2 days for a demo, and they sent it on to other stores. They had 1 glasstron in stock once, but it sold right away so they decided not to bother with another one. So now, they have some TVs, about a dozen MD players, and a couple of cameras that take memory sticks. Stuff like Aibo and Glasstron would sell too well so they stay away from it. =P
C'mon, get over it!
It's almost like these days people think that anything that isn't a troll is "karma whoring."
The damn buzzword has been way overused. You're beating a dead horse. Who CARES if the post is just there to soak up karma of not? Are you jealous because your karma is in the negatives or something? If whoever's moderating appreciates the post, they mod it up. It was obviously a good post regardless of the reason it was posted, so quit it with the fruitless acusations!
Why settle for the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu for prez! Cthulhu will not censor the internet, it will find far worse ways to torment mankind before they go insane and it east them!
So it is obviously to Sony's advantage to delay the PSX2, at least until after Nintendo's release. This way they'll be the latest and the greatest and the thing to have.
Maybe, but there's possibility 5, which I went with. I was waiting for a PS2, but then I read about all the bugs in the first versions, the high price tag it would have, the head-slappingly foolish things (no anti-aliasing in early games), and the long wait, and I just said "to hell with it, I'm getting a Dreamcast."
It may not be as advanced, but it's here now, it works, and you can get one for pretty cheap. 3 big factors.
You might think 3dfx OpenGL is a Glide wrapper, but I got the beta of the Windows Voodoo 3 OpenGL drivers, and they act fairly differently in 2 ways:
1: Whenever glide is initialized, the animated 3dfx slash screen shows up. OpenGL is instant.
2: Glide _will not_ run in a window no matter what. In fact, switching to a windowed app can corrupt the graphics both in Win95 and MacOS 8. The OpenGL drivers run with no problem in a window.
Just because we like computers are we really ready to throw away our humanity for a set of perceived benefits? We are what we are, and any gross changes in the state of our existance cannot help but fundamentally alter who we, as a species, are. There is no "intangible transition" between what we are and what we will be.
For one thing, I don't believe that what others percieve as "humanity" is a ubiquitous part of being human. (It may be the norm, but one could live without it.)
Either way, it's a moot point, since we are as we are, and we are not a static race. Changes for better and worse are made, and personally, I see man's integration with machine as an unavoidable next step in evolution. (It is done now medically, and will eventually be done of convenience, and while it WILL have some morally wrong uses such as demographic tracking, overall, it will be for the better.)
You say that our idea of self is shaped from our boundaries, but I find that untrue. Personally, my idea of self stems from my perceptions of the environment around me relative to my perception of myself, and my interactions with my environment,(a neccesary feedback.) If you are naught but the sum of your boundaries, you are trapped in the cage of your own mind. I see boundaries as a neccesary evil, but to be ignored when not crucial, that they might be expanded.
Of course, caution must be exercised in all things, but progress must continue. Mankind will naturally become "unnatural." (Though I find the term quite pointless. Cities are man's natural habitat. All that we have built was built with nature, and it is our nature to do so. What is unnatural about that?)
Talking on Iridium phone:
"...hey! For some reason the reception is REALLY good today!"
[looks up]
"YACK!!"
[jumps out of way of flaming satellite as it crashes into the ground]
"Hm... I've been disconnected."
That still doesn't explain the first part: Why wouldn't Sony allow these companies to release these games? It sure wouldn't be angry parents. The game "Th ril l Kill" was already authorized by Sony to be released. It had warnings about sex and violence, and even requires you to sign a clickwrap agreement that you are over 17 and won't show it to anyone under 17 before you can even see the intro movie. Here is some info on one of the characters in it. There goes the "sexual overtones" argument. It was 99% completed and would've been released, except EA didn't want a game like that under their label, and canned it. Sony was ready to release it though. (I know about the game because I got a copy despite it not being released. If you do a search for it, you'll be able to find reviews.
So what is it that's so shocking and appalling about dating sims/life sims that would keep them from release here? I doubt it would be Sony fearing calls from angry parents.
Man, these games have way fewer "sexual overtones" than the onslaught of "girls with guns" games coming out here for the Playstation.
Also, if the console makers had any say in it, companies wouldn't be able to make add-on hardware like the VCD player cards, PSX gameboy cards, and GameSharks (which in turn wouldn't be easily re-flashed with... say... Caetla ROM images, and used to further hack the PSX.) As it turned out, Sony had to remove the port from the Playstation, and even that doesn't work because you can get kits to put these things directly onto the PSX board, or even get kits to put the port back on the PSX.
I'm afraid your agrument doesn't seem to hold very well.
You gotta admit, S. Miyamoto's games may appear kiddie-like at times, but he never fails to serve up steaming hot, overflowing dishes of original gameplay. Contrast this with the PlayStation, where every other game seems to be "put a girl in hot pants and give her a gun". Tomb Raider, PE, Fear Effect, R. Evil, Dino Crisis... the list goes on and on.
True, but that's just our game market for the most part. You should see the music games in Japan (Like Beatmania, Pop'n Music, Dance Dance Revolution... all by Konami BTW.) They're completely original and extremely addictive if you get a good one.
--RANT--
Also there's the whole "life sim" genre. I agree they'd probably fail here, but no company has even TRIED it here AFAIK. Not even (Konami's) betselling Tokimeki Memorial series. You know that in Japan, Rival Schools "evolution mode" worked by making a base character (school, gender, face, D.O.B. etc...) and then taking them through their school life, making friends and enemies, balancing training and clubs, etc... and picking up fighting moves/partners based on how you did in this game? The mini-games are actually mini-games of this "life-sim" on the evolution disc, yet when they brought it over here, the biggest part of the evolution disc was stripped right out.
AAAARGH, it's like whenever a cool non-RPG comes out in Japan, it's instantly kept from coming to North America!
--END RANT--
Huh? Where was I? Oh yeah, There's plenty of original gameplay for the Playstation, it's just that unless you import your games, you'll seldom ever see it. Personally, I'm completely hooked on the Beatmania series, and I don't even like most of the music in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
You DO realise that you just described a TV commercial, right? It's also likely that no one told these children not to hit the dolls in the room. There's a major difference. Do you really think that children are these blank, will-less zombies that can be programmed at the drop of a hat?
Sure, show them a violent game, then let them play it, and chances are that they'll play it. Show them a violent movie, AND teach them about morality, and it's exceedingly unlikely (barring some mental disorder) that they'll go out and kill someone. I try to avoid using this line in an argument, but... "c'mon, it's common sense!"
Anyone remember the +5 back scratcher from the DM's guide ?
Yeah, there are some awesome magic items. A friend of mine was in a campaign where the DM kept giving them cursed joke items from one of the sourcebooks. They managed to kill a dragon by giving it tons of their cursed items.
I can't remember the details, but it involved giving it "omelet of the plains" then "cloak of blending."
(Omlet of the plains: A typical airline food omelet in a styrofoam container. If eaten, another one shows up in the container daily. Very poisonous.
Cloak of blending: Not the kind that makes you blend into your surroundings, this one blends you (with spikes) if you put it on.)
Actually, that's pretty much it. When some friends of mine rented "Saving Private Ryan," so they could show me all the so-called "kickass gib scenes" ("look at that! His LEG flew off!"), I fell asleep several times during the movie because if you're not shocked by any of it, it's just a long, colorless, noisy, boring action scene. (Forget the "touching story," it seems to be a small excuse to show hundreds of guys getting gorily dismembered. Another "war is hell" movie IMHO.)
If you ask me, this (cliche warning!) "ultra-violent media culture" isn't turning kids into demented killers whether or not it desensitizes them. It is, on the other hand, kind of absurd when you step back and look at it.
("Check it out, in this game you can tear out your opponent's still-beating spleen!"
"Oh yeah? In this one you can rend his tonsils out!"
"Oh yeah, my character just did a root canal on the other guy!"
"Ha! That's nothing, if you press all the bottons at once you can do triple-bypass surgery!")
Yeah, you can only violate the rules if you're a house robot (RobotWars.)
(most visibly, using a flame thrower, and going for a good half-minute after being told to stop.)
Dammit, now I have to spend almost a minute and a half to read trolls? What's this world coming to?
Hm... that's interesting. I never do full-put "lucid dreaming," but if I need to intervene with something, I've been known to pull down a Quake-like console and enter commands. (And try as I might, I just can't accurately remember what it's like to have my entire vision filled with a console.) For example, if I'm being chased by guys with guns, I drop the console and think "gun" and there it is. It's also the fastest way for me to wake up. (Although one time I tried this, and it quit to a dos prompt for a minute, THEN I woke up. It bothered the hell out of me (not having a body and everything.))
You! First, learn to GRAMMAR. Otherwise, kill self.
No! Failed to, do! Must heed.
*BANG!*
*%&@&(
NO CARRIER
That's right, kids, I've seen it happen to good friends of mine. You get a Gameboy, and they give you a little Tetris, just a sampler. Well, pretty soon you've got it mastered, and you have to move on to other things, maybe a little Puzzle Fighter now and again at parties. Everyone knows it's not addictive...
But HEED MY WORDS! If you keep it up, you'll be importing Puyo Puyo games before you know it, and that series has no end in sight!
And stay away from "Puyo Puyo DA!" at all costs! You get into those Japanese music games, and you're a gonner! Beatmania, Pop'n Music, DDR, they'll pull you in, and before you know it you'll find whole days missing outta your calendar BEWARE!
Actually, what I couldn't stand was when I was taking a course in C++, and I'd wake up with a brilliant code fix/neat little program all planned out, so I'd rush to my computer, fire up CodeWarrior, and get the code started (just past the includes,)
...then I'd realize that the trick wouldn't work because there was no such function as the one I was thinking of! (And being a beginner's course, I wasn't about to write one.)
"Waaugh?"
...I guess I can't type a random exclamation without getting someone's name... you were just the lucky one. ^_^
Japan is safer than most places, but keep in mind that nationally, it is a master of appearing better off than it is.
Just yesterday, there was news of a man who "accidentally" burned 6 women alive while robbing a jewelry store.
Although there are many more disturbing things like the Aum Shinrikyo (sp?) sarin attack, the recently caught boy who beat his mother to death with an aluminum baseball bat, the disturbing increase in poisoned food cases, etc...
A 15 year old boy was accused of peeping through windows at a neighboring family's 16 year old daughter. Angered by the accusation, he killed 3 of the 6 family members.
A 70 year old man was taking out garbage one morning when a 19 year old boy ran up and started bludgeoning him with a hammer. When the man's wife ran out to help, she too was attacked.
A 17 year old boy in Osaka hijacked a bus, stabbed 3 people, and made demands for a bullet-proof vest, a handgun, cash, and to be driven to Tokyo. Police negotiated with him until riot police stormed the bus and captured him the next morning.
In Aichi prefecture, a 17 year old boy stabbed an elderly woman 40 times because he wanted to know what it was like to murder someone.
Most of these stories (I think all except Aum Shinrikyo) are from May 2000 to present. I've also heard there are problems with people getting beaten and robbed in Osaka lately. Japan appears to be all under control, (don't get me wrong, I'd love to spend some time there,) but there is a lot of underlying crime that is quickly forgotten and swept under the rug. It's not as neat and tidy as it seems from here.
(Also, a story I thought was interesting but didn't really fit: Yakuza stormed a Right-wing political office, armed with knives. Their attempt failed because the people at the office had guns. (illegal in Japan.))
Actually, in Canada here (Alberta, I think it applies to other provinces though,) Everyone has to register all of their firearms with the government, effective... soon. (I think it's another 3 days before the cost of a posession licence goes from $10 to $60. That's right, possesion licence. You need it to keep guns you own, or buy ammo.)
Get this too, crossbows, certain pellet guns, and (AFAIK,) realistic looking replicas are counted as firearms.
Also, there are 3 licences (4, but 3 that count if you live in a city.)
One for possesion, one for acquisition of most rifles, and one for restricted weapons. (Handguns, and certain rifles, that is. It's pretty near impossible to legally own an automatic weapon.)
Funny technicality in the arms laws here:
It's illegal to own knives that open by spring, gravity, or centifugal force, or that you otherwise just press a button to open. It's also illegal to have a FOLDING knife with a blade over 4". The funny thing is that there's no blade length limit on non-folding blades, and the police here even agree that it's legal to walk around downtown wearing a sword, as long as it's not concealed, or brandished.
Time for a slightly OT tangent story:
Man... that's weird. Where I work, in the shop the lathes are P133s (I think.) They run Windows NT. It was really weird the first time I saw them, this machine the size of a van, with a desktop showing on the side.
(The operator was locked out once because he'd been playing in the control panels. This is my official endorsement for L0phtcrack. It's awesome! It had the lathe running in a couple of hours.)
LOL! I can picture it now, this guy in shades and a trenchcoat standing at a bus stop, playing a flight sim. He's just standing still for a while, then suddenly he looks straight up, yells "WAAUGH!" and falls over backwards.
Smooth...
I think it would be pretty awesome if they made a design that's a bit more suitable for a robot... like a face hugger from the Alien movies. With that many legs, they could probably pay less attention to balance, and make it so that it could walk fast enough to follow you around. Maybe give it the option to make screeching sounds instead of beeping.
It'd definately be an interesting conversation piece, and I'll bet something with 6 or 8 legs would be even better at robot soccer!
I don't know, if it's anything like the Sony store here, it'd be pretty impressive if they had the Aibo for Xmas. They had 1 here for 2 days for a demo, and they sent it on to other stores. They had 1 glasstron in stock once, but it sold right away so they decided not to bother with another one. So now, they have some TVs, about a dozen MD players, and a couple of cameras that take memory sticks. Stuff like Aibo and Glasstron would sell too well so they stay away from it. =P
C'mon, get over it!
It's almost like these days people think that anything that isn't a troll is "karma whoring."
The damn buzzword has been way overused. You're beating a dead horse. Who CARES if the post is just there to soak up karma of not? Are you jealous because your karma is in the negatives or something? If whoever's moderating appreciates the post, they mod it up. It was obviously a good post regardless of the reason it was posted, so quit it with the fruitless acusations!
Why settle for the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu for prez! Cthulhu will not censor the internet, it will find far worse ways to torment mankind before they go insane and it east them!
So it is obviously to Sony's advantage to delay the PSX2, at least until after Nintendo's release. This way they'll be the latest and the greatest and the thing to have.
Maybe, but there's possibility 5, which I went with. I was waiting for a PS2, but then I read about all the bugs in the first versions, the high price tag it would have, the head-slappingly foolish things (no anti-aliasing in early games), and the long wait, and I just said "to hell with it, I'm getting a Dreamcast."
It may not be as advanced, but it's here now, it works, and you can get one for pretty cheap. 3 big factors.
You might think 3dfx OpenGL is a Glide wrapper, but I got the beta of the Windows Voodoo 3 OpenGL drivers, and they act fairly differently in 2 ways:
1: Whenever glide is initialized, the animated 3dfx slash screen shows up. OpenGL is instant.
2: Glide _will not_ run in a window no matter what. In fact, switching to a windowed app can corrupt the graphics both in Win95 and MacOS 8. The OpenGL drivers run with no problem in a window.
Just because we like computers are we really ready to throw away our humanity for a set of perceived benefits? We are what we are, and any gross changes in the state of our existance cannot help but fundamentally alter who we, as a species, are. There is no "intangible transition" between what we are and what we will be.
For one thing, I don't believe that what others percieve as "humanity" is a ubiquitous part of being human. (It may be the norm, but one could live without it.)
Either way, it's a moot point, since we are as we are, and we are not a static race. Changes for better and worse are made, and personally, I see man's integration with machine as an unavoidable next step in evolution. (It is done now medically, and will eventually be done of convenience, and while it WILL have some morally wrong uses such as demographic tracking, overall, it will be for the better.)
You say that our idea of self is shaped from our boundaries, but I find that untrue. Personally, my idea of self stems from my perceptions of the environment around me relative to my perception of myself, and my interactions with my environment,(a neccesary feedback.) If you are naught but the sum of your boundaries, you are trapped in the cage of your own mind. I see boundaries as a neccesary evil, but to be ignored when not crucial, that they might be expanded.
Of course, caution must be exercised in all things, but progress must continue. Mankind will naturally become "unnatural." (Though I find the term quite pointless. Cities are man's natural habitat. All that we have built was built with nature, and it is our nature to do so. What is unnatural about that?)
Talking on Iridium phone:
"...hey! For some reason the reception is REALLY good today!"
[looks up]
"YACK!!"
[jumps out of way of flaming satellite as it crashes into the ground]
"Hm... I've been disconnected."
That still doesn't explain the first part: Why wouldn't Sony allow these companies to release these games? It sure wouldn't be angry parents.
The game "Th ril l Kill" was already authorized by Sony to be released. It had warnings about sex and violence, and even requires you to sign a clickwrap agreement that you are over 17 and won't show it to anyone under 17 before you can even see the intro movie. Here is some info on one of the characters in it. There goes the "sexual overtones" argument. It was 99% completed and would've been released, except EA didn't want a game like that under their label, and canned it. Sony was ready to release it though. (I know about the game because I got a copy despite it not being released. If you do a search for it, you'll be able to find reviews.
So what is it that's so shocking and appalling about dating sims/life sims that would keep them from release here? I doubt it would be Sony fearing calls from angry parents.
Man, these games have way fewer "sexual overtones" than the onslaught of "girls with guns" games coming out here for the Playstation.
Also, if the console makers had any say in it, companies wouldn't be able to make add-on hardware like the VCD player cards, PSX gameboy cards, and GameSharks (which in turn wouldn't be easily re-flashed with... say... Caetla ROM images, and used to further hack the PSX.) As it turned out, Sony had to remove the port from the Playstation, and even that doesn't work because you can get kits to put these things directly onto the PSX board, or even get kits to put the port back on the PSX.
I'm afraid your agrument doesn't seem to hold very well.
You gotta admit, S. Miyamoto's games may appear kiddie-like at times, but he never fails to serve up steaming hot, overflowing dishes of original gameplay. Contrast this with the PlayStation, where every other game seems to be "put a girl in hot pants and give her a gun". Tomb Raider, PE, Fear Effect, R. Evil, Dino Crisis... the list goes on and on.
True, but that's just our game market for the most part. You should see the music games in Japan (Like Beatmania, Pop'n Music, Dance Dance Revolution... all by Konami BTW.) They're completely original and extremely addictive if you get a good one.
--RANT--
Also there's the whole "life sim" genre. I agree they'd probably fail here, but no company has even TRIED it here AFAIK. Not even (Konami's) betselling Tokimeki Memorial series. You know that in Japan, Rival Schools "evolution mode" worked by making a base character (school, gender, face, D.O.B. etc...) and then taking them through their school life, making friends and enemies, balancing training and clubs, etc... and picking up fighting moves/partners based on how you did in this game? The mini-games are actually mini-games of this "life-sim" on the evolution disc, yet when they brought it over here, the biggest part of the evolution disc was stripped right out.
AAAARGH, it's like whenever a cool non-RPG comes out in Japan, it's instantly kept from coming to North America!
--END RANT--
Huh? Where was I? Oh yeah, There's plenty of original gameplay for the Playstation, it's just that unless you import your games, you'll seldom ever see it. Personally, I'm completely hooked on the Beatmania series, and I don't even like most of the music in it.