JB0

I'm sure my parents did too, after I woke them up at 6 in the morning to ask what a torso was...

Funny how things are always better the way you remember them than they are when you see them again. I'm hoping they'll focus on what's important and not try to include any "plot" or "character development." People are going to pay for 90-120 minutes of giant robots kicking ass, and they darn well better get 90-120 minutes of giant robots kicking ass. Complete with the cliché shouting and overdone combination sequence, too. If I don't hear someone yell "FORM BLAZING SWORD!" there will be hell to pay. But like I said, I have absolutely no hope of this coming out decently.

Until today I didn't think it was POSSIBLE to have less hope for a movie than the Transformers movie. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050726/film_n...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Ah, who cares about Gundam. SUPER ROBOT WARS 360! 314317[/snapback] Anyone getting it ? 314439[/snapback] Mmmm.... Macross and Gaogaigar in one bright shiny 5" optical disk... if only I wasn't broke.

I'd always understood the ESRB ratings to be based on the content of the game, not the disk. And the ESRB ACTUALLY exists to prevent some twit in Congress from making legislation to restrict the creative freedom of software developers. As far as I know, the ESRB ratings are completely voluntary, even among ESA members. They've turned Quake into a flight sim. This was child's play. Now we get into what I consider a gray area. Must everything have someone to blame? IMO, this is (at best) an unfortunate incident with no-one truly worthy of blame. The AO rating penalizes Rockstar for not spending the time to hunt down and delete all code related to an abandoned and incomplete minigame, as is standard industry practice. And (ignoring the PS2 part) the end user COULD have downlaoded a patch to enable content of that level of complexity. I know. GTA just happens to be the unique case where the mostly-finished mini-game would actually affect the rating if it had been made available. A. the actual level of completeness is un-determined as of right now. We may have barely scratched the surface of what they originally intended. B. The key word there is IF. Actually, what the ESRB is "supposed" to do is defined by the ESRB itself, not by our high minded ideals of what rating media should or shouldn't involve. So right now, according to the ESRB it's "supposed" to rate games by the content on the disc. The ESRB is holding publishers and developers accountable for how objectable content gets to an end user. If developers want to put naughty bits on a disc that might or might not be accessed, then the disc will be rated accordingly. As of right now. As of the time San Andreas was submitted for review, the rules ONLY covered content that was actually present in the game. Indeed, to enable the incomplete minigame IS merely the toggling of a single bit. However, the original hot coffee mod DID include the extra code needed to load the nude models, as well as to start your game with you dating all possible girlfriends. It's easier to insert code than you make it out to be. ESRB's current policy doesn't even really acknowledge modders, other than the fact that their work might allow existing content to be accessed. If the content is on disc, then it'll be considered in the rating, period. If the content is not there, then it won't. Again, this is based on existing rules. The rules as of San Andreas' submission to the ESRB ONLY considered content that was actually used in the game. Expecting a title released over a year ago to obey rules put into effect a week ago is absurd. I see this as a first step.

Actually, if you watch, Max, Hikaru, and Kakizaki are all pretty much the same distance at the start. Kakizaki just shifts into fighter mode slower than the others, making him further behind at the end. Max, also beat her in DYRL where she was bloodied and he left his valk unscathed. To be fair, he's a much smaller target. Basicall any hit in a QRau's upper body hits the pilot. You've got to land a shot into the "breatbone" on a VF-1 battroid. And Millia landed hits to either side of the heatshield in that battle. Had Max been a zentran, he would've been as dead as Kakizaki(HEADSHOT!).

Maybe the "content changes in online play" label on MMORPGs will be adapted for every PC game. "Content changes with unauthorized patches."

Ah, who cares about Gundam. SUPER ROBOT WARS 360!

The whole relationship was pretty neurotic to start with.

It's a reasonable look at things. As I recall, the doctor's also telling Claduia that there was too much bleeding, indicating that they did work. I don't think he was ever intended to have just dropped dead immediatly.

Been there, done that, cursed the board. Aww, gundammit. I'm doing it now, too. Attention Invision! I HATE YOUR QUOTE PARSER! --^-. .-^-- Tell me about it. Seems like one broken quote command mucks all of them up in this new version of Invision. -Al But as near as I can tell, I didn't break a tag. I ran through multiple times and counted the pairs. I think it just has a limit to how many it can parse. I've had this problem on another Invision board. And I've been running out metric buttloads of quote tags for ages. 314176[/snapback] If you can boldface your way through a post, then you can use quotes. 314179[/snapback] All I did was replace the word quote with the letter b. A replacement I did because it exploded. Damn right. The man hates people that use lots of quote tags. And people that use zeros in their names.

*shrugs* I just don't see it as being all that diffrent. If you can download the hot coffee mod(either the censor flag tool that leaves you with clothed sex or the full mod that adds code to load the nude models and features a "trainer" feature that leaves you dating all the girls at once), then you could just as easily have pulled down the naked Sims 2 hack(TWO of which are in the top 5 downloads at FilePlanet right now), the naked Quake 3 models(a pack of which is currently the 2nd most popular Q3 download according to FilePlanet), or a # of other hacks and mods. So IMO, the only argument that really holds water is the cheat device code to flip the bit in the PS2 version. Honestly, if it weren't for the political fallout, it'd be nothing more than an interesting look into the development process IMO. Yeah, I'd agree that target audience matters. I'd say that it probably matters more than whether a user has to perform an incantation to get at the content or not. *shrugs* There's just something wrong with even considering Care Bears sex games. Cheat codes and development aids are a different animal from actual content that could affect a game's rating... especially content that lets you control every pelvic thrust. So in retrospect, I think GTA's guilty of more than sloppy development. They're at least guilty of sloppy development involving objectionable material. I'm just saying... The industry is riddled with discarded gameplay concepts, half-finished areas, and incomplete minigames. This one just happens to be racier than most. Well, I'm guessing that many of those who are finding the sex minigame unacceptable are those who were uncomfortable with the game's premise in the first place. And many of those who are perfectly fine with the minigame's inclusion were already endeared to the game. I don't think anyone out there has drastically changed their tune to the game over the sex minigame. *raises hand* I don't particulalry care for GTA, despite my defense of the game. And another game under development by Rockstar has earned them my hatred, as opposed to just apathy. But I'd rather not go into that here. And of course we know the thing that actually offends some isn't the monogamy. The offense is in the portrayal of explicit sex acts as entertainment (and made available to those who might be minors). Like I said, it's actually fully-clothed sex. Somewhat racier than prime-time TV, but not more so than an R-rated movie. But the fact that people are more offended by depictions of sex(and yes, I DO feel the fact that it's monogamous is relevant) than by killing cops, running over injured people with stolen ambulances, and flying airplanes into towers is... odd, to say the least. And I assume people ARE more offended, since none of the other events in the game set off NEAR this much fuss. For what it's worth, many of those who value monogamy also value sex as something so intimate and personal that it shouldn't be experienced except by two people in the actual act with each other. Here, ultimate monogamy means having the one same partner for life, and not just having one partner in any single period of time. In this view, sex shared with a third party is not truly monogamous, and sex experienced vicariously in a video game or movie is a cheapening of real and actual monogamous sex, even when it pretends to portray such a thing. Bah. I still say it's the most moral event in the game. Does the sex mini-game do even that? I assume you can continue to access prostitutes throughout the game if you wish to. Damn you. Damn you to Wisconsin. At any rate, it's not like society actually shuns depictions of monogamy and embraces gangland violence... our attitudes regarding sex rise from the original belief that in its very depiction and vicarious participation, we actually undermine the core of its monogamous nature. Society's desire for freedom from sexual mores has brought us to where we are today-- where whatever's left of these attitudes manifest themselves as knee-jerk reactions, and we're offended at the sight of sex without knowing why. We've never had such strong sentiments about the depiction of violence, however-- where we feel watching violence and criminality actually undermines peace, or that it inherently causes lawlessness and harm to others. It's still interesting that society gets more bent out of shape over a little sexuality(or even just implied sexuality in many cases) than it does senseless violence, even when it's absurdly overdone and gory. Been there, done that, cursed the board. Aww, gundammit. I'm doing it now, too. Attention Invision! I HATE YOUR QUOTE PARSER! --^-. .-^-- Tell me about it. Seems like one broken quote command mucks all of them up in this new version of Invision. -Al But as near as I can tell, I didn't break a tag. I ran through multiple times and counted the pairs. I think it just has a limit to how many it can parse. I've had this problem on another Invision board. And I've been running out metric buttloads of quote tags for ages.

Yeah... but is it really piloting skill, or just man over machine... i.e. no soft squishy human to fall victim to insane g forces? Would Sharon or the Ghost AI beat the human pilots if they were all in Sopwith Camels instead of a machine custom-designed to take advantage of an automated pilot? 314085[/snapback] Hypothetically, the computer should have a higher maximum. Better "eyes" and the precision accuracy that only a machine can get. Though given Sharon was never intended as a combat machine, she quite likely sucks at it.

But at the same time, most of the content was created by the developer. So content on disk was placed there by the authors of the title, whether it was easily accessible or not. From a distributor/publisher/author PoV, the content was placed there by themselves. If we rate media purely on the end-user PoV of what's needed to be done in order access the content, then we should have no concerns if some company started to release children's games with hours of hardcore porn encoded that can be accessed by a registry tweak. Sure, it'd be silly to rate Tomb-Raider AO because of a nude patch, but if the criterion lies solely on what action the end user must take-- on whether the action is documented or not-- then we should have no problem with games rated for children with hidden porn. My POINT was that the only way to get this is by downloading and installing a hack. And there are a great many games that have had porn added to them through a hack. And I AM considering the target market here. If Rockstar had a half-finished sex game in "Care Bears: The Secret of the Hidden Candy Cane" it'd be an issue, regardless of whether the thing was unlockable or not. There is a fundamental diffrence between an abandoned idea with half-completed code and malicious subversion of the ESRB and parental oversight. So I guess we'd agree here that games shouldn't be rated solely on what end-user actions are required to access certain types of content. I'd agree that intent should factor in on how a game's rated... but the consumer doesn't care whether Rockstar meant for the content to be there, but whether it is there, and whether their child can get at it easily. In addition to looking at the end-user action needed to unlock certain content and the intention of developers when they placed it there, I feel that content authors should have some level of responsibility over what they knowingly allow on a disk. It's sloppy development at best and a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the rating system at worst. It may be sloppy, but it is(or should I say has been, as this has ramifications across the industry) standard practice. Heck, cheat codes started as development aids that no one wanted to crawl through assembly code removing. And the consumers getting beant out of shape over this are the ones that shouldn't have bought their kids Grand Theft Auto to begin with. I'm not hearing any media frenzies. I don't think media frenzies are a good measure of large-scale parental concerns. "Parents Distress Over Online Porn" does not make for a very interesting headline or story, and just because we don't see such media coverage doesn't mean parents don't care wholesale. A better headline would have been "No, Duh!" *chuckles* True. If I recall, the primary consumers of such software aren't parents, but schools, libraries, and other public access places. ... I had an actual point, but I got distracted, and forgot it. I have no objection to the ratings. I just don't feel GTA should be re-rated based on disabled content. All the arguments against rating GTA as AO-- "Kids see harder-core porn anyway." "You can't stop them however much you care." "They're already sneaking worse things behind your back"-- can also be applied towards other titles and genres. Actually, my primary argument was that ANY game can be hacked to add sex and nudity. Whether GTA's hack is smaller than most is irrelevant. We can even apply this rationale justifying inaction towards pornographic DVD's and magazines themselves. "Kids can get it for free and much more easily online. Why rate adult DVD's and magazines as AO?" You actually make a reasonably decent case. Particularly given kids already manage to sneak into R movies and pick up Playboys anyways. I just don't find the "kids might be getting at worse if they're inclined" argument a particularly good one for justifying passivity and inaction. It does however, do a good job of make us feel better about doing nothing, because we've already concluded that nothing can be done. Like I said, it wasn't my primary argument. But everyone's acting like the game's exposing pure virgin eyes to the evils of sex. Aside from the actaul offensiveness of the content being HIGHLY debatable in the context of the game(I think I mentioned that I suspect it to be the most moral event in the game), the eyes viewing "hot coffee" are anything BUT virgin in 99.9% of cases(the stuff in the crotch area may very well be, but that's another thread entirely). Because rating on potential content means every game is AO. Not if we're rating on content--code, artwork, animations-- that's actually placed there by the developers. Then only cases like GTA are potentially AO... although this brings to scrutiny how much end-user or third-party action is necessary for a title to be rated adult-only. I still think it's silly to re-rate a game based on content that can't be accessed without altering the game. But if we don't rate at least somewhat on potential content, then that means developers are free to do much worse than GTA with impunity, and leave much more explicit material hidden on disk, so long as their content is not accessible through "normal play". I'm not sure that's a good thing either. Fortunately the shock tactic is quite rarely used in the industry. And to date, I don't think a single developer has seen fit to expend the effort on a feature they intend to not be in the release with the exception of debugging tools. Perhaps the best thing would be for publishers to police their own studios, and demand that no content should be left in the final gold masters that could affect the rating, hidden or otherwise. But I'm not sure what motivation they'd have to do that, outside of the one the ESRB just game them, rating essentially on potential content, I mean. Well, there's the possibility of name damage. Take 2 dodged a bullet on this one, as everybody knows Rockstar. Many games the developer gets brushed under the rug and the publisher takes all the credit/blame. I can't tell you how many times I've gone off because someone talked about how awesome Enix's Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile games were, or Atari's Ikaruga. Depends on which version you bought. The retail version was M-rated, but there was also an uncensored AO version that could be bought direct from the publisher. I suspect, due to the existence of the censor bit in both versions of the game, that Rockstar was originally planning a similar dual release of GTA:SA So does the retail version of LSL allow you to change it to the AO version by simple tweaking? Dunno actually. If so, it does show an inconsistency in how GTA:SA and LSL were rated... but at the same time, it's pretty obvious what sort of content you were going to get in LSL. Sex, and maybe more of it. GTA is more about senseless violence, criminality, and brief sexual innuendo. GOGO HOOKERS! But each GTA has, as far as I know, been increasingly more offensive than the previous instalment. Not that I actually expect non-gamers to actually track diffrences between installments, but IF they did, it would've been obvious that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. And it's because of its mainstream acceptance and the fact that somehow one doesn't naturally expect more explicit sex in the game, for whatever reason, that we have the media frenzy we do. There's a LOT of interesting commentary you could make on asociety that accepts the depiction and glorification of drug dealing, murder, the titular grand theft auto, and whatever else is in there(I've talked to some people that make a show out of ramming airplanes into skyscrapers...) as reasonable fun, but when you throw sex between a man and a woman in a (as I understand it) monogamous relationship into the mix it becomes totally unacceptable. But that's a whole 'nother thread or 12. On a forum with more interest in the political debates that will arise. Been there, done that, cursed the board. Aww, gundammit. I'm doing it now, too. Attention Invision! I HATE YOUR QUOTE PARSER! --^-. .-^--

Not minigame-related. GTA3 != GTA:SAn Andreas.

Oh yeah... are we sure Sharon was piloting the Ghost? She may have just deployed it under orders to defend the Macross.

But that's his plane(and Max and Milla's later). He's clearly already established as a skilled pilot, or he wouldn't be on the project flying against Isamu, as it wouldn't be a fair trial to have one darn good(albeit crazy and unpredictable) pilot and one average one. You put the best you can find in both planes(optimally, you would have the same guy in both planes to completely remove one variable, but that's not possible real-world), and see which performs better.

Whoop. Anyways... Xenogears was T too. And it had boobs!111

Mine covered the Nintendo Power(but very few of the games in it). I bought each and every Gamepro I own. Mmmmm... *fondly remembers the RoadBlasters in the grocery store*

Let the pissing match begin..... 313777[/snapback] Pissing contest aside. from the top of my head, here's my list: 1. Roy Fokker 2. Max Jenius 3. Millia Jenius 4. DD Ivanov 5. Nora Polyansky (psychotic bitch all the way) 6. Isamu Alva Dyson 7. Hikaru Ichijyo (check spelling) 8. Kamjin (kind a sadistic though [HINT: BACKSTABBER ]) 9. Guld Goa Bowman (good with his YF-21 only ) 10. Shin Kudo (if he comes back and trains harder that is ) and remeber this is just my worth. 313791[/snapback] WTF? How is Guld only good with the YF-21? And how does he rate below Isamu anyways?

Considering the launch price of the PS1 and Saturn at the time, the price of the NeoGeo cart system wasn't all that bad. The only problem was the price of the carts, but when you add up the coins you'd otherwise spend in the arcade, they're quite a bargain. You also get instant gratification without all the annoying load time or fear of scratched discs that'd no longer work. 313747[/snapback] A. I meant now. And was considering the price of feeding them. B. The NeoGeo was up against the SNES and Genesis. By the time of the PS1 and Saturn, I think the NeoGeo home hardware had been discontinued. They MAY have been making the CD version still, but I don't think so.

Ah, a true elite. I remember seeing my friend hooking up his NeoGeo Cart system to the home stereo to show me the original Samurai Shodown. When the floor started shaking to the drums I knew the system is a must-have. 313741[/snapback] Heehee. I wouldn't mind a NeoGeo. But I'm not paying what they go for.

That was exactly what I paid for FFIII (one of the first games I bought with my own money, and it completely pwned my wallet). It was worth every penny though. At that point, consoles didn't have awesome graphics to rely upon to make up for mediocre stories. JBO, it would appear that we're pretty much in the same age group (I'm 26). Likewise I can recall in hindsight that after paying for my subscriptions to EGM, Gamepro, and Nintendo Power (Until about 1996, I had been a subscriber since it was still the "Nintendo Fun Club" or whatever back in the mid-80s), I could've easily doubled my game library over the course of about 3 years. 313681[/snapback] 23 here. I have a few years' worth of GamePros bought off newsstands, and a pile of Nintendo Powers I subscribed to. Actually wasn't half-bad in the SNES days. I used to play games at Pizza Hut/Inn/Whatever. I remember one. Arkanoid. I remember it because I thought the machine was broken. Years later I realized that the joystick was actually a knob that you rotated.

No offense but that's got to be the most retarded thing I've ever heard. I mean really, to take probably one of the most perfect examples of hand-drawn animation and attempting to outdo it PLUS crap it up with CG would just totally rape my childhood. 313726[/snapback] What if we made it live-action WITH CG?

Agreed. But I don't necessarily think that a decent parent should have to be aware of hidden content in a game that his or her child might know about. Said parent should be able to tell what is and is not in a game by what's advertised or noted on the box, by a few mainstream reviews, and by watching or playing a little bit of the game with their child. The end-user PoV of the technique used to unlock the sex in GTA(downloading and running a hack) can also add sex and nudity to any of a great # of PC games. So really, it's no diffrent except that the media made everyone in the world aware of it. I'm sure they do exist. But, to use your earlier choice of words, a decent parent really shouldn't be buying games like GTA for their 10-year old kids, reguardless. It's lazy, irresponsible parenting to say that it's okay for a child to play a game where he buys time with a prostitute, then beats said prostitute to death, but not okay to play a game where you hump a girl with all your clothes on. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, the "odd parent" you described isn't a good one. I'd agree if they were parents of 10-year olds. But what about those of 14, 15 and 16 year olds, who might be a little bit more relaxed about their kids being exposed to certain levels of violence and sexual content but still uncomfortable with actual interactive virtual sex? Obviously there is a difference between buying time with a prostitute, with most of the action merely implied, and showing the actual sex act, even with clothes on. If there was no difference, and there's no line between the two, then the sex minigame would have been left in game as is instead of being tucked and hidden away. Rockstar for one seems to have thought that there was a difference, and that the difference would affect their rating. Or thought a diffrence would be interpolated. IMO, the minigame is MORE wholesome than the prostitute, simply because it ISN'T a prostitute, even if it's more graphic(and I use the term loosely) . Why are we then so shocked that the game is receiving the rating that Rockstar anticipated receiving had the sex minigame been made available, now that it's been exposed and is being made available, requiring only a simple patch to activate it? Because it's not actual game content? There is a fundamental diffrence between an abandoned idea with half-completed code and malicious subversion of the ESRB and parental oversight. And regardless of what we think of said "odd parent", what they deem appropriate or not is their call. It doesn't really follow that we shouldn't label media for what is actually on the disk (readily available or not), and let them make the final call, just because we disagree with their ideas about what's right or isn't right for the child, and where they draw the line. I strongly feel that games should be rated on the ACTUAL game content, not on leftover vestiges of the development cycle that are NOT accessable through any normal game mechanism. How about the kid whose parents actually monitor their internet usage and for whom downloading gigs of porn isn't quite as easy to get away with as a simple patch for a game? Or the kid who doesn't have an internet connection but who can get the patch slipped to him easily from a friend? They can make any PC game pornographic, including such utterly wholesome games as Sims 2 and such senseless bloodbaths as Doom 3(Hell, Duke Nukem 3D contained strippers in-game... and yes, I realize I'm dating myself). Or grab a nice copy of MAME and Gals Panic S. If y're gonna grab a porn game, it may as well be a fun one. SO... any kid that's staring at fully clothed*, jagged, pixellated sex in GTA quite likely ALSO staring at high-res hardcore lesbian midget bondage porn on their PC. And no one's flipped out about that. Er, I imagine many parents are flipped about that sort of thing. I'm not hearing any media frenzies. A. Most people don't use them. B. They're legendary for their ineffectiveness. And they have kids that are quite adept at sneaking things in behind their backs. Because rating on potential content means every game is AO. Depends on which version you bought. The retail version was M-rated, but there was also an uncensored AO version that could be bought direct from the publisher. I suspect, due to the existence of the censor bit in both versions of the game, that Rockstar was originally planning a similar dual release of GTA:SA, then decided it wasn't worth the effort and dropped work on the still-incomplete minigame(I believe I mentioned already that there ARE nude models on the disk, but no code to load them). Also possible they ran into license conflicts with SCEA. Even SCEJapan is pretty vocal about no porn in games, I imagine SCEA simply won't license AO games. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that they won't license an M-rated version of an AO game either. Attention board quote tag parser! --^-. .-^--