Op Ed

Slate Magazine - Should the United States ban a Japanese "rape simulator" game?
"Considering the impossibility of policing the Internet, as well as the availability of English RapeLay translations and forums for years before any politician caught wind of the game, it's unrealistic to think that the game could be banished from America. Very few Japanese developers make an effort to sell eroge to the West, and those that do, like Peach Princess and G-Collections, make content modifications to suit foreign norms and laws. (For example, all underage characters' ages get rounded up to 18, no matter how young the character looks.) These Westernized versions are sold in the United States via import sites like J-List and Play-Asia. Neither company sells RapeLay, but they do offer the popular eroge Yume Miru Kusuri. That game, while more edgy than it is violent, does focus on sex-crazed, underage-looking high schoolers with drug problems and suicide fetishes. RapeLay is appalling, but titles like Yume Miru Kusuri—sold in America after being unconvincingly modified so the protagonists are "18," making it tough to peg the games as outright illegal—would make far more constructive targets for political outrage."

Edge Online - Why the -Age of Steam- May Not Last? By Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, operator of Impulse.
"It's far too soon to assume that Steam will continue to dominate five years out. Thus far, it has largely operated without serious competition. With other services such as Impulse, Games for Windows Live, Amazon.com, GamersGate and others upping their own services with unique and compelling features, expanding their catalogs, and focusing on providing good customer experiences, I would be very surprised if Steam continues to have such a large market share (as a percentage) even 18 months from now."

CNET - Is the video game industry losing the PR battle?
"Based on what I've seen so far from the industry, it's willing to take a beating from government, lawyers, authors, and concerned groups and it does little to fight back. Meantime, I receive e-mails from parents on an almost daily basis asking me why video games are so bad for their kids. Whenever that happens, I write them a short but informative e-mail saying, 'They're not as bad as some groups say and here's research to prove it.'"

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Re: Op Ed
Mar 13, 2009, 11:23
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Re: Op Ed Mar 13, 2009, 11:23
Mar 13, 2009, 11:23
 
Quantity != Quality.
Surely you're not arguing that consoles have better quality of games? Games like Killzone 2 have weaker graphics and weaker control systems BECAUSE they're on console - FPS games are always much better on a PC. And you can plug in a X360 controller to a PC, so consoles are no stronger for other genres. Plus PC has plenty of other genres that don't work well on console, like RTS, adventure, RPG, casual (Peggle, Eets, etc).

No, it's not a fact. The PC as a platform is one of millions of hardware configurations. You can't even make the comparison in the first place. Which PC? The Wal-Mart PC? The HP laptop? You argue it's a strength, fine for you. I argue that it makes comparing the platforms themselves based on technical specifications pretty stupid. You're like a little kid back in the Nintendo vs Sega days, WAHH MY PLATFORM IS BETTER. It doesn't matter son, it's all about the games.
Actually, their point was valid. PCs can have more powerful hardware; they do have more control systems; they do support higher resolutions; they do have better visuals. That's not to say all PCs have better graphics than consoles but that's not the point - the flexibility of the PC is that older / cheaper systems can scale down the graphics and still run the game... you can't put a PS3 game in a PS2 and scale down the graphics.

Actually consoles are gaining upgrade abilities already. Modules for storage are already present and I suspect GPU's will be next generation.
Hard-drives are just the logical expansion of memory sticks of old... they're nothing particularly new and, in case you didn't notice, have been available for decades on PC. In fact consoles have gone backwards in terms of upgrading because the N64 and Saturn both had upgrade ports. You can't up the resolution, turn up anti-aliasing, download higher quality texture mods, use KB+M at full sensitivity, etc. Consoles are closed systems.

Z9000 is wrong as well, the console is not "better" than the PC. They offer complementary genres, experiences and so on. Owning both is far smarter than owning one and being an ignorant fanboy.
See, that I agree with. Consoles definitely have their place - you don't have to worry about settings or performance, installs (except on PS3) or additional software, and it's easier to just sit back on a comfy sofa to play them. But it shouldn't be ignored that everything you can do on a console can be done on a PC... hook-up a big screen, connect a wireless force feedback controller, etc. Consoles are simply a cheap way of playing games and necessary to play some games that have been bought-off by Microsoft or Sony.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
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