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It is true that insurance companies are in business to make a profit  but is absurd to believe that mistreating customers is the optimal means of maximising profit. Indeed this a a formula for failure and bankruptcy rather than success.  I don't think profit is a bad thing.  It's the incentive that drives an organisation to operate efficiently, eliminate waste,  and to continuously improve it's self.  The tried and true way to success in private business is to provide a superior product or service and/or a better price that the competition.

McDonalds would like a word with you.

That's normal, and yes, you should tell CJ about it.

The long and short of it is this:

The insurance companies have as their primary aim making money. It is in their best interest to give you as little health care as possible for the highest price you will accept.

The government has as their primary aim the welfare of the citizens (or at least in theory). It is in their best interest to give you as much health care as possible for the lowest price they can manage.

Note the obvious conflict of interest here. Traditionally, USA uses the former, and most of Europe uses the latter. According to studies, healthcare in the USA is about thrice as expensive overall while being inferior in quality to that in Europe. I do not think that is a coincidence.

It strikes me that a small group of people is making a lot of money with the previous system of health care, and would make substantially less with the new system; and that since these people have a lot of money, they can use it to sway the ignorant population with propaganda.

Is it paramount to every game to be Politically Correct?

Absolutely not.

Political correctness is a non-solution to a non-problem.

And in latest news, the Heroine's Quest team has joined forces with Crystal Shard studios, known for several adventure games in the recent past.

http://crystalshard.net/hq.htm

I believe HQ is a very promising project that will become a worthy spiritual successor to the classic series. We're drawing from mythological sources to put together a highly atmospherical world, and a challenge worthy of any heroine. Primarily, the team now consists of Corby (art) and myself (scripting), although several other people are contributing with e.g. music and portrait art. There is still a lot of work to be done, so do not expect a swift release yet.

I assumed the boundary was scat.

Nope.

Reminds me of an old DOS program called Eliza.

I'll see your Eliza and raise you a Ping...

There was a story a while ago about the governor of Las Vegas being very 'offended' by one of the rainbow six games because it implied that Vegas was full of terrorists. These are the kinds of people that think Johnny Depp really is a pirate.

You mean he uses BitTorrent?

Clues in the title; Just wondering what people find offensive in games/game content and what they would/wouldn't play.

Depends on whether the offense is gratuitous or truly part of the plot.

It was the RPG elements that made it completely intolerable for me. When I spend time boosting a characters stats in the directions I want they become a unique incarnation of themselves in my head and it's just too damn emotionally distressing to scrap them and start the game anew; redoing all the tree climbing and knife throwing and other neat little things you can do it that game to develop your character.

While I don't necessarily agree on dead ends in general, I do agree that this particular dead end is just stupid.

Come to think of it, many Sierra dead ends are. This is a standard that has evolved: back in the high days of Sierra, it was (evidently) acceptable for a game to have dozens of dead ends, whereas now it is not any more.

I've never understand why the walking deaths, dead ends all Sierra's things are so annoying for the players... For me they make the game more challenging and more interesting.

Well, they're not as annoying as message boards make them out to be, but when combined with slow gameplay and/or unskippable cutscenes they do make a game rather tedious.

Come to think of it, somebody should remake KQ5 to get rid of all the stupid dead ends and make the cutscenes skippable.

A graphical version of "Colossal Caves" with a built in auto map would be nice, (is this game really based on an actual place or is that just urban legend?)

It's real. At least, according to Wikipedia

I don't think most infocommies would work as a graphical adventure, really. They do some quite ingenious things with text that would be very hard to capture graphically.

I second Gold Rush; it's an oft-overlooked classic. Another that I'd like to see remade is Future Wars.

And hey, I even know Castle Adventure! I used to play that and want to add extra features and stuff, that's one of the things that got me into game design. Looks like it already has a remake, although it's missing now.

"Super Smash Bros Adventure"

You mean like this?

From the above link, "If the campaign does not produce any results with Activision, the team will consider reworking the game and removing all traces of King's Quest IP. It is by no means a simple task, but we would prefer to do that than to abandon eight years of hard work and sacrifice."

This sounds like it could work. It is worth mentioning that several elements of the King's Quest series aren't the intellectual property of Activision or indeed of anyone: fairy tales are public domain. Of course, the royal family of Daventry is not.

It's not an acceptable legal defence to shrug and say "I dunno, I didn't upload it! Did you? No? Well then it's a mystery forever! Case dismissed?"

That is acceptable only if you can afford to spend more money on lawyers than the IP owner.

How'd the guys from the "Quest For Glory 4.5" game get away with it? That game had lots of questionable content, and if there was ever a target for a C&D order they would be an understandable target.

No, the real question is what happened to King's Quest: Breast Intentions

A couple of months later another amateur group decided they wanted to make a 5th instalment. Bear in mind there would be no financial gain for either of us, I still said no to them. The reason being it was MY series of films and I made them how I wanted.

The main difference is this: since you are the author, you have both the moral right and the legal right to do that. Since Activision is not the author (that would be Ken and Roberta), they still have the legal right, but whether they have the moral right is up to debate. Not that their lawyers would care.

Sad news, indeed! It reminds me of Crimson Echoes, last year: another fangame that was weeks away from its full release.

It would be like if Lucas had somehow lost the rights to Star Wars in the middle of filming the prequel movies. Sure, he could probably have rewritten the story and made it not be about Obi-Wan and Anakin and Palpatine and Luke & Leia's mom, but what would be the point?

Ironically, Star Wars was made precisely because George Lucas wanted to tell a Flash Gordon story that he didn't have the rights for.

I find that to happen in all projects where you don't pay the people.

I beg to differ!

I would go with ZIP files; much easier for all involved.