Messages

cobra: Snuff games? You mean games in which fictional polygonal characters die? Like most games?
Calling Manhunt a "snuff game" is like calling any crap horror movie a "snuff movie". Nobody died to make Manhunt, nobody dies when you play it, it has never been demonstrated that playing the game makes you significantly more likely to harm someone.

A snuff movie is a movie of someone being killed for entertainment purposes... the reasons such a thing would be illegal are obvious, and they're not our vague ideas of what is up to "standards".
Similarly we don't simply abhor child porn because of "standards", it's banned because it's part of an industry that exploits and abuses children, and because having child pornography is seen as a good indicator that you're a danger to children. Simulated child porn, like Voh mentioned, is illegal many places, clearly the first reason doesn't apply to that, but it seems to be based on the second.

Owning Manhunt is a terrible indicator of if you'll commit murder, or if you think it's fun to hurt people. It's a PS2 game with some OTT 3d gore animations. It's predominantly an average quality sneaking game. I enjoyed the first game for about an hour, but then got tired of the gameplay - I'm not a sadistic killer, and I didn't feel like I was becoming one in the game. It might become worrying if the game seemed realistic, and encouraged me to really take part in "sadism" but it doesn't. Manhunt is obviously not a game for people that want a torture simulator, the options are too limited. They've even taken out the snuff movie theme in the second game, if for some reason that was the most offensive part.

As for it being banned, Rockstar definitely did not want that... sure it might make it seem cooler among some, but for overall sales it'll be a disaster - unless they can get a rerated version out as soon as possible.

ProgZ:
"Sensible human beings have to collectively draw lines in the sand somewhere to prevent things from getting out of hand" Absolutely. I'd hope most people would draw them at the point things are actually causing trouble for other people though, and not when they don't like the look of someone else's choice of entertainment. Coming from a horror movie fan, this seems a strange comment. Manhunt is way tamer than you guys are making out...

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_go-gos/vacation.html I just searched for some of your lyrics.

I'd reluctantly support the banning of a game/movie/record if it is shown that it'd cause some seriously big problems. That's not shown in this case.

Until these awful, awful games are causing a significant, demonstrable negative effect in society it seems backward to consider censoring them. Yes, it's only entertainment, and it isn't like censorship of important ideas, but even entertainment media censorship on the grounds of "oh, I don't like the look of that" is quite pathetic, in my opinion. I had hoped we'd come some way since blaming D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and all manner of other things for creating killers (often with more reason than for Manhunt), but sadly not, it seems.

Any link between games and increased violence is so tenuous that despite all the studies there's nothing conclusive. All you hear is the anti violent game crowd repeating nonsense like the case of the manhunt killer m0ds mentioned, doesn't matter to them that the police investigating the case didn't believe that was much to do with it, as long as the newspapers did.

At least this time it's only Manhunt, I don't suppose gamers will be that up in arms about it until they ban something we might have wanted to buy.

You bought 50 grand's worth of totally legal music and you don't know what you like yet?

Wifi will be a limitation if your connection is above 54mbit. Obviously most people aren't lucky enough to have some uncapped fibre going to their home, so it's not a problem. Standard home internet speeds won't be significantly affected by using wifi rather than wires.

What your friend meant was that if you have another computer on your LAN, then transfers between it and your computer will be slower over wifi (54mbit) than wires (100mbit). This is because in this case, the computers are able to utilise the full bandwidth. (By the same token, it'll be faster if you use gibabit ethernet, rather than normal ethernet, between your computers. But that won't make your internet connection any faster.)

I'd go for an arrow, a themed verb coin is plenty of copness. Not every sprite needs to scream YOU ARE A COP at you! It didn't really occur to me that the CMI cursor was a piratey treasure map kind of X, I don't think it mattered much. The one themed cursor I noticed, (Larry 7's condom cursor) was kind of silly. Easy to see, and easy to see where it's pointing at are the most important things, and for that you can't beat an arrow.

"The blog would also welcome print reviews (not web-based ones) from non-english speaking countries."

Brighton isn't a billion miles away, Fish, the main problem for indies is that it costs over £500 Develop is a good conference, but as the price suggests, it's more of an industry thing than something for us.

How adventurous are you feeling?

I think the original colour is best, how boring.

"Indulge your EGO"
"Save early, save often"
"Makes game development E Zed"
"800x600 ought to be enough for anybody..." - Bill Gates

On average it's warmer, but the main difference is that the climate is more steady. Less extremely cold in winter (you probably won't see snow on the south coast), perhaps a bit warmer than Norway in summer, on average. I notice it's 29C in Oslo today though D: That's a couple of degrees more than here.

Ferry wouldn't be too bad, because we had hoped to go to Snowdonia, anyway, and it's only a little further to get you from Holyhead. Hopefully your flight will be fine.

The last one became a discussion about Scientology's operations from people that aren't in the church, and I suppose Yufster doesn't think that a real scientologist will take part in that. Jesus Juice claimed to be a scientologist, but didn't want to take part. However I've had to remove Jesus Juice posts before that were clearly just trying to stir shit up, so I took it with a pinch of salt.

Pretty much the only things that matter are those you see and hear! But then the code is driving all that, so it's fundementally important. Sure, you shouldn't be thinking "ooh, crappy looking 3d, this must have been hard to code" and giving it a higher score, but like progz and radiant said, coding is just as much about making things work slickly, making interfaces that don't get in your way, little cosmetic things, like characters turning to look at stuff they're describing, and so on. It has as much of an effect on the style of the game as good animation or writing does.

It's probably because AGS does a lot of the work for us, coding is quite underappreciated, but going beyond that standard can make things feel a lot more fresh.

Really? How lucky. PM them

Oh you mean Jesus Juice... I assumed they were trolling...

If you want an insight into what a Scientologist thinks about their organisation perhaps you could post on a Scientology board or find one on myspace and MSN them... do you really think it's likely there's a Scientologist member here? Perhaps you're overestimating how many there are... most estimates put it at around half a million worldwide.

It's certainly not dangerous to go into the Church and have a chat to them, as long as you understand basically how they operate and aren't desperate for a solution to an emotional problem. They only hassle people that go to cause trouble, picket, investigate, or leave the church.

Yeah, you wouldn't have to go back very far until that was exactly the case in the Catholic church (even ignoring little things that happen today, like people protesting blasphemous movies and plays). We'll not even go into modern Islam...

Even so, it's worth noting the huge differences between Scientology and established religion. I think they're more interesting than the similarities, which are the usual basic religion things.

Scientology is amazing to watch because, well, there's not even 2000 years to make the source material look credible. It reminds you how gullible people are. The adoption of pseudoscientific presentation is pretty unique in a religion that size, too, I think... Also the way it's very nearly run like a corporation, employing PR people and buying advertising, and gets away with it, tax free (in many countries). If it wasn't for the "religion" facade, there would certainly be a lot of grounds for prosecution over their many frauds... it's amazing what you can get away with under the religion banner. The price we pay for religious freedom, I suppose.

To be fair, he's from Norway... one of the few places you could travel to the UK from and think stuff was priced pretty reasonably.

Bournemouth is a relatively nice place, I've been trapped there many a time. Hope you're going there soon if you want a chance of experiencing this "warm climate".

Heh, yes, Spleen got captured by Scientologists for a while during Bonfirittens. They had to rescue him. As far as I know, there are no Scientologists among the regular AGS members.

The personality tests are pretty boring, just yes/no questions, and you get a score at the end, like the silly quizzes in teen girl magazines. If you are convinced by the score that you have a problem, then you can go on to have more tests and help, including fun stuff like being read by Hubbard's e-meter.

The most weird thing they do at the moment is that anti psychology/psychiatry stuff. They have exhibitions about how evil they are... Probably appealing to dissatisfied mental patients looking for alternatives, which has to be their core support base. The main activities are all presented as typical self-help programmes, especially nowadays. Not all that entertaining on the surface. However this is one of my favourite images/captions, from the golden age, when wacky Ron was alive.

As in all Berne convention countries, you aren't required to have put to put a copyright notice on anything published in the US either, but that wasn't the case until the 1978 "Mickey Mouse" act.