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[MaximumZero]

The stuff does exist, but it's rare enough that it doesn't really matter.

[Neonivek]

The stuff does exist, but it's rare enough that it doesn't really matter.

What I meant was... the ESRB has never made a game rated AO for political reasons. Every game that is rated AO deserves to be rated AO.

There is no "Ohh this game features football players being killed... AO!" like in some places I heard of.

The closest a game has ever been to getting a AO rating when it didn't deserve it was Manhunt but honestly it almost deserved it.

Yeah I am going to put "Australia" as a Gaming Pet Peeve. I am not even in Australia and it just bugs me.

[Sartain]

RE: ESRB Ratings

First off, GameStop will sell you an M rated game if you're 17 with a state ID. Not 18. If someone looks to be over 30 or so, I don't even bother, unless my DM or corporate is in the room.

If it helps, when someone has questions about the rating of a game, I'll pull up a review of the game on my phone or use examples from other games that I've played. Many laughs have been had at these exchanges:

Parent: "What does 'suggestive themes' mean?"
Me: "Cleavage, mostly."

Parent: "My kid is 15. Do you think 'partial nudity' would be too much for them?"
Me: "Not really."
Parent: *shocked look*
Me: "Partial nudity is usually a buttcheek, or very rarely a full butt."

That really depends on what Gamestop you work for. I'm a Gamestop Nordic employee and even though I've worked as both Assistant Store Manager, Store Manager and now part-timing, I'm still not sure what the official policy is because it's pretty much been at the whim of the Area Manager, of which I've gone through a few. Legally, we could sell Manhunt games to toddlers I'm pretty sure.

On topic: I mostly play indie stuff and unusual games these days, but back when I was still interested in MMOs it was really horrible how they all clung so desperately to the "WoW-model". Even the ones that wanted to be different at the most tweaked a few core concepts as well, but pretty much every MMO I've played so far other than Secret World and City of Heroes seems to have been carbon copies of World of Warcraft.

[MaximumZero]

Waitwaitwaitwait...I could get transferred to Norway!? Awesome.

[Sartain]

Waitwaitwaitwait...I could get transferred to Norway!? Awesome.

Well, I live in Denmark but there's stores in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Ireland too, although they have different rules for everything but that's where the main office for Nordic is located, for tax purposes I believe.

[Quartz_Mace]

About ERSB  ratings, anyone feel like the Teen group has pretty much disapeared over the years? I feel like it's just that any violent game nowadays includes moderate blood, getting it insta-flagged as M.

Also, yeah anyone can get a rated M game with no real issues, unless their guardian stops them, but even then they can find a way. In fact, I think I had access to rated M games as a child because my father kept some old M-rated shooter games in our gaming cabinet, but I never tried them. I think I still have them, actually.

[SealyStar]

About ERSB  ratings, anyone feel like the Teen group has pretty much disapeared over the years? I feel like it's just that any violent game nowadays includes moderate blood, getting it insta-flagged as M.

Also, yeah anyone can get a rated M game with no real issues, unless their guardian stops them, but even then they can find a way. In fact, I think I had access to rated M games as a child because my father kept some old M-rated shooter games in our gaming cabinet, but I never tried them. I think I still have them, actually.

I'm not sure if the ESRB has gotten more sensitive (it's hard to go up from where they already are). I think developers and publishers realized that in practice most teenagers (and younger) will buy and play M-rated games anyway and only the strictest parents actually care anymore. Also, modern technology allows for blood and gore to be shown in more detail, and generally the ESRB's thoughts on violence seem to be that "more realistic graphics = violence is worse".

Back to that first point, though, I personally think video game ratings are good for younger kids but there's not really much point to difference T and M anyway. Most teenagers deal with more sex, drugs, and language just going to school than they'll ever see in games, and literally all media seems to have its share of violence these days. There's not much point in controlling how much they'll see if you're only doing it for one medium.

Really, the ESRB's ratings based on violence, unnecessary as they are, are pretty benign. The real problem is one they share with society as a whole, which is that sexual content is considered worse than violent content. There's the old quote that only 2 or 3 games have gotten AO ratings for violence and language instead of sex - Manhunt 2 and, recently, Hatred - I think there might be a third but I'm not sure.

[coolio678]

Isn't ESRB that thing where you can view at a glance whether any particular product has violence/drugs/whatever in it? As a to-be parent, that sounds moderately useful. Of course I wouldn't take ESRB ratings at face value. What I could do is learn that a given game has drug use, which I could then look into and think for myself whether the implied/shown drug use is handled in such a way that I'd want to allow or disallow it from my crotchspawn.

The ESRB can get a bit overzealous with ratings sometimes. They're normally good, but one instance that still gives me a chuckle is that We Ski, a very child friendly and rather fun skiing sim on the wii got an e10 rating for "drug reference." There is a single npc in that game who makes a single mention of wine to go with the plate of spaghetti that you deliver to them.

[Neonivek]

About ERSB  ratings, anyone feel like the Teen group has pretty much disapeared over the years? I feel like it's just that any violent game nowadays includes moderate blood, getting it insta-flagged as M.

Also, yeah anyone can get a rated M game with no real issues, unless their guardian stops them, but even then they can find a way. In fact, I think I had access to rated M games as a child because my father kept some old M-rated shooter games in our gaming cabinet, but I never tried them. I think I still have them, actually.

Here is how it works

Games trying to market themselves towards teens are Rated M because the M rating attracts teens.

Games trying to market themselves towards adults, but aren't gorey, are typically rated T because they feature things like moral ambiguity.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

ERSB and classification boards in general are a fascinating subject but it has derailed the thread a bit. I highly recommend someone to make a new topic to discuss it especially in light of the whole Hatred nonsense.

Anyway on topic:

Crossbows
Why (especially in RPGs) are crossbows so damn useless? I've always loved the design and mechanics of medieval crossbows but I can never use them in games because they're always flat out worse than bows.
Often the crossbow fails to scale with stats which always struck me as quite odd. Crossbows also took strength to draw (bigger ones having to use levers and stirrups) and a person certainly could advance in the finesse it took to reload.

The biggest advantage over bows, which games almost always fail to implement, is that they can be cocked, kept loaded and able to be fired at will. For this reason it was particularly common place in sieges where marksmen could track patrolling soldiers and fire when they briefly emerged from cover. Bows had to drawn and can often only be held for a matter of seconds making "sniping" more difficult.

[mastahcheese]

The lousiness of crossbows is highly irritating to me, as well.

Actually, that's pretty much the only thing I like about Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. Trying to use a bow is frickin' hard compared to a crossbow, since you can just aim and shoot with the crossbow, while the bow and arrow has to take forever to draw and aim, and then you can only hold it so long.

[MaximumZero]

The biggest advantage over bows, which games almost always fail to implement, is that they can be cocked, kept loaded and able to be fired at will.

That's also a fairly large disadvantage, though. Accidental fires are a bitch when your buddy is standing in front of the bolt, or if it's aimed at your feet or something.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

That's also a fairly large disadvantage, though. Accidental fires are a bitch when your buddy is standing in front of the bolt, or if it's aimed at your feet or something.

While it's certainly a disadvantage I wouldn't really call it a large one.
Most pre-modern crossbows used a primitive but effective notch and latch system that likely wouldn't misfire unless there was a massive mechanical malfunction (like the latch snapping). It wouldn't take much to learn basic "trigger discipline" and the lever used to fire has to have a lot more weight put onto it than, say, a modern firearm trigger. It likely wouldn't fire merely by catching on something or a slight bump.
Bows can also misfire with the arrow flying off to the sides (although generally at a much reduce velocity) or merely the bowmen's fingers/thumbring slipping. Probably less risky to friendlies though.

As for actual videos games they could at least allow crossbow damage to scale with your stats and have a crossbow as a slow reloading high armour piercing/damage ranged weapon. I don't get why people think only bows should scale with strength while you can only put a certain amount of strength into bows before they get overdrawn and lose effectiveness. 

[Neonivek]

Ok here is one

Censors in MMOs that censor ordinary words and GAME TERMINOLOGY

You have to fail quite spectacularly for "Hell" to be censored in a game where you literally can go to hell... Or when the names of moves IN THE GAME are censored.

By the way... Assumption, Assume, But to, As Soon... All censored

[alexandertnt]

Runescape did that, but it also tried to detect workarounds (shit as sh1t, fuck as f.u.c.k etc) and block web addresses, and it was utterly paranoid about it. It could make having a casual conversation with people difficult, as it would sometimes wrongly detect arbitrary parts of sentinces as swearing (without anything that could obviously be misinterpreted as swearing, like in "Assume").


Everything is trying to exterminate humanity
Some group of evil, morally abhorrent definetely-not-one-of-us'es are trying to destroy humanity, Because! It's up to you, the Good Guy, to to save the day by murdering all of them.

Dehumanization
Some games portray their enemies in a way that feels straight out of WWII propaganda, faceless inhuman monsters. Unfortunetely, because the fantasy world is makebelieve, the author is free to make their enemies literally be like that. I think it's terrably shallow, and more often than not just seems like a projection of the idealised enemy.