You almost - almost - had the perfect argument there.
Then you went and said something silly like "homocide isn't a big issue."
Yakuza.
There is plenty of organised violence in Japan, and plenty of crimes of passion. Violence in general - physical, sexual, emotional - is a big problem everywhere in the world, and every kind of it is everywhere in the world.
@ both Shadowstar and SilentNegotiator:
How do you know that that was the intention of the developer? Did you ask them? Have you got some other kind of objective proof?
I personally think the very idea of Rapelay to be vile. But then there are people who think the sole purpose of Bill Henson's photography is to be vile, and there is another group that defends it as art.
Neither of you - or me - has any right to determine what is and isn&...
This article is about games as an artistic medium, though.
Sometimes the entire point of an artwork is to shock and offend. By it's nature, then, it's transgressive and offensive. To not be offended by it suggests some unpleasant things about the person.
But, that's the point, and that's exactly why we should be fighting for its existence.
Have you done the math around this, by any chance? Do you know how thin margin is for games? Or the fact that, unlike hardware, loss leading is unsustainable in the games industry.
It might suck for the consumer, but the reality is that while pricing is one of the great problems in the games industry, the problem is that the price is already too low to build sustainable business models on. Publishers just can't afford to increase the prices, either, because what would hap...
It would be likely to be a conglomerate outside of the games industry, looking to boost its presence in the gaming space.
So think of some of the really big entertainment companies out there - I would bet on one of those.
There are a lot of industries out there that have remained very healthy as a whole.
No one said Activision was dead. This news represents a huge lack of investment confidence in the game industry, though.
It means that Activision Blizzard has been identified as an undesirable element of a large entertainment company.
The biggest, most economically important publisher out there is undesirable as a business unit. That means a lot, actually.
@shackdaddy
We're at a time where big acquisitions are indeed being made where a company has a gap in its own portfolio. Microsoft has made a few really big acquisition (Skype, Yammer). Facebook, Google, and then a few enterprise tech companies as well.
Apple has a gap in its portfolio - gaming. It's likely to be far less costly to acquire into such a mature market than develop in-house capabilities.
Apple has $110 billion in cash reserves: http://techcrunch.com/2012/...
That's just cash - doesn't even take into account the company's other assets. Its market cap is over $500 billion.
Apple's cash reserves alone is almost enough to buy 100 per cent of the stocks of both Nintendo and Sony.
Now ...
And all of Sony's product lines would be complementary to Apple's product line - there's actually very little crossover between the two.
Distributors can still deeply care about games.
What does Sony Europe have to do with this? Sony didn't publish this game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
One of the most common forms of Manga art in Japan. It's usually designed to represent happy, cheerful stories and characters.
Wait wait wait, we have here a game that, in the review, is the equal in every way to the PC game in that it controls just as well, offers a tutorial for newcomers, and is perhaps even more comfortable to play because you can while sitting on the couch... but the game gets a C+ score because it's not as pretty? (It's still pretty, mind you).
This review confuses me. The PC version deserves an A+, so even if the graphics are all-important, the Xbox port still deserves a A...
What a ridiculous review.
Warner Brothers didn't make the game, as the reviewer seems to think. They published it. While that means Warner Brothers is complicit in the "crime" - if you want to believe that - it was Grasshopper Manufacture that made the game.
Furthermore, I would expect a critic to know something about self-referential irony in game production. The fact this guy took the game seriously is quite a poor reflection on games jo...
Time to pull out the Mel Gibson Freedom pictures.
Funnily enough this rather sensationalised article has a seed of truth in it - one of the PR professionals (as in, the people who do this stuff for a living and have access to data about what works and what doesn't work) didn't suggest that booth babes were a problem at all.
The problem, she said, was that the booth babes should have been dressed up in costume. A random bikini is not effective, but dress the model in costume and according to this Stephanie Schopp, it ...
It's a term for a relatively new genre that was pioneered in cinema by movies such as the Saw sequels and Hostel.
You won't find "JRPG" in your typical dictionary either. That's because genre is an informal descriptor used to collect similar works of film, literature or games into "categories," rather than a formal word that has an definite meaning.
@kevnb - you don't like people using genres to describe games/ books/ films...
@TheLyonKing - ah, got ya now.
The trailer has one especially nasty scene, but a lot of it reminded me a great deal of the "goreporn" movies - the stealth section where Lara has her hands tied, the caves at the start. Honestly, this has the potential to be one of the most explicit, dark, and shocking survival horror games ever, and that's a great thing.
Looks like we have very similar taste in games, Dreambox :)