Videogame News

[Alex79uk]

This is really cool!

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2019/06 ... next-week/

Rocket League goes all 80s!

[Flabyo]

This is quite the thing...



Little bit of the Scott Pilgrim game about it, especially on the soundtrack side...

https://wayforward.com/wayforward-unlea ... s-details/

[Alex79uk]

Looks pretty fun. An update of River City Ransom?

[Flabyo]

Looks pretty fun. An update of River City Ransom?

More of a semi-sequel I think. It’s inspired by it, I assume given the obvious references that it’s using the name under licence.

[clippa]

Yay! EDF 5 coming to pc

[KSubzero1000]

Hey, Darren...

CLICK ME

[ratsoalbion]

He’s already seen it. He’s excited.

[Alex79uk]

Oh wow that's odd timing, I was only thinking yesterday I wonder if a new Monkey Ball game would ever come out!

[ratsoalbion]

We’ve been posting all these news stories about Monkey Ball on our Facebook page... I know it can be selective about what it actually lets people see though!

[Alex79uk]

There is a very high chance that's what I'm remembering rather than me wondering whether there would be a new game in the series. Anything past a few hours ago gets very murky

[Alex79uk]

Almost difficult to tell whether this is a piss take or not (it's not).

https://uk.changeincorporated.com/cultu ... to-smoking

"Experts fear children and young people could pick up the habit after seeing characters reliant on cigarettes, cigars and vaping to power up"

I mean come on now. Can you think of more than one or two games in which smoking grants you an in-game bonus? This is farcical. Video games have become as artistically valid as film or television, and smoking within a dramatic production should not be censored. It also sets a dangerous precedent for future censorship, I feel. There is no provable correlation whatsoever between videogame violence and real world crime, why should this be any different? Of course this sort of argument is nothing new (although it's been a while since anything got major coverage I think) but I wonder in the current climate of the world whether it'll gain more traction?

[Craig]

There aren't many games I can think of with cigarettes featured (only really Metal Gear Solid (which also shows negative effects) and Vanquish) but I guess if you want video games to be taken as seriously as TV, you unfortunately end up adhering to similar standards. From the 90s onward, cigarettes in shops and movies aimed at kids have been pretty much axed. We grew up with things like Tom and Jerry smoking cigars, Disney characters (usually villains) having the odd cigarette and further back you had things like the Flintstones flogging them. Nowadays, thanks to pressure groups such as this, that doesn't happen which leads to some interesting edits to Japanese shows where the standards aren't the same. Whether it helps or not I don't know, but I can understand reluctance to show smoking as cool to impressionable young minds.

That said, of all the examples of cigarettes in gaming I can think of are games that kids probably shouldn't be playing anyway. It's not like Mario's idle animation in Odyssey is him sitting on a park bench and taking a drag on a pack of Lambert and Butler. I think unfortunately this stems from the mind set that games are for kids and thus if something is in a game that is inappropriate for kids, it's an inappropriate product. Which is an issue with the wider media at large and parents who don't think twice about buying GTA V for their little one.

[Stanshall]

In The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, a Yakuza/Persona-lite (very lite) which recently came out on the Switch, there's one button dedicated to sparking up a ciggie. Some quality vicarious smoking for me.

[KSubzero1000]

That said, of all the examples of cigarettes in gaming I can think of are games that kids probably shouldn't be playing anyway. It's not like Mario's idle animation in Odyssey is him sitting on a park bench and taking a drag on a pack of Lambert and Butler. I think unfortunately this stems from the mind set that games are for kids and thus if something is in a game that is inappropriate for kids, it's an inappropriate product. Which is an issue with the wider media at large and parents who don't think twice about buying GTA V for their little one.

Very well said. For a sad amount of people, video games are still being viewed as children's toys / glorified nannies. Which is what is fueling these kinds of debates time and time again.

Of all the games I can think of that prominently feature cigarettes (the aforementioned MGS & Vanquish, and I would add Yakuza as well), none of them are made for children. MGS has various bits of dialogue specifically centered around the health effects of tobacco, not to mention the associated in-game penalty. Vanquish is a more straightforward example of the "Smoking is Cool" trope, but I just classify it as silly adult-themed humor in the same way as some violent or sexual content. Yakuza (at least the cutscenes!) is meant to be a reflection of Japanese society in which smoking is still a more popular and widely accepted habit than in the West, so I don't think it should be held to a different standard than a similar movie or TV production.

Anyway, the age ratings on the box are there for a reason, so I would be curious if those "experts" are sounding the same alarms when it comes to mature rated films featuring similar imagery. My guess is that they aren't.

[Caligulas Horse]

If ‘all’ you think they’ll be doing is indulging in mindless violence, you should be aware: they could be picking up more bad habits than you bargained for.

haha that's brilliant.

Happily watch Lil Timmy blow half the town's face off but they better not be huffing those damn cancer sticks!

[clippa]

There are cigarettes in Enter The Gungeon - https://enterthegungeon.gamepedia.com/Cigarettes

Damages the player for half a heart. If the player has armor, the damage will remove the armor.

Increases Coolness by 1 per use, decreasing the cooldown of active items and increasing the chance of items dropping upon clearing a room. The coolness bonus will remain for the entire run, even if the Cigarettes are removed from the player's inventory.

[Caligulas Horse]

Anyway, the age ratings on the box are there for a reason, so I would be curious if those "experts" are sounding the same alarms when it comes to mature rated films featuring similar imagery. My guess is that they aren't.

They did kind of address that in the study, they think that parents are less strict with age ratings for games than they are with films.

"Psychologist Dr Joanne Cranwell from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, said:”Although around 54% of UK adolescents play video games online, parental concern over exposure to inappropriate content while playing video games seems to be lower than for other media, like movies for example. While 80% of children aged 10-15 play packaged or online video games with an age rating higher than their age, more than half of British parents are unaware of the harmful content this exposes them to. "

[ratsoalbion]

Which made sense back at the time when parents hadn’t grown up with games, but really doesn’t now.

Pretty much all my friends who have kids are at least aware of videogames and observe the age ratings (with a little flexibility in some cases).

[Caligulas Horse]

Yeah I'd say the parents I know are pretty on it with their kids playing games, the same as they are with them watching youtube or just being on the internet in general. There has been so much in the media over the past few years about the dangers of letting your kids play games or go online unsupervised.

The study isn't really worth the time of day anyway

"The researchers used YouGov survey tools to ask 1,094 UK adolescents aged 11-17 whether they had played any of the most popular video games identified as containing either tobacco or alcohol imagery. They were also asked whether and to what extent they smoked or drank alcohol. The study found that adolescents who had played at least one game with tobacco or alcohol content were twice as likely to have tried smoking or consumed alcohol themselves."

That really doesn't tell us much at all.

[Craig]

I mean, when I was that age, if you asked a bunch of 16 year olds in my area who has tried alcohol you’d have 80% of people saying they had and 20% people lying.