This week’s edition is a little different, in that there’s no set format, just a roundtable discussion of the past week’s events. TJ raves about Owl Boy, Jonah talks about N7 Day and the new Mass Effect: Andromeda revelations, and everyone on the podcast discusses how games have really been a disappointment this year and not much is coming. Oh, and a $99 3DS coming for Black Friday.
Let us know what you think.
There’s a ton of discussions, such as Xbox Cloud Gaming will reportedly let players stream any game in their library from November, Russia straight-up bans Discord for enabling ‘terrorist and extremist purposes’, Killing Floor 3‘s dynamic tech makes zed heads ‘flower’ when you shoot them, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will get a Nuketown map, Brazil lifts ban on X following Elon Musk’s compliance with Supreme Court orders, the DOJ may break up Google, Terrifier 3 (the indie horror film that managed to make 10x its budget while Joker: Folie à Deux flails in the water) is getting a videogame, the current head of Xbox Game Studios, Alan Hartman, is to retire at the end of November, with Rare studio boss Craig Duncan taking over and the official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing.
The news:
Let us know what you think.
The post Episode 735: Long Discussions first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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A new draft of the R18+ classification has been released by home minister Brendan O’Connor through the Australian Federal Government. The new guidelines closely match those in place for Australia’s film industry. The new R18+ rating removes restrictions on bad language, drug use and nudity; in contrast, the current guidelines forbade the classification of any adult-themed games.
O’Connor’s draft claims that the R18+ rating will allow “virtually no restrictions on the treatment of themes”, and violence in games “except where it offends against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that it should not be classified.” As far as sex, the draft says, “Sexual activity may be realistically simulated. The general rule is ‘simulation, yes – the real thing, no'”.
Of course, “standards of morality, decency and propriety” is still troublesomely subjective, while “simulation, yes, the real thing, no” is comicly inept for videogames, where everything is simulation. You may be able to tell when live actors are actually performing sexual acts, but when can you tell a videogame character is actually having sex?
O’Connor stated:
“The Gillard government wants to provide better guidance for parents and remove unsuitable material from children and teenagers. The introduction of an R18+ classification will help achieve that and will also bring Australia into line with comparable nations. This issue has been on the table for many years, without the necessary progress to make a change. We’ve recently seen several states publicly express their support for an adult only rating for games and I’m keen to reach a unanimous decision at the July meeting.”
Rather than banning games, why not punish stores for selling mature games to underage children? Or put the onus of raising children on the parents?
The sound problems continue, while Jonah complains about not being able to live stream Dragon Quest XI; this issue is something that’s frustrated PlayStation, PC and Switch gamers for the past few years, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason why the restrictions are there.
Otherwise, the news of the week includes:
Let us know what you think.
