PixlBit

No, Ben, I do understand your frustrations to a degree, and I wasn't trying to come off as a bullying toerag. I offer my apologies if it felt like I was. I can't understand them completely, because I'm not you, of course. And I do understand that some of your frustration came from some of your struggles on the RPG Maker Community forums, where some of those folks were really out of line.

 I don't believe the guidelines highlighted were directed at work like your games. People just want to have a good time, and they want to feel safe on the Web. Rules like that are mostly in place to try to minimize the number of games advocating "kill/subjugate all the xxxxxxx" mindsets from the extreme fringes of society, and there are those in every corner of the political and social spectrum, rather than folks like you who may be perceived as risque at times (YMMV), but are certainly not out to hurt or denigrate others. Again, those are subjective because of what we've been discussed, but they try to arrive at a standard that will accomodate the biggest number of people, and they'll step on someone's toes no matter what.  Beyond the not-so-obvious fringe extremes is a huge gray area that hasn't been well defined, and that is where private citizens, companies, the courts, and Congress have struggled the most.

My older sister used to be into the Muppets. I wasn't so much, but they're still pretty damned cool. Henson was a genius and they've done pretty well at keeping his magic alive even after he was gone.  No amount of fancy CG can replicate that kind of wizardry. My favorite muppets are Gonzo and the two old guys on the balcony, Statler and Waldorf.

The Internet is a world of extremes. Yes, even "extremes" are subjective. Somehow, Andres Serrano scored a $15,000 payday from the NEA for Piss Christ. Why? Who knows? I wouldn't have approved those grants if I had been working at the NEA or been on whatever House or Senate Committee that oversees funding for the arts back in 1987, but that wasn't my call.

The rules of "politically correct" do change over time. At the time The Birth of a Nation was released, Juno's producers would not only have not received $15,000 in art grants from the government, they would have served jail time and paid heavy fines to the government for distribution of obscene material, and if they were extremely lucky, the Supreme Court might have granted cert for their appeal. And the Supreme Court of 1915 was not friendly towards their viewpoint. A hundred years later, the rules and social attitudes have changed to where the situations would be reversed. Well, sort of. Nobody would imprison D.W. Griffith in 2014, but he would have had an extremely tough time trying to find a movie studio willing to distribute Nation, or theaters willing to show it. Keep in mind, Birth of a Nation is still considered by the serious film community to be the best movie ever produced at the time of its release in 1915, so it has artistic merit even among its harshest detractors. But that also isn't an issue of government censorship. That's private platform holders making a decision about what they are and aren't willing to accept.  The courts would readily uphold Griffith's right to make and release Nation, but beyond keeping the government's hands off of him, they can't do anything about current public sentiment about Nation. Pro or con.

I wasn't criticizing your opinion of Actual Sunlight or whatever it's called. I don't think it's something I would enjoy and it's probably something I would consider a "boring slog."

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." - Justice Potter Stewart's famous concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), a landmark case that rolled back government censorship.

As I said on Facebook, good on the Pennsylvania DA for dropping the charge. Milburn fucked up on discipline in his schools and he tried to cover it up with some good old-fashioned victim blaming. Nothing will ever fix the damage done to Christian by charging him under a federal wiretapping statute that probably dates back from Watergate, but at least the DA exercised the discretion PA law allows him and stopped this in its tracks, and hopefully the DA will be asking Milburn some rather uncomfortable questions. 

As far as the contest goes, though, I respectfully disagree. I really don't think the contest-holders are trying to act as "thought police" or censor anything, and their rules do not come off to me as such. What they're telling folks is this: "Don't use our forum as a platform to air out your ideological dirty laundry. If you want to throw stones at the people you don't like in this world, do it on your own time and your own dime." And you know something? I'd do the same. I wouldn't be looking for the video game equivalent of Piss Christ or The Birth of a Nation if I were running a contest for hobbyists, and I damn sure wouldn't be looking for such a mess if I were a mass-market business owner like Satoru Iwata, Kaz Hirai, Satya Nadella, or Gabe Newell.  Who needs that kind of headache for a damned hobby?!

They're trying to keep their platform as civil as possible. Maybe they should clarify what constitutes unacceptable racist/sexist/homophobic content in their rules, but beyond that, they're not being unreasonable. As Super Step says, their forum, their rules. Very few contests of this nature don't have rules like this, whether written or unwritten, and Steam, MS, Sony, and Nintendo definitely have restrictions on content. These folks are being up-front about their expectations and telling people bluntly, "Take it or leave it." The ones that want to "leave it" can do their own games on their own time and can make their own platform to distribute it under. And the folks who play their works can draw their own conclusions as to whether the person making the work was making the game to seriously explore the issue at hand or is just trying to be inflammatory.

I guess this point also ties into what you said about the "Actual Sunlight" game you found on Steam as well. Did the folks making it have a vested interest in the issue of depression, were they just a bunch of social justice warriors, or were they mocking people suffering with depression? Either way, they found a platform to distribute their work, and like any other consumer, you played it and drew your own conclusions from it.

FF Tactics is a standard-bearer for the genre, and with good reason. This is a true masterpiece of a game. It was the first SRPG I really got into, and it ignited a big passion in me for the genre.

And until 2008, I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly. Then Valkyria Chronicles and Sakura Wars came out. :)

You can get it really easily if you have a PSP or a Vita. It's downloadable from PSN. There's also the PS1 versions of Lunar and Lunar 2 which are reasonable on Amazon or eBay if you don't care about the feelies that come with.

Oh, and even though I'm not big on the whole playing games on cellular phones thing (which I say as the owner of an iPhone and an iPad) there is the iOS version of Lunar: Silver Star Story. But then, Lunar is one of those games that would be great if you played it on an abacus. :)

As an experienced RPG lover, Golden Sun was a nice revelation for me. It was great having a full-featured and graphically pleasing RPG on a handheld gaming system. Before that, handhelds didn't sport a whole lot of RPGs other than Pokemon, and the ones they did have were very bare-bones by comparison. After Golden Sun, the handhelds seem to explode with RPGs, This was true of both Nintendo and Sony handhelds.

In any event, I did download Golden Sun for my Wii U and will be playing it today.

I played through some parts of BoFII but I got stuck about a quarter of the way. I have the downloadable version on Wii U.

Breath of Fire IV is a great game too. I have the downloaded version of it, but I've seen the disc version in Vintage Stock recently, complete with manual and everything, and I'm tempted to go for that.

Breath of Fire IV is certainly an excellent game. On a very technical basis, it's probably a better game than BoFIII, and I think it's probably considered the best BoF game overall. It certainly doesn't have the camera issues that III does since the camera is fully rotatable in IV. III just stuck with me more.

Whether a game aged well depends a lot on who made it. I felt a lot of the better PS1 and N64 games did age rather well. FFVIII, FFIX, and the N64 Zeldas aged rather gracefully in my book.