I was thinking about it today, no publisher will touch an AO (adult only) game with a 10ft pole. So I was wondering if gog should be the ones.

One of the problems with gaming is that it isnt free to do what it pleases. I think we lose out on a lot of narrative in stories, story vehicles, ways for a game to present itself, ways for a devolper to express himself, to be shocking, to be different or just simply be gross because gaming has an invisible wall in it. You can be as brainless, cute and cuddly as you want or you can portray nudity, violence and so on but only up to a certain point before you have to cut it back or else you get an AO which is a kiss of death for sales because no one will carry it. But gog is purely digital, there is no worry about if walmart will carry your game or not.

The movie industry has in the past 6 or 7 years to really defy the MPAA by just releasing their movies digitally or direct to video to release their unrated movies instead of trying to censor their movie enough to get a ratings board approval to an R or below so movie theaters will screen it. And I think gaming should follow suit. I want to play games that are beautiful in their graphic display like a lars von trier movie, I want stuff that isnt afraid to have an adult narrative, or something as immature as a tentacle woman raping anime giant monster invading tokyo that is just hillarious in how over the top it is. But most of all I want what gaming gives us that no book, song or movie can because of how unique the medium is. I want its unique style of entertainment, story telling and interaction to be able to really spread its wings and be free of the shackles of censorship that the ratings board has put on it.

Im not saying everything should be violent and over the top orgy sex and so on. I mean those games would have their place because for every cooking mama game we could have a blood soaked orgy or tentacle raping world wide rampage destruction of carnage with dicks and tits flying allover the joint, but we could also have actual adult content that is tasteful and actually helps the narrative instead of just being gratuitious. It could be something as simple as in mass effect having some tasteful nudity in the sex scenes instead of 2 characters very awkwardly and stiffly bumping around with their clothes on for 2 seconds. It might have been much more compelling and Id have believed it more and been more glad to see shepard get with his love if it actually seemed like love instead of 2 still dressed characters fumbling around while being 3/4 of the way off camera. That was supposed to have been a wonderful moment ruined by the fact it had to stay VERY censored. Then you have a game like Polymorphous Perversity which is technically/graphically really ancient but it was incredibly interesting to play and I cant help but wonder what it might be like if told through a more powerful engine. Sure its perverted but it has a unique feeling that is different enough its interesting to play, but games like this have to hide in the corners of the internet.

Yes it would take many many years before a true AO game or more "mature" (mature doesnt always mean titties and blood, I mean mature in the sense of a mature mentality) would be sitting on walmarts shelf and gaming had evolved itself but we cant ever get there if we dont start trying. Baby steps.

Gog has been ballsy about their intent to never use DRM despite stiff competition from the big companies and I appreciate that. So maybe gog should be the one to promote the freedom of game developers.

Manhunt 2

AO uncensored PC exclusive version

I want that here on GOG

GOG has one AO game, the uncensored version of Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit. The only other one I can think of them maybe one day selling is Manhunt 2.

this.

but i actually thought the op was talking about games with sexual content. i couldn't even name one, though. sexuality in video games is mostly just awkward. it worked in the Larry games because of the humour.

I would like to mention Fate/Stay night as a game with sexual content and a great story. However, this great story was despite the sex and not due to it. While the plot leading to the sex scenes was usually pretty good; characters were, well, out of character. I braced through the first scene, abandoned the second midway, and I skipped the rest.

I'm still against not selling the game just because it had sex scenes, stupid as they might be. But I get the feeling GOG cares a lot about their "respectable" image, that could a reason why they are not there.

Fascinating read and interesting points but with this topic I always get tied up with determining AO over non. You may have a good idea of determining a difference, unfortunatly a lot of other folks don't. I like that you brought up the MPAA. This is going to sound like I'm being silly and I am a little, but I think there is validity to my point. Anyway, the MPAA uses level of violence as one of it's major determining factors (sex, profanity, drug use as the others) as to whether a movie should be child friendly (G, PG) or adult oriented (R, NC-17) yet it stands by it's decision to give a PG to what is easily the most violent movie of ALL TIME: Star Wars. Don't laugh! Between an entire planet blowing up and a space station the size of a moon blowing up, what do you figure the body count is for that thing?! Yet it gives Whale Rider a PG-13 because of a 3 second shot of someone hitting a joint. Yes I know this is the movie world and the thread pertains to gaming but I can assure you that if GoG starts allowing AO games it will first need too get folks to determine AO, at which point we are sure to get beat to death with the same hypocracy, contradiction, and hyper-sesitivity that the movie world has laid before us.

Possibly because the "M" rating already covers some fairly violent/sexually explicit territory, and once you get past the bounds of "M" it's more likely that you're showing stuff just for titillation or morbid delight rather than to serve some higher artistic purpose?

I dunno. I have 0 personal experience with AO games. I think there's a pretty big difference between an implied bodycount and actual onscreen violence/gore. Are you really saying that Star Wars is more "violent" than a movie like Hostel?

I think that's pretty much the crux of it, although bear in mind to that the ESRB - like the MPAA - is notoriously prudish, although sex is never really a topic that is addressed in any great detail in games. That's pretty much the biggest reason why there are so few AO-rated games. There's only one game that I would describe as being really remotely sexually explicit while just being short of falling under the porn category - Singles: Flirt Up Your Life (which my ex used to play) - and that got slapped with an AO rating in the US while it sailed through with a 16 rating in Germany (it got an 18 rating here in the UK as well).

I never really got what was so nasty about Manhunt 2 that earned it the AO rating. I have it on PS2 and it seems fairly average in terms of violence to be honest.

No, of course not, but members of the MPAA would say that. It's their job to sit there, go over a movie frame by frame and come up with a corpse tally (real or implied) which they then hand over to their supervisors for their ultimate rating decision. My whole point was, how do you determine AO as it is kind of subjective. The MPAA sees actual numbers as a valid resourse but as you can see from my Star Wars joke it sure the hell is not a reliable resource. The rest of Star Wars was full of enough wholesome action and goofy droids that they overlooked the number of dead, but trust me, they counted bodies.

True story, check it out on the DVD commentary. Horror film fans around? Hellraiser...Great Movie! When Clive Barker handed it over to the ratings board they came back to him with one major problem. There is a very brief and very un-erotic sex scene early on and the MPAA said that so long as there was only "three thrust" in the scene the movie would be 'R'. Any more than 3 and it would get an X or NC-17 ( I don't remember if NC-17 was around back then). All of the violence and gore in that movie and they have some guy sitting there counting thrust to determine a rating. They use logic like this to determine adult oriented vs family oriented and if the game boards do the same thing, it will never work.

Two things....first it would be a challenge for GoG to insulate themselves from the litigious parents of the youngster "accidentally" downloading an AO game.

Second the hypocrisy of violence over sexuality screams at our prudish culture. Parents have no problem buying kiddos the latest Battlefield game because it seems harmless. However, you better not mention penis or show a booby or I'll sue your pants off.

...and then sue you for indecent exposure.

The news had a fit and it was made by Rockstar. A deadly combination :P

I actually partly blame the Wii version, since that's what caused the uproar and all the attention on the game. It probably would have slipped on by with an M rating otherwise...

Didn't they obscure the violence in the console releases, though?

I've seen the "uncensored" kills, and some of them are really disturbing (particularly the one where he saws through a guy's head).
You think that's bad? I know some Christian families that let their children watch all sorts of violence but won't let them hear the word "fuck."

It's always baffled me. Although for myself, I tend to be more comfortable with violence than explicit sexuality. But that's a different subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AO-rated_products
Pretty much just Indigo Prophecy, Thrill Kill and some of the formerly AO-rated games. The rest are pretty much "pointless porn games."

EDIT: Oh and Manhunt 2 is probably worth it if you can stand the violence, given that the PC version is rated AO.

I actually remember finding Riana Rouge on a search for Mac games back when and I think it's "pointless porn mixed with lots of senseless violence." Like in the trailer, one of the deaths is the main character getting essentially melted in a mix of CG and FMV.

Do you know about the history of this game? The PS2 version, just like the Wii version, is cencored and M rated. The only uncencored, AO rated version is the PC version, and it was sold only on D2D, only for users with US or Canadian IP, and only for a few months. Then it was removed from the store.

I have the Wii version and the censoring is really annoying. It's some kind of blurry filter that distorts all the kill scenes. Made me kind of sick, looking at it. I've read that there is a way to make the PS2 version uncut, but you need a special cheat module in order to do that. If you haven't used that cheating device, you played it cut.

Here's a video of the kills without the filter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PR2apfLBzw

Pretty disturbing stuff, if you ask me. I can understand the AO rating very well.

The game itself is surprisingly good. It's always reduced to its violence by the public, but it actually has a gripping story and challenging stealth gameplay. Contentwise it offers more depth than most action games in recent years. The controls are a mess, but I guess that's a problem exclusive to the Wii version.

So yeah, I would love to see it here on GOG - uncencored. One more reason to hope for Take 2 to finally join the GOG party.