The Video Game Critic

Critic, Have you played carmageddon 64? Seeing it was the second worst rated n64 game I gave it a try and find its a solid c- title, not the blatant F or 28.5% average on gamerankings. Figuring you've bought and played garbage games before (i.e doom snes, starfleet academy 32x and of course superman 64) I figured you'd have given this game a try by now. Sure its looks hideous, but it looks no worse than carmageddon 2 (pc) which its a port of.

I actually remember playing Carmageddon on the PC back in the mid-90's and thinking the game had some real potential.  The graphics weren't that great and there were some minor gameplay issues, but overall I was hoping someone would take that concept and clean it up a little.  I wasn't aware it was released on any other platform but Dave if you can track down a copy I'd be interested in taking it for a test spin one of these Mondays!
Sudz

How censored is it on N64?

Hey, how about Vigilante 8?  It out-Twisted-Metal'd Twisted Metal, and was available on the N64 (though not as good as it was on the Playstation).

Matter of fact, has anyone ever played Route 76 on the PC?

[QUOTE=Quiet Flight]How censored is it on N64? [/QUOTE]

The humans were called zombies. No graphical changes, just a simple terminology difference. They don't look like zombies at all.

[QUOTE=Adamant][QUOTE=Quiet Flight]How censored is it on N64? [/QUOTE]

The humans were called zombies. No graphical changes, just a simple terminology difference. They don't look like zombies at all.[/QUOTE]

No zombie limbs fly off, they just explode into green goo then disappear.

[QUOTE=Adamant][QUOTE=Quiet Flight]How censored is it on N64? [/QUOTE]

The humans were called zombies. No graphical changes, just a simple terminology difference. They don't look like zombies at all.[/QUOTE]They don't look like humans either though.

They look like what they are, a random assortment of polygons

Humans as Zombies in the N64 Carmageddon?  You know, this is yet another one of Nintendo's double-standards when it came to "cleaning up" N64 games for whatever reason it was (to appease parents, I guess, but how would some of the changes satisfy parents?).

Take Duke Nukem 64, for example. They ordered the devleopers to remove the nudity and rougher language, but apparently had no problem with its graphic violence.  This is putting parents' minds at ease how?

What about Perfect Dark's ridiculous Profanity Filter option? It was an M-rated game already, so how are a couple of pretty mild profanities and religious exclaimations so offensive that it needed it's own option to turn them off?  And why is it that when it's turned on, the opening cinema of the Air Force One level has only one "damn," yet it was apparently necessary to completely remove the entire response by the President to Trent Easton's Pelagic II offer (thus losing the entire meaning of Trent's line "My last chance? Ha, you fool; that was yours.")?

And then of course, there was Conker's Bad Fur Day.  Nintendo finally relented and allowed almost every possible form of offensive content in the game, yet they did little to no advertising for the game to the point where even the people in its target audience became confused as to whether it was actually coming out?  They were publishing it, after all, and yet they almost acted as if it didn't exist (they never even acknowledged that it ever came out in their Nintendo Power magazine, and they even obscured the existence of their official Player's Guide for the game).  Apparently, they were trying to protect kids from playing it, but the box aleady had a warning on it that it wasn't for kids, so why bother to go to such ridiculous extremes?

And of course, the other blatantly adult oriented games that they allowed on the system, like Shadow Man and the South Park games sent even more mixed messages, as did other M-rated products (mostly rated as such for violence) like the Turoks, Quakes, Doom and Hexen.

And then we got to run over zombies instead of humans in Carmageddon because it's somehow less offensive to kill zombies to graphically violent ways than humans in what's already a game intended for adults.  So, how are decisions like these protecting the children?  I haven't a clue. 

[QUOTE=Michael D]
And then we got to run over zombies instead of humans in Carmageddon because it's somehow less offensive to kill zombies to graphically violent ways than humans in what's already a game intended for adults.  So, how are decisions like these protecting the children?  I haven't a clue. 
[/QUOTE]

Perhaps its not censorship, perhaps the game had no effort put into it. (It wasn't even created by the orignal devlopers)
http://ign64.ign.com/objects/010/010078.html

Besides, i don't see what's wrong with censorship. Mature content is one of the reasons why I hate new games.

[QUOTE=hi there][QUOTE=Michael D]
And then we got to run over zombies instead of humans in Carmageddon because it's somehow less offensive to kill zombies to graphically violent ways than humans in what's already a game intended for adults.  So, how are decisions like these protecting the children?  I haven't a clue. 
[/QUOTE]

Perhaps its not censorship, perhaps the game had no effort put into it. (It wasn't even created by the orignal devlopers)
http://ign64.ign.com/objects/010/010078.html

Besides, i don't see what's wrong with censorship. Mature content is one of the reasons why I hate new games.

[/QUOTE]

Well, there's a lot wrong with Government-enforced censorship.  However, that is not what this is.

It's not "wrong" per se for a company like Nintendo to insist on the content that isn't questionable if indeed they hope to target parents who don't buy that content for their children.  Much of Nintendo's historic policy on this came from the failure of the Atari 2600 late in life.  The Atari had a huge publicity problem when it came to light that they had no power to prevent publishers from making carts of questionable content for their system.  They had released the Atari VCS without a licensing system in place.  As a result, porn games started to be released for it, along with games where kids would play the killer, such as the shark game controlling the shark to eat people, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre game where the kids playing would take on the role of Leatherface.  It may seem like a crazy thing now, but back in that time those types of things were very controversial on a system whose audience was 70% children.  That actually did a lot of damage to Atari's credibility.  Nintendo made sure that they had a licensing scheme when they started selling the NES in both Japan and the United States, and immediately started censoring such content on their platform.  This helped to make it a hit with parents.

Personally, I think Nintendo just didn't quickly came out of that policy commensurate with the direction the culture took since that time.  They really dropped that policy (mostly at least) around the end of the N64's lifecycle.

Having said all of that, you MAY not like games that have mature content, but a lot of us do.  If you don't want such games, you just don't buy them.  You instead buy the games that are tailored for audiences that DON'T like such content.  In a more conglomerate system that allows both types of content, and any number of variations in between, we have the option to pick those games that we actually want.

For instance, it would greatly offend me if survival horror games were "banned" from Nintendo systems or even diminshed due to your objections to mature content.  Instead, just don't buy them, and leave the rest of us alone.  I don't mind if your next game will end up being the Super Mario Sunshine sequel, if that's what you want.  But don't force my hand to start asking for censorship of kiddie content because that ends up being one of the only ways to protect my right to enjoy mature content I choose to purchase and enjoy as well.

I guess the point is that this kind of censorship is wrong for the here and now for a number of business reasons, rather than ethical ones.  Nintendo can try to continue such a policy, but it won't help their case.  It will just push those seeking mature content to find it on other consoles.  Things aren't like they were back in 1983, so that likely would just push Nintendo back into third place.