As an example, the above player was auto-named “Jason Gay” at the online TeamBuilder site. But imported into the Xbox 360 version, the player was renamed “Jason XXX.” Users may manually change the name back in all modes of play into which created teams are imported, both online and offline.

The filtering, however, does make EA Sports look like it’s demonising the word, a delicate and persistent issue in online gaming. But in fact, EA’s code has no problem with it; in the game, play-by-play man Brad Nessler says the name for players who have it.

Asked for comment, Electronic Arts provided this statement:

We are aware of the situation in which some auto-generated player names used online in NCAA Football 10 are being edited, due to Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE language filter. EA encourages diversity in our online communities, and providing a safe place for gamers to play is a high priority at EA.

When we went to Microsoft for a comment, a spokesman acknowledged the ongoing debate and pointed to the XBL terms of use, which prohibit text in Gamertags or “other profile fields that include comments that look, sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate content of a potentially sexual nature.”

Both sides gave – quite understandably – policy-based answers to what is ultimately an incremental development in this issue. NCAA 10 may not have the kind of user base that gets fired up about this, after all.

But whether or not “gay” is more a self-identifier or a term of abuse, it continues to be someone’s last name. Rudy Gay. Tyson Gay. Efforts to proactively micromanage this evolving word’s use may, privately, have the intended effect. Publicly, it will continue to create instances such as these, in which some major corporation wittingly or, in EA’s case, unwittingly and through no fault of its own, puts its brand on the implication that the word is inherently shameful.

Microsoft says it’s still exploring ways to integrate the word with its community and its TOS. But, really. As decisions go, you’re gonna make it now, or make it later. Let some churlish gamer’s ugly behaviour speak for itself, and deal with him tomorrow. But you can take “gay” off the filter list today, and end this as a controversy.

Kotaku AU Note: Can anyone who has the Xbox version of FIFA or Football Manager tell me if you can play as English team Scunthorpe United, or is that censored too?

This stumble in Nintendo’s stride has gained little attention as its competitors chase its dust. It’s about the key tool for movement in this big gaming movement.

The original promise of the Wii’s controller, the Wii Remote, was that it would augur a revolution in game control, a Motion Control Revolution.

Yet nearly three years later, with the Wii Sports’ sequel, Wii Sports Resort,on the verge of its U.S. release, the triumph of the Motion Control Revolution is debatable at best. At the very moment when the wisdom of releasing the Wii is beyond dispute, it can be argued that the Motion Control Revolution has stalled — failed even — and that Wii Sports Resort is the next best hope (the last one?) to save it.

First shown at a game conference in Tokyo in September of 2005, the Wii Remote was going to make imitation swordsmen and dentists of us all. It was going to turn us into sharpshooters and champion fishermen, or so Nintendo’s video sizzle reel hyped.

When Wii Sports was released in November 2006, that Motion Control Revolution seemed assured. We swung the Remote like a tennis racket and heaved it like a bowling ball. Those motions first delighted our families at holiday gatherings and then an audience at The Oscars. Day after day, the anchors of cable news seemed charmed to play a game on a console whose name they struggled to pronounce.

Yet, since the Wii Remote birthed the great Wii Sports, it’s no stretch to claim that the revolutionary Remote has spawned no other great motion control games.

That’s Nintendo’s hidden stumble, this struggle for the motion-sensitivity of the Wii Remote to prove itself the equal of traditional button and stick controls, to say nothing of establishing itself as the superior option. Gamers groan at the flimsy motion controls mapped to action games. A shake of a hand replaces what could have been the press of a button. In game after game, motion control presents a different option, but one that seldom seems better.

As right as Nintendo was about so many things, maybe it was wrong about this. Or, as is so often the case with Nintendo’s Wii project, the failure here may be one of critical imagination. That happens. Forty years ago on Monday, a human being first stepped on the moon, and what people assumed would happen in the next four decades — trips to Mars, cities in space — have not been built. The guessers often guess wrong.

The future we may have expected in 2006 — of a 2007 and beyond filled with motion-based greats manipulated with a Wii Remote — has not come to pass. The lightsaber, magic wand and music-conducting Wii games we expected were made. But they felt constrained and inaccurate. Mario and Zelda have not been transformed into adventures of motion-based brilliance. Magnificent as that motion control in Wii Sports was, the ability to let a player control their game by swinging the Wii Remote appears to have inspired little confidence and limited mastery even in some of the world’s most expert game creators.

Even in Wii Fit, the great successor to Wii Sports, the Wii Remote was all but relegated to a laser pointer used to select menu options. Meanwhile, the mechanism for the game’s motion was the Balance Board, a controller inspired by a bathroom scale.

Other Wii designers minimised their use of the Wii Remote’s motion control even more. Chart-topper Super Smash Brothers played without it. Blockbusters Mario Kart Wii and Guitar Hero tucked it away in shells shaped like wheels and guitars, doing little to convince anyone that motion control was a must.

A new Zelda down-played it. A new Mario limited its motion-control element, as have so many Wii games, to the occasional vibration of a player’s right hand. This fall’s New Super Mario Bros. Wii, made in the two years since the last Wii Mario, uses motion control no more than the last.

Some games have used the Remote’s motion control aggressively. MadWorld, No More Heroes and Manhunt 2 harnessed its potential for violence. Wii Music marshaled motion for musicality. Boom Blox made it the mechanism for hurling baseballs at stubborn bricks. But fun as some of those games were, they were not hits.

In that dust behind Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft and Sony are in the chase. Last month they revealed their own Motion Controllers, tied to cameras and, in the Xbox’s case with Project Natal, absent the need for players to hold anything in their hands. One wonders if the companies have noticed Nintendo’s struggles with motion control amidst the Wii’s triumphs. The use of arm and body movements to play games has not proven a game-changer in and of itself. By making games more appealing a wider audience, its been a component of a bigger change. But it’s also been a red herring.

Designers borrowing ideas from Wii Sports had had better success drawing from the game’s accessibility than strictly from its motion controls. The simplicity of its design made Wii Sports approachable, streamlined and friendly, the least intimidating game many people had played since Pac-Man. It has one of the shortest gaps between being turned on and being fun. These have been its smarter qualities — and have revealed that the genius of the Wii Remote may not be its swing but its shape. It can be understood when seen from across a room and clearly it’s no threat.

If the lack of games doing great things with motion control was one sign of trouble for the Motion Control Revolution, another was last summer’s revelation that Nintendo was building a gadget that would enhance/repair/improve the Remote’s motion-sensitivity. Bundled with copies of next Sunday’s Wii Sports Resort and made to be plugged into the base of a Wii Remote, the MotionPlus add-on is, in Resort, a necessary attachment for better sword-swinging, archery, bowling, golf and more. A swing is a swing and a flick is a flick, and the controller feels like it finally knows — instead of merely simplifies — how the player is moving.

After years of playing games made during Nintendo’s era of the Remote, playing Wii Sports Resort with MotionPlus attached suggests that we’ve been using a tool that was too blunt for the task. It is a technological success but also an admission by its manufacturers that the original Wii Remote was not capable of the motions we imagined — or that were teased in that sizzle reel.

Wii Sports Resort has greatness in it. A couple of days playing it — of going back for more and more — reveals it to be another joyful construction, a game with plenty of fun to share. The necessary bolting on of MotionPlus could be proof that, like Wii Fit or Guitar Hero, the greatest, most accessible motion-based games needs a unique device of its own, a controller shaped to the actions and fantasies of the game it supports. Wii Sports Resort suggests that for all the virtues of the Wii Remote’s simplicity, it was too simple on its own to enable a line of games made great by its motion control.

By exposing what’s been wrong with it, Wii Sports Resort may be the game to save the Motion Control Revolution.

(All images via Nintendo of America’s press site. Super Smash Bros. player image from Nintendo/Stuart Ramson)

It’s a blog post that’s a bit too sensitive and an argument that’s a bit too convenient and dramatic for my taste, but the Houston Chronicle’s Game Hacks blog tees up the Big R in a colour-by-numbers mainstream look at something – which is, more or less, that any three can make a trend. In this case, the writer takes controller-dropping offence at participating in a story as a Confederate sympathiser (Juarez).

The game that really inspired this blog entry was Ubisoft’s “Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.” The game starts out with players assuming the role of Ray, a Confederate officer, working to save his brother, Thomas, who’s pinned down by Union soldiers. I nearly dropped the controller. I have so much respect for President Lincoln — he wanted to preserve the Union and ended up freeing the slaves — and have just as much respect for the Union Army.

This guy may legitimately feel that way. Fine. I think if Call of Juarez was overtly sympathetic to Confederate aims of slavery, instead of just framing the story of two mean-ass brothers in the context of soldiers of a failed cause, we’d have a different discussion. Similarly, it’d be a big problem if Left 4 Dead 2 was explicitly about Katrina and the institutional racism that fuelled such a listless response and collective shrug at a disaster we thought only could happen in the third world.

But this sort of rumination seems to me to be picking a fight where none exists. And it points up the difference between sensitivity and tolerance. Not everything has to provide a teachable moment or avoid an uncomfortable subject altogether. Look at film.

Racism in Video Games: The New Norm? [Houston Chronicle via Trueslant]

The delay to BioShock 2 was what was getting reporters and developers talking yesterday.

This fall, stocked as it is with some very exciting games for hardcore gamers, is lacking something most gaming falls have had: an absurd abundance of big games.

Downgrade this fall’s line-up to maybe just a notable abundance.

Last holiday season ran from Lego Batman to Prince of Persia, with Fallout 3, Fable 2 and Far Cry 2 in between. It had a new Call of Duty, a new Gears of War, a new Resistance and curiosities like a new Banjo Kazooie and Spore. It had the standard stock of racing, sports and music games and the added bounty of the Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge experiments. Nintendo failed to offer anything deeper than Animal Crossing, but on other platforms than the Wii, Crysis, Brothers in Arms, LittleBigPlanet and Tomb Raider games got their chance to shine. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Left 4 Dead were hits.

And this was all in a year, 2008, that already gave the world a new Mario Kart, a new Grand Theft Auto, a new Smash Brothers, a new Metal Gear Solid and Wii Fit.

Maybe the fall of 2009 never had a chance to outshine that.

There will be another round of sports, racing and music games this holiday season. And then, for gamers looking for something to sink their controllers into, there are likely the big titles: Halo 3: ODST, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Borderlands, Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend. Those are, as best can be determined from the way major publishers have been structuring their press events that Kotaku has attended, the flagship games for Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Take 2, Sony and EA.

Games are falling out of these final few months of the year. Singularity was pushed back. BioShock 2 got bumped. Army of Two: The 40th Day could be the next to go, if it ever did have a shot at 2009. Marked for a winter release it’s been absent from EA’s 20-plus title holiday showcase in New York last week and isn’t slated to be shown at the publishers big Comicon events next week. (An EA rep, sticking to winter as the last announced release, told Kotaku today that the game will be at Gamescom in Germany next month).

There won’t be a lack of games to play in late 2009 — not with Dragon Age, The Saboteur, The Ballad of Gay Tony, Splinter Cell, MAG, Ratchet & Clank, Left 4 Dead 2 and the August-slated Batman: Arkham Asylum showing up. The portables have some excitement with Scribblenauts and Zelda for DS and a new PSP hitting in October.

But the buzz that was at last night’s event — which was for Borderlands — was that this just doesn’t seem to be as well-stuffed a holiday season for hardcore gamers. Perhaps that’s a benefit, as a crowded marketplace gets a little less crowded. Companies such as Capcom switch their prime release window to the early part of the calendar year, in that publisher’s case, pushing major Resident Evil and Street Fighter sequels early in 2009, and promoting the untested Dark Void and the latest Hail-Mary-for-the-hardcore on the Wii, a second Resident Evil light gun shooter, for the fall.

Perhaps another culprit for the lessening of options for serious gamers this fall is a result of what’s showing up at press events: More general-interest games. More games for kids and girls and mums and grandpas. Beyond just sports, racing and music titles, EA, for example is pushing its successful Littles Pet Shop brand, some Spore expansions and more spin-offs of The Sims. Activision and MTV Games are splintering their brands and throwing all the more of them into the season: Rock Band 2 of fall 2008 begets fall 2009’s Lego Rock Band and Beatles Rock Band; Guitar Hero: World Tour of late ‘08 spawns Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero and DJ Hero. Tony Hawk is back as a peripheral-based game.

Maybe the publishers are just less in it for just the hardcore than they used to be. Nintendo leads the trend, outbalancing Mario and Zelda with Style Savvy DS for girls, a new Pokemon: Mystery Dungeon for kids and Wii Fit Plus for, no pun intended, a bigger audience than they might ever reach with any games targeted for the hardcore gamer. Take Two has a game based on the circus. Sega’s got a Sonic kart-racer. And money will be made.

The holiday rush was often too much for the kind of gamers who want to experience the big brand blockbusters from the big-name studios. Not enough money. Not enough time. So maybe this slight calming, this change from a mouthful of cotton candy to a mouthful of Gummi Bears is slightly healthier.

It doesn’t look like a slow season to everyone, after all. In a note to investors regarding the BioShock 2 delay, financial analyst Michael Pachter referred to this holiday season as “among the most crowded ever.” And it could also be a dangerous one for game publishers, with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick attributing part of the reason for delaying BioShock 2 to a shrinking of initial orders for new games from retail and a smaller number of games being kept in stock by the gaming shops.

There’s reason to celebrate or to be concerned here. You could do both. This fall, the gaming holiday season won’t be what it used to be.

(For those who think 2010 won’t be able to keep up, check this post to see the traffic-jam-in-the-making. To say nothing of this.)

Badass.

He was arrested, and sentenced to a year’s detention in a juvenile home. Now, we don’t point this out to somehow shame the man. He’s an industry great, it’s a matter of public record, and it was decades ago.

No, we point it out because… well, we kinda wish there were more developers like that. Not a criminal, necessarily (which Carmack certainly isn’t), just… someone with a little colour to their lives. Hear me out.

An artist – and really, the great developers like Carmack, Miyamoto, and Ken Levine are just that – can in his or her work often only hope to reflect their own experiences and emotions.

Which for video games is a problem, when you consider the vast majority of the “artists” in this business are (Itagaki aside) clean-cut, respectable, sane people.

Look at other mediums. A lot of the world’s truly great artists – I’m talking painters, authors, composers, even movie directors – were either messed up, or had messed up things happen to them. Van Gogh had ear trouble. Beethoven was deaf. Caravaggio killed a guy. Woody Allen had… family issues. You get the idea.

Many of them perpetrated, or suffered, terrible acts. But history doesn’t judge an artist on their behaviour. They judge them on their works.

Maybe if this industry was more like other mediums, and had more people in creative positions who’d spent a night in a cell, or fled from a war, or faced a lifetime of persecution (not that I’d wish that sort of thing on people just to get a better video game), or were just straight-up crazy (again, Itagaki aside), we’d get that real diversity of content that people always seem to be clamouring for.

Maybe!

The average recommended retail price for a new release console game in Australia is approximately $100. Sure, some Xbox 360 and PS3 games come in above that, and Wii games tend to be priced a little lower, but on the whole $100 is a good basis for comparison. (And I surely can’t the only one who remembers the days of $150 SNES and N64 cartridges?)

Bear in mind that while you can easily shop around to find new release games for less than their recommended retail price, these discounts are set by the individual retailer rather than the game’s publisher. The only sensible way to examine industry-wide game pricing is by focusing on the RRP.

In the US, the average new release retail price for Xbox 360 and PS3 games is US$60, and US$50 for many PC and Wii titles. In the UK, it’s £45, although again there are variations of £5 above or below that price point.

Based on the exchange rate at the time of writing, the average US price converts to about $80 and the average UK price to about $90. So, yes, today it would seem that we’re paying $10-20 more than our overseas friends.

But currencies fluctuate like crazy. It wasn’t that long ago that, based solely on exchange rates, UK game prices would translate to well over AU$100 and we were paying twice what a US consumer would pay for the same game. Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose.

Yet the fact remains: our games are still 100 bucks, regardless of how the dollar is faring against foreign currencies. They were 100 bucks a few years ago; they’re 100 bucks today. They’re not suddenly more expensive because the dollar conversion is unfavourable.

It seems silly to me to judge this issue by looking solely at something as variable as exchange rates. The issue of pricing is much broader than that.

For a start, a publisher such as, for example, Activision may well be a global corporation, but its Australian office is running its own business. It needs to operate within local market conditions, often facing specific distribution costs and retail challenges that aren’t readily comparable across territories.

Economies of scale come into play here, an important factor to consider when you’re trying to compare two markets of such vastly different populations as Australia and the United States. Transportation costs play a part, too, and you can see why it’s always going to cost a publisher more money to move stock to and around Australia than it would to ship the same game into UK stores.

It may surprise you to learn that publishers in Australia all purchase stock from their global head office. And they do it in the currency of that head office. Ubisoft Australia, for example, effectively buys stock from Ubisoft France and they’re charged for that stock in Euros. The same goes for every other local branch of an overseas publisher.

The legacy of our PAL heritage means that some Australian publishers report to European headquarters and see their finances recorded in Euros or British Pounds. Others deal in US dollars, while a few will need to convert everything to Japanese Yen.

Suddenly you’re looking at four different currencies that affect the games business in this country. Imagine if every fluctuation in those four exchange rates were to be factored into our game prices and applied on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s just not practical.

The result? Publishers have – at least over the last couple of console generations – settled on this $100 figure that accommodates the good and the bad. For every period where that price point is seeing widening profit margins for them, there’s another period where things start to get uncomfortably tight. One needs only look at what happened to Red Ant to see the tragic effect the latter can have over even a short period of time.

My advice to anyone thinking they’re being “ripped off” over the price of games in Australia is to stop the futile comparisons with separate overseas markets and start comparing prices within our market. Shop around and you’ll find you’ll rarely have to pay recommended retail price for the latest games. You might even start thinking they’re pretty good value for money.

Next Monday I’ll tackle the price of digitally distributed games. Between now and then I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue of game pricing and any questions you might have around digital distribution.

Monday Musings is a regular column designed to get you thinking and talking about game design or an industry topic. I’ll be tackling a specific subject each Monday, so email me if you have any suggestions.

Take a look at the two shots released. They’re awful. One only shows a small part of the device, from the top-down, while the other has one side of the controller abruptly cut off. When revealing product images to the press, you don’t accidentally cut off sections of the image.

Oh, unless you’re trying to hide something.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Activision have a few more announcements left on this thing. Like, say, a small crossfader.

And if you’re worried about it being in the top-left of the unit, take a look at the buttons on the two images. The “front” image has the buttons on the left, but on the top-down one they’re on the right, suggesting that Activision simply flipped the front-on image, meaning the crossfader would actually be on the bottom-right of the unit.

In lieu of any worthwhile new releases this week, I’ve returned to Fallout 3 with the imminent launch of the Broken Steel DLC. My goal: to have a different experience.

When I first played Fallout 3 last year, I was – as I tend to be in any game that marks a binary divide between good and evil – something of a saint. I disarmed the Megaton bomb, befriended ghouls, freed slaves and gave purified water to the desperate and downtrodden. For my deeds, I earned the Ambassador of Peace achievement for reaching Level 14 with Good Karma.

For me, making these types of decisions and taking these types of actions is the most natural and immersive way to play.

Playing the game again to explore the huge tracts of wasteland I ignored in my previous rush to find my Dad and finish the main quest, I figured it would make sense to try a different approach. After all, what’s the point in playing it in exactly the same way?

So right from the off I opted to be a brat. I was rude to the adults at my birthday party. I was eager to get my hands on my first BB gun. I took the first swing at Butch when he was hassling Amata. I even persuaded my teacher into letting me not take the G.O.A.T. exam. As a child and teenager, it was pretty easy to see these actions as those of a snotty, mischievous kid and I was happy to play the role.

But then I hit Megaton.

Part of the reason why I chose to disarm the bomb on my initial playthrough is because there is no sense in doing otherwise. In offering you the quest to blow up the town, Mister Burke fails to offer any reason at all why you would want to do this. Sure, he offers you money, but his motivation is clouded in vague utterings of the town’s worthlessness.

So, although I accepted Burke’s mission, I couldn’t immediately bring myself to follow through on it. I wandered around town for a while. I couldn’t bring myself to insult Gob, the ghoul bartender at Moriarty’s Saloon. I started helping Moira with her research. I repaired the leaks in the water system. I told Lucy I’d deliver her letter. I didn’t betray Leo’s confidence, although I did steal some of his supply.

Megaton is full of regular people. They may have their share of problems, but I didn’t view them as any worse than my own. The more I thought about it, the more I realised: the only reason to blow up Megaton is just to see what happens. And even though I had set out to deliberately experience something different, that reason didn’t strike me as sufficient.

Later, after being screwed over by Moriarty when seeking information about my father’s whereabouts, I decided to do some snooping around. I picked Moriarty’s pocket and broke into his back room. There I found his computer terminal and, on it, incriminating dossiers on every major Megaton citizen. The dismal portraits he’d painted of his fellow townsfolk were a revelation to me.

For the first time, I found myself capable of seeing Billy Creel, Jericho, the Stahls, Doc Church and the like as the sleazy losers Burke had no doubt thought them to be. And Moriarty himself was the most despicable of all.

I went down to the bomb and armed it in the dead of night, feeling not pity but disdain for the Child of Atom still reciting his empty worship in the radioactive cesspool. I walked back to the saloon and blew Moriarty’s head off.

Then I ran.

I ran all the way to Tenpenny Tower, not even daring to look back once to see if Lucas Simms or Gob or Nova had decided to chase me far enough to be clear of the destruction I was about to inflict upon their home…

In retrospect, perhaps I was too harsh on Bethesda. Perhaps they didn’t fail to provide a compelling reason to blow up Megaton. Perhaps in not doing so, they succeeded in forcing me to examine my motivations with far greater scrutiny. If Burke had told me, “Everyone in Megaton is a child molester”, then that choice wouldn’t have been interesting. Instead, by framing the morality of the decision so ambiguously, it’s allowed me to fill in those gaps with my own response and, with that, introduced feelings of guilt, remorse, and soon – if the ghoul invasion of Tenpenny Tower succeeds – revenge that I’d have otherwise not encountered.

I’m interested to know what you think about morality in games. What are some of the best – or worst – examples of ethical or moral dilemmas you’ve encountered? And how do you think developers could do better in handling such situations?

Now that we know what comes in the Limited Edition Premium Bundle for The Beatles: Rock Band, it’s time to ask the question – is it worth US$250?