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Why are pregnant sims unable to slap etc obviously not attack another sim when they are enemies with them or have a low enough relationship which would usually have the fight action in their menu as this does not happen with my pregnant sim she caught her partner with another sim which resulted in them breaking up & both their relations dropped to -100 & enemies but no fight menu...  They are able to slap the cheating partner when they are first caught but not after...  Why is this...

In theory pregnant women are fragile beings and wouldn't want to endanger their unborn child by being punched while rolling on the ground.

In theory nothing, that's exactly why the menu's not there. Not that pregnant women are fragile, but the unborn baby certainly is - the only safe period of pregnancy is the second trimester, and even then hot tubs and changing cat litter are big no-nos. Same reason you have to wear a seatbelt a certain way when you're bigger - above and below the bump, otherwise damage can and has been caused in the event of an accident.

Well spoken Sadie!  :D

Sadie, you are right and wrong at the same time.  Right about real life, wrong about why it isn't in the game. The interactions are not in the game for the same reason babies and toddlers are fire proof. The same reason there are no children in many "adventure" or violent games like Vice City.  It isn't in the game because EA is a pack of cowards directed by lawyers who don't want to catch Hell from some Christian right-winger organisation about them advocating beating women, killing babies, or promoting domestic violence.  I will point out that the same developers that won't let us have a pregnant woman smack her cheating husband are the same ones that added sattelites falling from the sky, spontaneous human combustion, and running with scissors as ways for your sim to die... none of which is particularly realistic.

It was not out of any sort of service to realism or decency, it was ball-less cowardice.

It's the same with every game company. Take Bethesda with Morrowind or Oblivion, take any other game company, take Molyneux's "the movies". No children.

The problem runs deeper than general cowardice. The problem is the USA being the biggest market and every company has to suck up to the bizarre rules and lobbies of that particular country. Best example would be the Vice City scandal around the hot coffee mod. And that in a game, tailor made to shoot, knife or club your way to the top.

Too true, abaris, one good example is Temple of Elemental Evil; in addition to obvious coding bugs, there a wide range of problems caused by one of the stupidest publishing decisions in the history of computer games. Shortly before the game’s release, Hasbro, the owner of the Wizards of the Coast who holds the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license demanded that the game’s rating is changed from Mature to Teen; even though Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as published by Hasbro (and earlier publishers) has been under fire from the Christian right for as long as I can remember as satanic and violent. Caving to Hasbro's demands was inevitable, and Troika Games removed all children, foul language and several objectionable objects, such as a brothel. However, Troika Games didn’t have the time to remove conversation paths and quests linked to the removed features, the removal of these things had already pushed the game far over budget. This caused several quests to be broken and many dialogues that make no sense are still in the game.

The thing was a fiasco.  It is as stupid as everything else in the USA when it comes to these matters.  You can't see sex in a game, but you can shoot hell-spawn zombies whose heads explode into a mass of tentacles with razor-sharp barbs on the end; you can't have children die, but you can have alien butt probes; you can't have a Sim breast-fee a baby, but you can watch a slow motion volley ball game played by women in skin-tight bikinis; you can't gay "marriage" in a game, but you can have a woman in a bloody wedding dress with a machine gun take out a sniper's nest.

The day the USA gets over itself and realises its own hypocrisy will be a happy day.

That won't happen, since the USA haven't the collective European memory of bombs and shells raining down on most every village. So they won't change their bizarre stance of violence or nationalism being something positive as opposed to sex. Same goes for religion. The American christian lobbies would be a laughing stock in the largest part of Europe, if they had a try at selling their wisdom here.

But that works both ways. Because of that particular colloective memory, many European politicians have a peculiar stance about video games being too violent. I remember vividly the debates after a German school shooting where the shooter was playing counter strike prior to the attack. That was used as a pretext to ride a general attack on computer games and what they are doing to the mindset of children - without taking into consideration, that that guy was well off age and not a child.

Problem is, that politicians are all too eager to jump into debates they don't know shit about as long as some populistic stance promises to buy some more votes.

Either way. Regualations like these are rendering all the talk about freedom of speech and freedom of expression into a joke.

Well stated, abaris, this too is true.  I cannot disagree on any point.  The trend from freedom to do things is being replaced by freedom from things.  I don't know if it is some effect of nostalgia or romance, but I remember a time, not so long ago, when it wasn't so bad as it is now. I was younger then, maybe I was simply naive.

Maybe some of these points could be applied in real life. When my uncle was dating 2 women at the same time and got them both pregnant, they were fighting over him. It was a sad sight. Don't want to see that in my game. :P
This game is sort of a relief from real life. :D

I think, the problem runs deeper than that. For once, game companies have their publishers breathing down their necks and so they're throwing out public betas instead of finished games. Also they're producing what I like to call throw away games, meaning, that there's no interest in supporting mods. The consumer shall get bored pretty fast, so that he's already eager for the next half finished game being advertised.

And that's what your nostalgia seems to be about. Some years ago, the companies were helping the modders gladly and saw them as an additional marketing tool for their product. Nowadays, and partly because of the hot coffee mod, modders are frowned upon. There's no interest to create a game with any longevity. And there's no interest in supporting a group, that can't be controled by the company.

Hence the moddign ban for Molyneux's the movies. It was a typical Molyneux product with big promises, that never got fulfilled. But it could have been a great game, when modders would have taken over. Which of course never happened, because of the ban and some legal threats in their direction.

games are ment to be fun not for fighting

Pierreandreply have you never heard of Doom? Halo? Tribes? Everquest? World of Warcraft?

I suggest everyone here try out Bioshock.  Not only is it a great game, but it forces some interesting moral choices.

i do not know these games and i will never buy those games the only game a like are the sims sims2 roman of the three kingdoms dune final fantasy i will never buy games that are violant.

Actually I'm the most pacifistic and non violent person you can imagine in real life. But a good shooter can be a splendid way to vent some steam from the real life kettle.

But that reminds me of another example of the no sex, no violence hypocrisy rules being imposed in certain countries. Some years ago there has been a game called mafia. In Germany and certain parts of Europe it sold without the ability to shoot or harm civilians. Of course, you could download the bloodpatch the day it came out and the result was hilarious. Hilarious in the sense, that by eliminating certain civilians it actually got less violent. There had been a level playing at an airport and after it was done, some guy made a call to the police from a phone booth. In the German version you were unable to eliminate that guy. In the uncensored version, you could do him in and got a clean getaway wherelse in the censored and "non violent" version, you had to shoot your way through legions of police men, because of that one call.

^ I'm the same, and have to agree. Besides, if you decidedly eliminate violence from your games you're left with a very narrow choice. FWIW Pierre, by saying you won't buy violent games, yet you buy The Sims/2 and Final Fantasy, you're contradicting yourself. You mean to tell me there's no violence in either game? Sims get into fights, a lot of times on their own (mainly due to EAxis sims picking fights with each other, got on my nerves ¬_¬). In Final Fantasy you have battles, are they not violent? Not sure about the other two you mentioned, but it's a fair bet there's violence in them too. Like it or not, most games are violent to some degree, that's partly what keeps the player interested. About the only type of game you'll never see violence in are puzzle games, which engage the player in other ways.

@Erica and Yakov: When answering I spoke from experience (yes, I mean being preggers). Oh, and Yakov, believe it or not EA does get some things right - when I mentioned cleaning cat litter and hot tubs, I was also referring to the game. You can't do either with pregnant sims, the actions are disabled. Maybe the reason there's no miscarriage could be explained through being spineless, or it could also be to save people like me, who have already lost a baby IRL, from encountering it again in a game, which we turn to for escapism. You can't blame everything on the lawyers, there is business sense in there somewhere.

Sadie - I meant no disrespect in this.  And had I been aware of your loss, I would certainly have made my reply in a more moderate voice.  You raise a very good point for the reasons they would choose to avoid these matters.  I am well aware the a disproportionately large (at least in computer gaming terms) number of women play these games; but there was only one woman on the entire dev team, and she , from my experience dealing with her, seemed one of the most bloodless, calculating drones of corporate greed I have heretofore met; so it seemed to me unlikely she would have interjected something as imminently reasonable as what you offer.  The rest of the senior dev team, men all, were and are some of the biggest freaks, weirdos, and maladjusted cellar-dwellers I have met... not that all freaks, weirdos, and maladjusted cellar-dwellers are bad, but looking at the obsession with fire, ludicrous means of death, and other aspects of the game, it seems well at odds they would be motivated by good taste, social responsibility and sensibility.

I can't claim to be a non-violent sweetheart like abaris, I am definitely some damaged goods in that department.  Yet, I find that I prefer a non-violent game to the canned fake violence of a combat simulation since it lacks those parts of the combat I find satisfactory.  There is very little satisfaction to be had in a virtual beat down, since the bloody rudder will be back for more; I prefer a more lasting effect from the expenditure of my time and energy :lol:

I didn't mean to sound bitchy or snappy or anything, just saying... You speak of the dev team though, the way you describe them suggests to me they're the guys dealing with the coding, that sort of thing. The decisions I speak of (what (not) to include, etc.) isn't made by them, but by the designers themselves - the guys who come up with the ideas that are then passed to the guys you mentioned (That's if I haven't got the wrong end of the stick). The designers are the ones who'd get the flack for something in the game that shouldn't be content-wise, and who would have the likes of Jack Thompson breathing down their necks. The developers just take the ideas and make them into a working *cough* product. They don't care what those ideas are.

So yeah, there's business sense and morality in there somewhere - tucked safely away in the designers' den ;)

Sadie - the "senior dev team" are the architects of the game as we have it -- there was a 3rd party design consultation agency yes, but their "ideas" passed through the commitee at EA made up of the management assigned to the TS2 dev, which included the senior dev team.  The "senior developers" are all management - and these guys say yea or nay to all levels of things. The grunt level coders aren't even considered part of the dev team; they are just warm-body labour, treated no better than typewriters, adding machines, and filing cabinets to be used and moved between projects.

The distinction is not something one will readily understand until you actually work for EA. The senior dev team may include a VP of EA or some equally high level muckity-muck.  The only people we see in the spotlight are the upper echelon, and to call them "deigners" is an abuse of real designers.  The internal design team is treated no better than aforementioned typewriters, adding machines, and filing cabinets.

In the real world of computer software development, you have it pretty much by the rights; but in the game industry it is a different beast with upper and mid-level management being the end-all-be-all and being labelled (wrongly or rightly) the senior dev team; when in fact they are nothing more than foremen driving the slaves.  All the grunt-level coder (which by the rights is a sort of developer) does is follow the directives of the senior dev team and hope like hell he has a job next month.

Nice... and me being on a game design course too :pale: Okay, now I'm confused. I've wondered for a while if I'm doing the right thing working towards a degree in game design, certainly the modules are all pointing towards the design rather than the coding, but with this new info I'm concerned. WTH am I really working towards, and is it time to switch to multimedia tech maybe? :dontknow: I know I'm not enjoying "Graphical Communications" - presentation on Tues. too >_<

Disillusioned? Yep. Fed up? Very. I just dunno what I wanna do anymore, besides write, and that won't keep the food on the table.
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