JohnTyra.com

Yet another questionable Yahoo! move announced today, but this time it’s in the gaming arena. Yahoo! has games and such available on their site but they are usually web-based games that are not stored locally on your computer. This announcement changes all of that by offering "more than 400 ad-supported games available to users by the end of the year" as quoted by their press release earlier today.

Don’t get too excited about this, fellow gamers…this announcement specifically states that the downloadable games will come from, I quote, "casual games publishers" which does not mean Sony, Blizzard or any other ‘less casual’ gaming company. What does this mean? If you’re looking for a free, ad-supported version of World of Warcraft or Everquest II to be available for download then don’t hold your breath…

Parents: Be careful if you kids are playing with Spore’s Creature Creator…

So everyone is excited about EA’s new “Spore” game, which is set to ship out in September. Ok, no problem, until you think about their new (free) “Character Creator” that allows users to create their own characters and then upload them to EA’s server.

Whoops, did EA forget about all of the…um…’imaginative’ users (you know who you are) out there on the internet? I guess so, because now there are user-generated characters that are not, let’s say, rated ‘G’. It’s sad, really, considering that this game appears to be geared towards the younger audience; aka NOT the PG-13 and up crowd. Since there have been over one million characters uploaded since the tool became available last week, it’s going to be hard for EA — or anyone else for that matter — to easily filter these non-child friendly characters.

Will EA have to put a PG-13 (or higher?) rating on their game now? Hmmm…let’s get your thoughts on this! =)