Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The US House of Representatives need to get a life.
The House in the US is starting a federal investigation of Rockstar in the aftermath of Hot Coffeegate. Does anybody else find this ridiculous? For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, the latest GTA game shipped with a hidden (disabled) minigame involving characters in sexual positions. While fully clothed. It turns out that with a mod (a crack really) you can re-enable this minigame. So now they're being federally investigated to see if they deceived the ESRB (ratings board for video games).
Here are some reasons why this is insane: 1) The game was already rated M (17+). The new rating is A (18+). BIG STINKING DIFFERENCE! 2) The characters were fully clothed, there wasn't even any nudity. People can see nude sex scenes on movies on TV, but clothed characters in sexual positions in a videogame... 3) THE CONTENT WAS DISABLED! People had to use cracks to enable it, and on the PS2 version people needed special hardware attached to their PS2 (The GameShark) to fiddle with memory locations to enable it.
You'd think the US government has more important things to worry about than this. On a more serious note, one of the guys who pushed this into the spotlight in the first place is now going after The Sims 2 because it turns out that you can apply a crack to remove the "blur" from nude characters. I guess the guy never played with Barbie and Ken dolls when he was a kid. What an idiot, and what a waste of time and money. Glad MY tax dollars aren't being wasted by this crap.
Here are some reasons why this is insane: 1) The game was already rated M (17+). The new rating is A (18+). BIG STINKING DIFFERENCE! 2) The characters were fully clothed, there wasn't even any nudity. People can see nude sex scenes on movies on TV, but clothed characters in sexual positions in a videogame... 3) THE CONTENT WAS DISABLED! People had to use cracks to enable it, and on the PS2 version people needed special hardware attached to their PS2 (The GameShark) to fiddle with memory locations to enable it.
You'd think the US government has more important things to worry about than this. On a more serious note, one of the guys who pushed this into the spotlight in the first place is now going after The Sims 2 because it turns out that you can apply a crack to remove the "blur" from nude characters. I guess the guy never played with Barbie and Ken dolls when he was a kid. What an idiot, and what a waste of time and money. Glad MY tax dollars aren't being wasted by this crap.
