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RockStar Speaks
JamesO writes "The alleged sex mini-game on the GTA San Andreas game disc, unlocked using the "Hot Coffee" mod, has been the news story of the week. Several investigations are now underway to determine if the allegations are true. Having kept pretty quiet on this issue, Rockstar has issued a statement clarifying their situation. Meanwhile, in Britain, GTA San Andreas was released with a BBFC rating of 18 in the UK, which makes it illegal to sell the game to anyone under the age of 18. The BBFC has stated that, as a result it does not feel they need to take any action, even if the sex mini game claims are found to be true. Such content would not require the game to be reclassified as it would in other territories where the game had not received a strict adult only rating."
I'm kind of surprised that GTA 3,VC &SA didn't get AO ratings anyway. I'd think brutal violence would be worth a higher rating than a little sex scene...but some people have f*cked up moral priorities...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
The most bizarre part of this whole story is how some people find sex the most objectionable part of the game.
The game [without the scenes] is not appropriate for most kids below the age of 16 anyways. So kudos to them for simply sticking an 18y sticker on it.
Now I'm cheering on the british... stupid hyperactive irresponsible american parents... stop making a fuss over nothing.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Personally, I think the whole thing is a non-issue that's being stirred up by a few crazies who would like to see games banned. The game is rated M in America and shouldn't be sold to anyone under 17. The AO rating just bumps that up to 18. Anyone who's playing this game has more than likely seen porn on the internet, TV, or in a magazine that was more hardcore than the silly minigame you'd find in GTA:SA.
I'd be willing to make a bet with anyone that if the next GTA game was released with an AO rating that included some sexual material like the "hot coffee" mod and an M rating lacking said content, that the AO rated version would sell more copies if distributed almost as widely as the M version.
Oh, no! A Mature rated game has mature themes and adult content. However my child's video game system raise him properly now? Give me a break. If parents were okay with the content of GTA:SA before this minigame was found, they're either still okay with it or they don't really care about parenting.
e2 | LJ
Why hasn't there been a similar outcry regarding God of War? Isn't the sex mini-game always available in that title?
I don't get why GTA:SA gets dragged through the mud when a minigame is found, but God of War gets away with it when it's meant to be played.
Methinks some groups have it out for the GTA series.
e2 | LJ
But... the game files have to be modified to make the damn thing visible!
Mind you, I don't think the game should be played by kids, but a lot of this furor looks simply like hysterics, something for particular people to point at and say "Oh my God!! Look, just look at how far society is breaking down now! If you're a decent human being you'll join me in comdemning this, and vote Republican!"
Reading the press release, it has a lot of doubletalk and (IMHO) never actually denies that the material was included. TFA just makes it sound like eeeeevil hackers went to a lot of trouble on their own.
How hard would it have been to explicitly say "This wasn't in the game, and all of it is user-created material"? (Making the assumption that the sex minigame wasn't just commented out).
C'mon, we're not talking about finding the Loch Ness Monster or reading the Dead Sea Scrolls! The respective claims of Rockstar and the 1337 h4x0rs are so far apart it doesn't seem like this would be a difficult question to settle objectively...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Maybe that is a bit of an overstatement.
So how is this little sex scene between two animated figures all that different from the sex scence between two puppets in Team America? Didn't that game get the equivilant of an "M" rating? It really does seem like idiots who don't know how to raise their kids properly have it out for GTA.
America... fuck yeah. That county, along with any other that blames every little thing on GTA without taking the resposibility on other social issues (the widespread use of guns and how so many people have one to begin with) needs to re-think their social values.
Why can't someone merely analyse the patch to see exactly what it contains? I mean, if it's got extra content in it despite what the author says, that should be easily detectable (such as size of the patch, the inclusion of new graphics and/or sounds). If it's nothing but a code patch with no new content, than it's definitively something unlocked from within the game. Unless of course San Andreas has OTHER areas in which the dialog spoken (and moaned) in this scene is also used. This is an honest question, as I don't have nor care to play the game.
And frankly, even if it is in the game, Rockstar purposefully locked it away. They can't be hend responsible for someone else breaking in anymore than a gun onwer can't be held liable if someone blasted their way into a locked gunsafe. If some 14 year old kid breaks into a porn shop by smashing open a door or wall, it's the intruder's fault he was exposed to porn, not the store's.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Then only outlaws will have mods.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Flying, fat, half nude CJ's with dual semi-automatics
First off, CJ can traipse around in his underpants. Why was this included? Then there's the jetpack at Verdant Hills, the weight management system (the biggest waste of time in the game, IMO...), and then lastly, wielding dual weapons.
There is no more brutal force than to launch a flying fat man into the middle of Los Santos and have him wipeout hundreds of innocent lives...
Looks like Rockstar has a 3-star wanted level. They should probably find a respray shop.
forty-two
Why do people care over a fully clothed sex game?
I mean, GTA:Vice City had a strip bar you could purchase, where one objective of the game was to spend 30 minutes staring at a badly animated nude dancer. Totally nude, no pixelation, from all angles. Spend 30 minutes in there, and you unlocked the maximum potential of the strip club and got the most money from it.
I put my character in there, and walked the dog.... it wasn't worth watching. Neither is the "hot coffee" mod. Kids see more realistic flesh watching Baywatch on TV, than in a Rockstar game.
Tepp
Coworker of mine said on the various crimes going on in the city, one is "attempted rape". Upon visiting the crime in progress, you see one character try to hump another. I haven't played the game enough to see it, and yet I see no press outrage over it.
I mean heck, that's not even consentual, and yet it's the same thing as what everyone's crying about in a hidden part of a video game!
All of this is a big smokescreen to cover up truly newsworthy events the media is trying to ignore.
Parents are idiots (that's a fact given they HAD kids in the first place), but that argument aside, I have heard of plenty of parents renting "Team America" for their kids. People are stupid stupid stupid!
...because 17 year olds have never heard of or seen this thing called "sex" until they played GTA.
If the mod maker reveals the exact methods used in creating the mod, and they can be reproduced, there is no question as to the code being there. It doesn't matter, though. Soft-core is the stuff of "R" ratings in movies. These "people" are polygons, so it's virtual soft-core. The "M" game rating has the same age suggestion as the "R" movie rating.
Does it make me want the game before it's re-rated? You betcha. If GTA:SA was re-rated would retailers sell it? GTA has a better chance than any other AO game. Hell, if they had to switch to "AO," they may as well make the sex mini-game available while playing. Will I buy it? No. I'm not all that interested in the main GTA game.
It really proves the "no such thing as bad press" concept. After all, if Rockstar lied in their official statement, that will put them back in the news for more sale$!
Mod parents -1: uninformed. Yes, I thought about using that pun for a while, so what.
Lock the guy in a room with the game a text editor a PC and no Internet and challenge him to reproduce the hack. If he succeeds we can make him famous. If not...
The modder says this: "All the contents of this mod was already available on the original disks. Therefor the scriptcode, the models, the animations and the dialogs by the original voice-actors were all created by RockStar. The only thing I had to do to enable the mini-games was toggling a single bit in the main.scm file." (from PatrickW)
Can some savvy person out there verify either of these claims?
Rockstar's statement seems to be very carfully worded and avoids specifically clarifying if they they originally wrote the sex game.
I have downloaded the "Hot Coffee" mod (for research purposes only!), it does NOT patch the executable. There are 3 files in the mod: main.scm, script.img and sacensor.exe.
By doing a binary compare of main.scm and script.img with the originals they differ by only a few bytes, therefore the content for the sex games was already included in the game, all the files do is chnage a few flags to unlock it. It is not the genius coding effort of the century that Rockstar tries to imply by talking about disassembling and modifying the code.
As for sacensor.exe it is only needed if you don't want the whole game unlocked at the start (which the other files do). When sacensor.exe is used main.scm and script.img are not needed. Sacensor.exe has to be executed when San Andreas is running so it can make an in-memory alteration so it does not alter the code in any way either.
Rockstar's statement tries to give the impression that the sex mini-game was "created" by the hackers, and they talk about disassembling and modifying the code, but the mod does not even change the code just script files and art assets.
This seems similar to the dubious stance Tecmo took when they sued their fans at NinjaHacker.net for creating new costumes for Dead or Alive characters. In that situation Tecmo claimed the people at NinjaHacker had altered their source code when in fact all they had changed were the art assets.
He's right, it really is a variable in the script file. None the less, the game still needs to be modified to get it to work. The game they sold did not include the ability to see this content. It's iffy, but I don't think there's much of a legal argument that they should be held responcible.
That's a really poor reaction on their part. It's just passing the blame along.
Not knowing who to believe on this one, but I thought they had originally said that they were going to make the game more accessible to modders than previous installations. Claiming that the modder broke the EULA in doing so is kinda wacked to me.
I guess the only way to prove this is to have the patch source code opened up for public review or something. This is turning into a "i said, they said" issue.
Insert Sig Here
I don't get why GTA:SA gets dragged through the mud when a minigame is found, but God of War gets away with it when it's meant to be played.
Were you in a self-imposed media exile through 1998 and 1999?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
In CJ's defence, it wasn't really sex anyways. More like a very softcore dry hump. For god sakes, he's wearing pants throughout the whole scene.
"We left this mini-game code in thinking it would be a laugh when someone unlocked it, but now it's caused such a scandal we are shitting ourselves and are blustering about reverse-engineering and license breaking"
Rockstar have been very open in the past, even supportive, to people messing around with their code (see the numerous Vice City mods, such as Multi-theft Auto). Hope this doesn't spoil it for everyone.
Ah, it's Hillary CLinton at her best: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/13/news_61290 21.html
the Political Inquirer
Mona is never actually naked in the game, but they included a fully nude (and much better looking than the ones in GTA) model of her along with a seperate towel model that they used to cover her up. I think one of the first mods created was the "Naked Mona Level".
As you might have seen:/ 138247
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/14
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Symbols don't necessarily communicate what you intend. There's an air freshener can in the men's room at my workplace that has a symbol which could be read either as "not for use by children" or as "keep boys and girls segregated".
Another symbol on the same can which they probably intended to mean "don't get in your eye" could also mean "don't look at product".
Are you sure your "no kids" symbol can't be misinterpreted as "no short people"?
And why is this information communicated indelibly on screen instead of as a data stream to be interpreted and acted upon by a V-chip or similar hardware? Especially for HDTV signals that shouldn't have legacy hardware problems! Once coming back from a commercial such a rating appeared directly over a character's face. The first line should have been, "How does Mr. TV-14 plead?"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?