Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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
Why was traipsing around in underpants included?
:)
Because it makes people like me laugh.
That was one of the first things I did in GTA... bought the heart shaped boxers, took off all the other clothes, got an afro, then did drive-by shootings while on a bicycle.
Because I could.
Because it made me laugh.
For the same reason, my characters in Baulder's Gate tend to run around naked... there's nothing funnier than a dwarf fighter, fighting rats, naked.
Tepp
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.