Slashdot Mirror
GTA: San Andreas to be Re-Released Next Week
404Ender writes "According to GameStop and EB, the wildly successful Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will finally be re-released without the controversial "Hot Coffee" content and clean of anything that might demand an AO rating. Will this be the first game in a series of many to come that will be pulled off the market to be changed due to questionable content? How long before a Hot Coffee replacement mod is produced?"
I'm posting this again, because like an idiot I posted it with no formatting the first time
I wouldn't say they are equvalent. The US probably just has more ratings:
Early Childhood (EC) 3+
Everyone (E) - 6+
Everyone 10+ (E10+)
Teen (T) 13+
Mature (M) 17+
Adults Only (AO)
Some of your 15 games might end up as T, and others might end up as M in the States.
try ordering a copy from the UK, the seemingly only sane country to still be selling the original version. And you yanks call us brits prude!
How many computers are too many?
Well it was an 18 cert to start with anyway here.
As another poster said, it's a BBFC rating of 18 in the UK, which is stronger than an ELSPA rating. But it's not "functionally equivalent" to the "AO" rating in the US, because all the UK games stores happily stock 18-rated games. (Doom 3 got an 18 from the BBFC too and they all stocked that, for instance.) It's more similar to an "M" rating, except for the 1 year age difference.
If I remember rightly, for the GTA: London game, everything bar the engine was changed - missions, cars, maps, etc - are you seriously suggesting that unless you change the underlying game engine (or even use a completely different one) it's not a different game?
I'm an avid Rockstar entheusiast, I own every single GTA game that's been released and quite a bit of the rest of their catalogue too, and I really don't see your point - they dont just change the city, they change *the entire game* apart from the engine, something that most regular gamers don't really know or care much about.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Hot Coffee for un-modded PS2
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I picked up my copy at Best Buy during the controversy but before the rerating. The price tag obscured the ESRB rating on the front of the box.
The original distributor of the Hot Coffee mod has withdrawn it from his site. You have to get it from others now and hope you're not also installing malware.
GTA:SA now has a patch available for the PC version that fixes some bugs and blocks the Hot Coffee mod. I haven't heard of anyone unbundling the patch to apply the bug fixes and not the mod blocker.
The UK version didn't require rerating, but they may also have rereleased it there without the content withdrawn from the US market (single build source and the minigame not part of the localization), or had the aforementioned patch applied. If so, you might not be able to discern the difference from the packaging, and I don't think amazon.co.uk will ship software out of the country. (They won't ship toys either.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
OP here, the biggest problem with the control scheme in the PC version of GTA SA is the fact that it doesnt give you any way to change which axes do what.
I have a flight-yoke & rudder pedals that i use for my flight sim & which also happens to work great for a great many driving games. EXCEPT GTA SA.... This setup is completely unusable with GTA SA.
GTA completely ignores the Yoke & the default config puts the steering controls on the rudder pedals, but not in any logical way. You have to hold one tiptoe half way down & use about half rudder just to get the controls centered & there is NO WAY TO CHANGE THE AXES.
Playing games on the PC is much better than consoles because we have such a wide range of options for input, audio, graphics & the like. When your PS2 port only allows you to use control schemes that are exactly the same as the PS2 controls, you completely remove all advantages of PC gaming & turn my pc into a $2000 PS2.
Ill say it again, fuck you Rockstar, you used to be my favorite game producer, but i wont waste my money on PS2 ports.
Incedently, this same setup worked fine in GTA VC, why are they taking steps backwards?
There are reasons for the different standards with video games than other media. Not good reasons, but reasons nonetheless.
Movies don't get hit as hard anymore because that's played out. There were an army of Jack Thompson types after Hollywood and they all fizzled out. Nobody managed to get a big settlement out of the studios, and the attempts were abandoned. Investment without return, basically. They never got that one key victory that would give them a free ticket to suck every studio dry.
Music is a different matter. Nearly all the highly offensive content in music is now in rap. Ever heard a femenist complain about rap degrading women? Very rare. Rap has gained a sort of "racial sheild" since it's seen as a primarily black art - most rappers are black, and a large portion of their audience is too. Thusly, an attack on rap can be turned into a racist action. Other music so pales in comparison to gansta rap about bangin' hos and shootin' bros that it falls under the radar.
Books, now, can get away with absolutely anything. Write a book about demons invading Mars and see how many eyebrows you raise. Now make a game about the same thing, and see how many people sue you. Books get this protection because those who attack video games, movies, or music universally invoke reading as superior storytelling. We're a century past the days when the novel was openly called the decay and end of enlightened civilization. Every attack on a book only hurts attacks on other artforms.