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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?"
Otherwise how will it be "clean of anything that might demand an AO rating"?
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Them then re-releasing the Hot Coffee version as a special adult-only don't-have-to-hack-the-code release (which I'm guessing some people would buy) and making MORE money from this. Which would be exactly the opposite that the original complainants were attempting to achieve, no?
Um, I don't know about you guys, but as I see it GTA is not something suitable for kids regardles off the amount of booty shown.
Any game with that amount of violence should be adults only. It's funny as hell, but it really does demand a mature mind... IMHO anyways.
.: Max Romantschuk
... killing and torturing people to death isn't questionable in the US, and so hasn't been removed?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
No, the main difference is pure psychology. There is technically a one-year difference in the "recommendations" between M (17) and AO (18); however, most chain stores will carry "M" but they absolutely refuse to carry "AO". This is exactly the same thing as theatres that will show "R" rated movies (under 17 must be admitted by parent or guardian) but will absolutely refuse to show "NC-17" (no one under 17) purely because of the psychological stigma that people seem to have against the various ratings.
Mind you, there are no laws, at least on a nationwide level, that say that stores and theatres must adhere to the ratings of games or movies. They're all purely voluntary. Unfortunately, too many Americans put so much emphasis on ratings that they're completely blindsided and outraged with stupid stuff like the "Hot Coffee" mod occurs.
I am a red-white-and-blue, flag-waving American conservative, and even I am appalled by the astounding hypocrisy regarding sex. A movie or game can have "F" bombs every third word, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction and it will receive a mediocre rating of PG-13 or M. But if any sex is involved -- WHOOSH! -- hear that rating skyrocket to R or AO even if there are comparatively few vulgarities, blood, violence, death, horror, and destruction.
The whole "Hot Coffee" thing is so ridiculously overblown just for the purposes of advancing the political agendas or stealing the spotlight on both sides of the political spectrum that it almost makes you want to engage in violence against the opportunists. So, I guess there might be some validity about video games causing violence, but only when ridiculous accusations and moral condemnations are made against those games. I have no intentions of playing "GTA:SA" just because that's not my type of game, but I still might buy it just to show support for Rockstar.
If these people are so against sex, then the best thing that they can do for all of us is to not reproduce.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Well, i don't really get it...i mean come on!
Every now and then i get surprised on how much those critics are really off with their ratings!
It 's like saying : "It is ok to steal cars, to kill people and to deal drugs, as long as we keep the game 'clean' with no sex content and no swearing!"
Come on, people!! If children were really influenced by the video-games they play, I'd rather have a kid playing the Old Larry games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry than any other violent content game! I mean sex is better than shooting people, right?
And don't even get me started on swearing! Did you know that the cursing words are not in the same part of your brain where other words are regularly stored? Therefore recent studies have showed that cursing is more a physiological necessity than a habit!
Let's put the game on as it is and let the children play! I mean if parents are not around to teach their children right from wrong, we cannot expect video-games do that for them !!
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
> I'm not sure if your comment was meant to be ironic
;)
Then you need to recalibrate your irony detector
> I know its an old argument, but stupid parents are the problem
I agree with the sentiment, but in this case I think it's a societal uptightness about sex. I never cease to be
astonished by the levels of tolerance people have for gore and violence, so much so I can barely sit through what
qualifies for an R rating these days, but they have no tolerance whatsoever for the natural and wonderful act of
sex. The fact that we see the truly astonishing level of violence we do on the same stations that flew completely
off the handle when Janet Jackson's tit flopped out for a tenth of a second says something really dark and
disturbing about our society's appetites.
Now, I don't think we should censor ANY of this stuff, although I'm fully in favor of labelling and warning people
so they can make educated choices, but if I had to choose between a sex scene and a guy getting lit on fire,
it's not a tough decision. =)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Just a friendly reminder that the Hot Coffee controversy is not about sex in GTA. It's about Rockstar defrauding the ESRB to get a lower rating so GTA would be carried in Walmart and Gamestop and other stores that won't carry AO games. Rockstar was contractually obliged to reveal all content to the ESRB. (I work for a major game developer, not Rockstar, and I know that we must disclose all disk contents to the ESRB.) They didn't disclose the sexual content, and once they were caught they lied about putting on the the disk and tried to blame some hacker who found the enabling bits.
Game developers can put whatever content they want in their games. Nobody is stopping them. (Not even congress.) But you can't lie about it to the ESRB. Don't get caught up in the "is sex worse than violence?!" argument. That's not the point. The point is that sex won't get carried in Walmart, but sex sells, so Rockstar put sex in the game and lied about it to the ESRB.
As a game developer, I'm pissed as hell at Rockstar for screwing things up for the rest of us. If you're gonna put sex in the game, at least fess up to it. Don't act all surprised and say, "Goodness, how did that get in there?" What a bunch of cowards.