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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?"
The crazy thing about GTA:SA is that speaks volumes about the differences in cultures between the US and other countries.
For example, here in the UK, GTA:SA - and its predecessors - got an 18 rating straight off the bat. That's the highest rating ELSPA (The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, equivalent to your ESRB/IEMA) gives to video games over here. I guess its functionally equivalent to your AO rating.
Although I'm not an expert on classifications I'm sure it earnt its 18 rating here due to the strong content - extreme violence, grand theft auto, prostitution and so on. The fact that some time down the line a hidden pixellated simulated sex mode was unlocked was just icing on the cake - the game was already strictly limited to adults anyway.
I am presuming therefore that your M (17+) rating is equivalent to our 15 rating, which presumably means you are quite happy for 15 year old American youths to play out scenes where they can mug people, shoot cops, steal cars, use the services of prostitutes and so forth - but God forbid they see some pixellated nudity and crudely simulated sexual acts.
Will someone please think of the children! (and give them some guys to protect themselves while you're at it)
It's laughable that religious nuts and publicity whores from both parties should seek to decry this tame, lame, disabled mod when the actual:
Personally I think GTA is a blast and GTA: SA is nothing short of a classic, but the hypocrisy concerning this mod is pathetic.
I bought this game the day it came out, only to find the control setup is horribly broken.
R* used to be so good about this, its a shame to see them go the route of "just another crappy playstation port" producer. Theyve gone through all this trouble to remove this stupid objectionable content, & completely ignored the glaring bugs that keep the game from being playable.
Heaven forbid anyone try to use a controller that isnt a carbon copy of the damn PS2 controller! Fuck you Rockstar, you can keep your damn coffee, just give me a usable control scheme!
The whole point of ther re-release is to remove the "hot Coffee" code.
There will be no "replacement mod", as there will be (according to TakeTwo) no AO content on the disk.
It _may_ be possible for some enterprising young hacker to _add_ content to the game, or produce their own mini-game with new content, but that is a different kettle of monkeys.
Will this be the first of many? How many other games have this content in? And are sold as non-AO? And have sales-figures to match GTA?
Maybe a few less-than-reputable (note: this does not mean small.) games companies may put offensive content in, purely to publices the removal of it, but this will be a minority.
Droid 1: Hey, whats all this buzz about hot coffee? It's all over the papers.
Droid 2: Its a part of GTA they pulled for being rude.
Droid 1: Can we do that? We could use the publicity.
Droid 2: Well, our games have no hidden offensive content...
Droid 1: I'll talk to the programming team.
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
What still bugs me the most about all this is that they gave it an AO rating when there are games out there such as PLayboy: The Mansion, that get an M rating...something in the rating system is broken.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
I don't know about the rest of you but I always like seeing these sketchy marketing ploys by companies. The fact is, the folks making the Grand Theft Auto games aren't out to be the good guys with a squeaky clean brand so what do they have to lose? They know their games shake up the market and get negative press and that's exactly what they want. So they add in this discoverable scene and keep that press wheel turning. I'm impressed, and I don't think this is the last time we're going to see something like this from their company.
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I wonder if Sony is still going to rely so damn heavily on the GTA francise now? I believe they once had a no sex policy in Playstation games before.
If you believe the marketing hype on The Guy Game's website, then there already has been a game pulled for questionable content.
And by "questionable", I mean supposedly/allegedly containing video of a topless 17-year-old girl who had signed release papers allowing the video to be shot but who later came forward and sued Sony/MSFT/Guy Game for including the underage video in the game.
I know I've still seen the game on store shelves this week, so I don't know the current status of this lawsuit or whether the game was pulled and released without her video included.
For all the Slashdotters who illustrate the point that religious groups and soccer moms are flipping out over a crappy sex scene in a video game, while at the same time condoning the violence need to do one thing.
Please STFU.
They do not condone the violence in video games and movies anymore than they do sex. Ok sure, your Mom might not bat an eye about you killing virtual cops, but at the same time will flip out over a little nudity. I'm not talking about her; I'm talking about the organized movements that wish to censor our entertainment for our own good.
Sex is just the latest taboo for these organizations. These same groups a few years ago have tried to censor games based on the amount of violence. The old timer's here should be telling the younger geeks about the media uproar caused by Doom and other games of the same genre way back in 1993. There was a lot of debating for years that violence in media was a leading cause of violent crime.
For example, I heard a lot more about how the kids responsible for the massacre at Columbine played FPS, then I did about the lack of the parents saying to themselves, 'Hey my kid has a swastika on his wall and lots of books about Hitler, is a social outcast at school and has an unhealthy fascination regarding death. Maybe I should look into this?'
However with the gaming companies banding together and creating a rating system it helped soften the violence argument by putting right on the box what the game's content is. The attempts to vilify video games because of violence started to make fewer headlines, for the responsibility is now on the parents. If your kid was playing games that you do not approve of, the fault was now yours. Sure there where still complaints by the hard core, but they were not about to shut up about the issue even if they did succeed at eliminating video games altogether. Sleazy lawyers will also continue to take up these cases as long as they think they can make the slightest bit of profit off of them. However for the time being, we won the battle for the most part.
However a battle is not a war. If you guys continue to use the argument that "What's the big deal about a little sex in a game where as a player, I'm allowed to commit a shopping list of horrendous crimes?" That's going to bite us on the ass by helping to reignite the violence in video games debate which our opponents will love to see happen.
Please stop giving the enemy more bullets.
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