Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Uncensor Manhunt 2
Less than 24 hours after the release of Manhunt 2, you can already play the full and uncensored version thanks to some enterprising hackers. The news for Rockstar is just ... bad: "The game has been censored in the US in order for it to receive an M rating - and therefore a release - rather than the original AO rating it was given by the ESRB. The illegal exploit of the original PSP code indicates that the scenes that were cut in order to secure an M rating were not removed from the full game, rather disabled, much like the Hot Coffee mini-games in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." This is also exactly what prompted the re-rating of Oblivion and Halo 2 for the PC. We should expect to see an ESRB response to this very soon, then.
You wait until AFTER the game has been out a week or two before posting the AO-hack.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Didn't you people learn *anything* from the Hot Coffee debacle? Heck, the Hot Coffee components of San Andreas weren't even *well publicized* and people s till managed to dig it up. What did you THINK was going to happen? You've already got congress breathing down the necks of the entire industry and STILL you think layering gruesome, brutal scenes that would have resulted in a higher rating over a simple... screen flash?
I realize this shouldn't be as big of an issue, society and violence, blah blah, but the truth remains that the industry remains under tight scrutiny, and Rockstar isn't doing anybody any favours.
The re-rating of Oblivion was insanely stupid. Ooh, you can mod it to include some nudity. Okay.. you can MOD a ton of games to include whatever you want! That doesn't change the fact that unless you go in changing things as (or via) a third party, the game remains the same as when it was originally rated by the ESRB.
In all of these cases, the rating should not change. A third party mod can add content, unlock content that otherwise cannot be accessed, etc. I don't see any logical, practical reason why in one case the rating shouldn't change and in another it should. Really, in all cases it shouldn't.
I like basketball!!1!
How exactly is the hack illegal? Shouldn't you be able to look at all the data on the disk you bought?
Guess I'll run out and grab a copy tonight before they re-rate it AO and get it pulled from shelves. I don't even like Manhunt, but it's the only way right now, other than letter-writing, to show support for more heavily-adult titles.
Game play experience may change once game is online. I always laughed seeing that in games like Animal Crossing. But, MODs could be seen under that blanket warning. Once a game is live and online there's always going to be some odd way to view it... Ever been T-Bagged in a Halo match or downloaded a new item skin for Elder Scrolls?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Chances are, the disc uses some sort of copy protection. Chances are, this circumvents it. At least, that's how I'd play it if I was there lawyer.
Thank you, DMCA, for making it illegal to crack copy protection, no matter what the intent.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...well to me at least, is that the edited scenes (yes with overstated screenjarring during the more brutal moments) are actually more disturbing to watch (in a good way) than watching the same things happening in clearly visible low-poly animation. The power of suggestion at play.
Weird in the sense that the people with their underwear in a knot over this manhunt business are still going to cry out over these less disturbing and plainly silly rendering resources being on disk, and the fact that hackers have removed the elements that make the scene more chilling.
But I guess they will want to blow off no matter what the game actually looks like.
http://gamevideos.com/video/id/15918
Seriously, TFA refers to it as an illegal exploit.
No no. It's merely against the license agreement, and is at the most unlawful.
The message is clear: "BUY NOW! SUPPLIES ARE RUNNING OUT (or forced to run out soon)!"
If anything, this will push the sales for as long as it's possible. And, well, I'd buy it now for one reason: Soon you can sell them for rather good money on EBay.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Old movies play on that too, and were more successful than those gore movies of today. Psycho still gives me more thrills than any bloodfest that drips red goo on the floor unter my TV.
The human mind comes up with more horrible ideas than the most graphic display could show. For reference, play Call of Cthulhu with my GM. I can stomach any horror movie, but when he starts describing what's going on and his cat jumps onto your lap, you piss your pants.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's really not THAT bad. I mean, the sword through the skull is kind of gross, but I don't see anything that would freak me out too much. Odd, considering I'm extremely squeamish. Look at UT3 for god's sake - that has so much blood in it, I thought I would drown.
The point is not that a piece of software can be mod'ed. The problem with the game is that the content is included but disabled. While in some ways I think it's stupid to make a distinction, I also think it's stupid that the company is being so lazy as to not product a finished product solely in the form expected.
Think of it this way: Child porn is legal in some parts of the world. A magazine is printed that contains it and some company decides that people in the US might want to read everything save the "naughty parts." So, they fold the pages over and use some sticky glue to keep it shut. It does take a little effort to get steamer out to undo the glue, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Do you not think people won't freak out over the magazine? After all, the "bad parts" have been made "unavailable."
I'm not saying the the ESRB is doing things correctly nor am I thinking that Congress is either. But, there is some modicum of truth to rating content that is there even if "unaccessible." If they hadn't included anything but what was necessary for the game, there would be no issue.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
They took the time to make sure the naughty parts didn't get displayed without a hack.
How hard is it to either completely yank the naughty bits or replace them with functionally-identical bits that are just outlines or other innocuous, not-fun-to-play, shapes? After all, unless someone writes a hack they will never show up on screen, right?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You may want to contact Adobe! There is a feature in their "Photoshop" program that will allow you to create naked celebrities! This product is available for Our Children to purchase with no age restrictions.
I can't mod this thread.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You don't know what you are talking about. Night Trap proves beyond all doubt that certain members of congress are card carrying members of the Taliban who wish to censor everything. You ever played Night Trap? If you didn't change anything except making the girls a few years younger, it probably would've been aired on Nickelodeon's "Are you afraid of the dark" series. The "violence" and "sex" in that video game are G-rated at most.
The attacks on video game "violence" and such have nothing to do with any actual content. It doesn't matter if you have a slasher game spraying ketchup all over the camera or teletubbies smashing into each other, those people will try to censor it.
My conclusion, from actual experience with this type of people, is that they want to elimate everything which doesn't conform to their sect's beliefs. Never mind if someone did anything like this to them, they'd be screaming bloody murder.
Shameful porn peddling by Google sneaking that logo past the rating boards, when all it takes is a kid with MS Paint to unlock the porn imagery.
Better now? BTW, thanks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There are movies that have more than one DVD for them: the official one rated by the MPAA and the unrated version that has everything. Why not make games that way? The ESRB rated version, then an unrated version for those of us that have pubic hair?
Dev team, that was, i assure you. Textbook gig - just obscure/hide the objected content, so that some enterprising 'hackers' can uncensor them. which hackers ? ones using absurdly l337 nicknames, for sure. but what are their real names ? you guessed right.
Read radical news here
If you don't care about selling in stores like Wal-Mart that won't carry AO games, then you don't have to appease anyone.
If you do, you do.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wal-Mart, like most companies, makes bottom-line decisions.
If they sold AO games, they would gain revenue from sales, but they would lose in the costs of lost goodwill, lost customers with kids-in-tow who don't want to shop with their kids in a building that sells AO games, lost customers who don't want to do business with stores that sell AO games at all, and the costs associated with responding to calls for boycotts from certain vocal organizations.
Even ignoring the latter, the first three costs are not insignificant.
Oh, I'm not even considering the costs of labor when a noticeable portion of your labor force chooses not to apply for a job with a company that sells AO games, the costs of not being able to higher minors when state and local lawmakers step in and prohibit AO-vendors from having minor employees ring up the merchandise, or the costs of making sure minors do not buy the merchandise.
These costs, as well as those at the top of the list, affect many other products, such as tobacco, alcohol, and even M-rated games. However, for those other categories the market has spoken and for the most part stores like the Wal-Mart Supercenters carry them where allowed by law.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem with the ERSB is they take everything on face value. None of them are programmers, so I doubt any would have the thought to say "What if there are secret things in the code of the game that gamers can hack out of it?" They simply view what's before them and don't think of the intricacies of the code behind the game.
The only reason why an M rating is soooo much better than an AO rating is so that the retail stores will carry it. Unless the ESRB rerates the game to AO and the stores return their inventory then this doesn't affect anybody. Personally, I'd rather the game be released in the original state. I don't know why game makers haven't copied the movie by releasing rated and un-rated versions of their products. I don't care if they make a stripped down version of the game so long as I can ignore it and buy the original.
How hard is it to either completely yank the naughty bits or replace them with functionally-identical bits
.. its not an easy process.
You can't just open the binary in a text editor and zero-out the bits that are the surrounded by that 'im naughty' glow. You need to change the all the associated assets (the animations) remove all offending particle effects, yadda yadda. It's not a walk in the park. You've just worked in crunch mode for however many months to make sure the game never crashes, and suddenly, you're ripping out assets, rewriting significant chuncks of production/camera code
What they did was 'hide' the offending manhunts with post processing overlays and camera cuts. But to go in and remove animations and change actual 'kill code' (how the hero/enemies are interacting with each other under the censored textures/effects) would have been a huge task and created another stabilization cycle that would have lasted far longer. In short, it would have all but guaranteed that the project would end up in the red once all was said and done.
What most people don't realize is that one of the biggest challenges in building video games is to make the 'build' process stable. An animation depends on a model which depends on textures. The game code depends on all those things, the number of joints a character has, even down to innocuous sounding things like whether a particular joint will ever be non-orthagonal to the floor. You change the animations, suddenly you rendered a lot of the testing you've done completely useless, because the math being used to make certain calculations for things like camera angle, relative positions of objects or joints to each other etc, now depend on a whole new set of assumptions.
So no, you cant just yank the naughty bits. The devil is in the details, and unless you know the details, pretty much everything always looks simple unless you're the one doing it. Adding new stuff to make the old stuff relatively inaccessible is the only sane way to bow to the demands of the ESRB without requiring a whole new front to back testing cycle. Removing stuff, now thats tricky, because identifying what things depend on those things are sometimes programmatically detectable (by your build process, dependancy tree, and build validation code) but much much more dangerously only discoverable via testing.
"Old man yells at systemd"
From the parents' point of view, it may not make a difference, but shame on you for saying this:
With Manhunt, maybe. With Oblivion, sorry, NO.
The offending content in Oblivion was not ever shipped in Oblivion. It wasn't "trivially locked". It was completely absent from the game, until someone added it -- as an optional, third-party mod.
To make it simpler, I'll use a car analogy: Manhunt is like a moped that comes with some sort of cap -- a physical device that can be removed, which was put there to limit how fast the engine can go. Oblivion is more like a cheap sedan -- ok, yes, it COULD be tricked out with Nitrous Oxide. But right now, it's just a cheap sedan. That old Lincoln Town Car could have rocket engines strapped to it -- in fact, someone has done so -- but until you do, it's relatively safe.
Now, I'd even go so far as to say that Manhunt should be covered here, as both unlocking and modding are generally going to be trivial. At least, once someone's done it once, it will be trivial to whoever. But the fact remains: Manhunt contained this content, even if it was locked. Oblivion did not.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The think I don't understand is a game is Rated M for mature when it hits shelfs so the ESRB doesn't have a fit about it and ban it from being sold in retail stores if Rockstar Games officially disables the content from the Final release on the Game and the ESRB gives it its rating why should Rockstar be held responsible for what hacker or hackers does to re enable the content. There are only a few people who actually have the time and knowledge to sit there and stare at code to figure out what is hidden in the game. Its seriously like some one using the level editor released by the company to edit a level and adding extreme levels of Gore and nude pictures to the game. It happens all the damn time why should a company be held any different from the user who creates this content and allows it to be put in games? Look @ Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix that has some gnarly visuals you cant shoot some one in the head and see their brains on the wall what is the difference from GTA or better yet that damn movies that hollywood releases like Saw or hostel or the hills have eyes yet no one seems to be banning those titles but better yet endorsing them with commercials and in theater previews. i don't get how Computer animated drawings (art) can be deemed as any worse than ANY of the stuff that is released in the films that these low budget films make bank off of. If People want to see these things in movies what is a computer visual that isn't 1/3 as intense as movies being looked at. With that said the ESRB pulls people off the street to get a consensus on what they think games should be rated and thanks to Politicians trying to "do something for Amerika" in an attempt to "relate to the people" they have sued and messed with companies that are just attempting to express there freedoms in art no one seems to really question Monet and is dark image or parliament. What is the "Land of the Free coming to"?
Guess I'll run out and grab a copy tonight before they re-rate it AO and get it pulled from shelves.
Think yourself lucky;) Let's not forget that here in the UK, even adults aren't legally allowed to buy it - even the censored version was banned by the BBFC.
I looked forward to the day when adults are allowed to choose what they watch, rather than being told what they can watch by other people. But things seem to be getting worse in this respect, not better (possessing certain material not classified by the BBFC may soon be illegal in the UK, thanks to a law currently passing through Parliament - the Government thinks it's a "loophole" that we can get hold of banned material by downloading it, so seeks to put people in prison for viewing a website it disapproves of).