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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!
Are you still living in 1997? Clearly you don't own anything anymore, you merely have some permission to use the publisher's sacred content in the one way they deem fit. Your concept of owning stuff you paid for is laughable.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
Your analogy to the magazine is way off, though. Folding over pages doesn't make them unavailable, heh, even if they're glued shut. Besides, the point isn't about accessibility per se (a high difficulty mode-related unlock can be just as inaccessible as outright disabling content from an effort-related standpoint), as much as it is a question of *what exactly is being rated.* Is it the game you will be playing? or is it the game you could potentially be playing if you use 3rd party apps to mess with the content in some fashion?
I'm not defending Rockstar's decision necessarily, but I'm certainly not criticizing it and I am definitely criticizing the ESRB's usual reaction to these situations.
I like basketball!!1!
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.
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?
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"
No, but PCs had been a personal hate of mine for a long time as a kid when I used Macs and Amigas, then when I learned of Linux I realised it was just Microsoft that were making the platform a puddle of piss. I have a Wii and a DS (where again previously I was never a big fan of Nintendo until recently when they started making products that I actually find interesting and cool). While a company should have making money as one of its goals, it will usually perform better in that regards if it actually does its best for the customer, rather than catering to its own agenda. Anyway, that was a particularly poor troll, considering it's obviously just Microsoft I loathe, and the money thing was just directed at Ballmer, not Microsoft in general. There are plenty more reasons than the money thing to hate Microsoft. Karma whore a go go >_>
which is totally what she said