Hot Coffee Boils Over!!!

I wrote about the Hot Coffee mod and the fascist liberals (especially Hillary!) intent to censor video games in retaliation. Rockstar Games, the developer, contended that this was an unauthorized hack and they didn't do it, only to have it discovered that the PS2 version had it, too.

Well, the fit has hit the shan and GTA:SA has been slapped with a revised AO (Adults Only) rating and is being pulled from the shelves.

A Los Angeles Times story on the rating quoted Take-Two spokesman Jim Ankner as admitting that "there is sex content in the [San Andreas] disc. ... The editing and finalization of any game is a complicated task and it's not uncommon for unused and unfinished content to remain on the disc." However, a Rockstar Games spokesperson flatly told GameSpot that Ankner "was misquoted."

This is true. Hackers discovered that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords (aka KOTOR2 for obvious reasons) had dialogue recordings, notes and scripting for several storylines that were cut when the publisher rushed the game to market for the Xmas season last year.

There was no misquoting Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB. In a sternly worded statement on the ESRB site, she said "we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs of all three platform versions of the game (i.e., PC CD-ROM, Xbox, and PS2)." She also had harsh words for Take-Two. "Considering the existence of the undisclosed and highly pertinent content on the final discs, compounded by the broad distribution of the third party modification, the credibility and utility of the initial ESRB rating has been seriously undermined," she said. "Going forward, the ESRB will now require all game publishers to submit any pertinent content shipped in final product even if is not intended to ever be accessed during game play, or remove it from the final disc."

Vance did concur with Rockstar's assertion that the sex minigames were "programmed by Rockstar to be inaccessible to the player and they have stated that it was never intended to be made accessible. The material can only be accessed by downloading a software patch, created by an independent third party without Rockstar's permission, which is now freely available on the Internet and through console accessories." A Rockstar spokesperson said the company was considering legal action against Action Replay, GameShark, and other makers of console cheat devices that allow access to the sex minigames.

A few thoughts:

1. While Rockstar shouldn't have pretended the sex minigame wasn't in there, the fact remains that the kiddies couldn't get to the porn without doing some deliberate things to get at it. No one was going to just stumble into it as the stories - the game press stories, not the MSM hack jobs - clearly explained.

It's like saying that a strip club should be closed because kids pass by on the sidewalk. Unless they proactively go into the club, they'll never see the skin, so what's the need to censor, Hillary!?

B. As I wondered before, the GTA series has always been anti-social and based on violence to complete its goals, but it wasn't until the discovery of cable-worthy pixelated sex that the fascists decided to howl.

Keep that in mind you hear one of these Leftists sneer that non-liberals are anti-sex.