It's always the same tho', isn't it?... *sigh*
Someone saw something they didn't like, and blamed everyone else for it. No one would take blame, pushing it away as fast as they could, and in the end the house came crashing down.
The important factors have already been said. There's no point in arguing about fact.
Fact: no matter how badly done, it was part of the original game. No hacks. It was a locked feature that was already there. It was simply pulled appart before release, and thus looks like crap.
Fact: the rating system sucks. It's molly cuddling the nation(s) and ultimately only leading them into disorder.
If people are allowed to complain about every little frantic thing, because they can't cope with how the world is evolving, we'll never evolve.
No rating system will ever work tho'. It can't possibly.
The rating system is there, so that parents can see what their kids are buying. So they don't have to play through the entire game to see if it's bad influence, but simply check the marker. But regardless of what we change this too, the problem, really isn't with the rating itself.
It's with the parents. The people who so desperately try to prevent their 16-year-old kids from seeing nudity even tho' they've been masturbating for the better part of 5 years. They wont let them see violence even tho' they get in fights in school, watch movies and the news, and have a perfectly functional understanding of what it is. They wont let them swear, even tho' it's the only thing the kids do when they leave their house to go hang out with their friends.
The problem isn't ratings or explicit content. It's controll.
The sooner parents learn that they can't controll their kids... Merely guide them, the sooner we can get over all this nonsense about ratings and ba influense.
Honestly speaking. If your child has a fit and freaks out because they played a game with a gun in it, they'd never have survived in society anyway. Stop whining and let them live their life. Guide them, but don't hold their hand. They're beyond any parent's god damn controll. Just like they themselves were beyong their parents controll.
It's funny how fast people tend to forget this.
All these rules aren't serving life. They're restricting it. The ratings are fine, but seriously. Grow up. It's a God damn game. If you can't tell the differance, then you're the one with the problem, not your child.
Kids aren't as dumb as parents think. They can look after themselves. They don't blindly believe everything they see, and wont become drug dealers because they played a game. Even if they do make mistakes. We all did. You learn from your mistakes. You grow as a person by making mistakes, not by never making any. We've all slept with people we shouldn't have. We've all gotten in trouble with the law at some point in our lives, regardless of how minor. We've all gotten hurt, been sick and felt stupid. But we're still here. It's part of growing up, and the sooner the current parent generation realizes this, the sooner things like this will fade.
RR put some content on a game that they shouldn't have. But honestly, has it really changed anything? Has anyone's lives been altered in anyway? People need to get some hobbies, because this is hysteria. Nothing else. We have wars going on. People are dying. Yet we'd rather spend thousands of dollars and minutes arguing about a computer game. A game that doesn't even show you the offending bits. You have to go and look for them yourself. If you're looking for them, then you're asking for it. Don't blame them when you find it. They went looking for trouble. They found it. It wasn't given to them. The fact that they might have put it there changes nothing. It wouldn't have been shown, ever, if people hadn't thought "this might be wrong, but I'll do it anyway, besides, I can't be blamed!". It's like looking for fights in town, and then complaining when you get punched. If you don't like it, don't go looking. If you do go looking, don't blame anyone else for your inability to handle what you found.
Sometimes I wish the world would grow up... Or lie down and die.
Tm