Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

Xbox Live's Major Nelson : 'Oblivion' receives M rating

congratulations, conservative america, you're getting what you want. the ESRB is becoming a weapon for closed-source, closed-API software. the hacker's statement from the linked article about the mod:

I do this because I hate government/society/whatever forcing companies to 'protect our innocent population from seeing those evil dirty things 50% of them posess personally anyways' not because I'm trying to turn it into a porn game."

if the ESRB continues to be pressured into re-rating games, the ultimate end will be that all PC-based games will be rated M. despite the fact that they are not shipping with nudity. despite the fact that hackers are modifying and redistributing copyrighted material (which is already illegal). the only games immune to this are console games. and they're only immune until someone releases a mod chip.

the closest analog to this would be if a woman is walking past a police officer, and someone runs by and steals her shirt. if the police officer then fined her for public indecency, and made no attempt to stop the theif, that would be roughly equivalent to what's happened here.

and only if the woman was a vile and unattractive demonic alien. for the record, i don't have oblivion, but i have played unreal against topless characters. and while we're at it, a retroactive re-rating should go out to unreal, half-life, and pretty much any PC game released in the last decade. i don't normally post about news, but this has been annoying me as much as it annoyed the hacker. he just has the time + skill to do something about it.