GTA IV Release

From Gamepolitics.com
California State Senator Leland Yee has publicly urged parents to please not buy GTA IV for young children. Hopefully this is just a reminder, because by this point in the series, only Osama bin Laden and other cave-dwellers wouldn't know that GTA is not for kids.

He then goes on to accuse Rockstar of maliciously deceiving the ESRB. I assume he's referring to the Hot Coffee content in GTA: San Andreas. I've seen it. And in addition to it being lame, and not at all erotic or arousing, it was deleted from the game. Admittedly, Rockstar should have eliminated all the code instead of making it inaccessible through the regular play. But take a step back for a second, and ponder this: the point of ESRB ratings is to keep little kiddies safe, right? How many little kiddies are able to hack into the game data and access this information? Don't know the exact number? Neither do I. But I do know that it's less than saw footage during the endless news coverage.

It's a bit embarrassing to see Leland Yee railing yet again about violent video games. He's a San Franciscan, for starters, and I supported him prior to his video game-scape-goating days. He's a child psychologist by trade, and so he at least has more credibility than others that I could name. I'd be interested to see his response to the arguments raised by Grand Theft Childhood (which should be arriving any day now via amazon.com). Yee seems to be a one-trick pony, as I don't think any of his constituents (or anyone else for that matter) could name one thing that he's done besides try to make the sale of video games to minors the legal equivalent of selling hardcore pornography to kids.