Rated Poorly "Pornography exists for the lonesome, the ugly, the fearful - It's made for the losers" Rita Mae Brown (Likely a woman) There’s a game out for a couple systems called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Well, it is currently destroying the fabric of society, if you haven’t noticed. Note: If you have not noticed, you either A. Do not own a television, or B. Live somewhere other than America. Sorry for the inconvenience if either applies (especially "B", given all that national health care must be a real pain). Rockstar Games, the company that produces this game, has sinned against God. The level of abominable material inserted into this game is frightening. In this game, you play as an African American gentleman by the name of C.J., a rather friendly fellow that eventually becomes a 9,321 time murderer likely to wear a pimp suit at all times. C.J.’s basic goal, aside from "don’t get killed all the time", is to earn as much money as possible while protecting his crew. And while he ends up personally killing roughly half of his crew, the other half he goes to great lengths to not shoot, so I suppose he comes out even. Also, C.J. doesn’t want to go to jail. While that is a common aspiration for most people, C.J. has a particular interest in avoiding the authorities due to his constant need to shoot people in the face. Additionally, C.J. fell behind a little on his car insurance payments, but luckily developed the mutant power of being able to open any car door and start said car in an instant. C.J. briefly considered joining The X-Men with his newfound abilities, but decided against it after determining that Storm was kind of a bitch. One way or another, it leads to an awful lot of car jacking, or ": San Andreas", for our protagonist. C.J. commits a few other crimes over the course of the game, such as car-exploding, reckless driving, building-exploding, grand theft plane-o, dam-exploding, drug trafficking, and James Wood-exploding. Generally, C.J. commits every sin alive, except possibly that one that involves that one kind of sheep. You know what I’m talking about. In order to progress in this atrocity, you must guide C.J. through missions that deviate between "shoot everything in site" and "abhorrently annoying". Basically, any mission that strays from the GTA formula of "drive around and shoot people" fails miserably, and leads to an established killer (carrying more of an arsenal than the entire national guard) having to dance for the opportunity to heist a vehicle. There is nothing stupider on this planet. And while the missions that do involve the reason you’d purchase the game are often fun, toward the middle/end of the game, some of the missions can take upwards of a half hour to an hour to complete, and one mistake, such as crashing an immediately replaceable car, can lead to the failure of a mission, with a half hour drive back to restart. It makes for game play that, to say the least, is as frustrating as trying to cram a camel through the head of a pig. Anytime you don’t have to be doing something is fun, anytime you actually want to make progress, however, there’s a 74% chance it will make you much more likely to murder passersby. In the game, I mean. The game, definitely. And while the storyline guides C.J. through a murderous rampage that ends up sending an entire city into a riot, there are plenty of things to do on the side that aren’t remotely required, such as stomp a hooker well after she’s gone to the great street corner-beyond. For those of you who want a more meaningful relationship between two pixel rendered people that don’t exist, there’s the girlfriends. And therein lies the biggest problem people currently have. When GTA: SA was first released, it was said that the girlfriends were the most pointless thing known to man. They’re just like real girlfriends, you have to get dressed up, take them where they want, listen to any complaints they make about how many pedestrians you mow down, and then pay for their meals, except the benefits from the relationship, the feeling that someone out there "knows" you, that you have someone that’s there for you, and, of course, constant, unsavory premarital sex, were left out. As it turns out now, of course, there was a point to the girlfriends aside from getting a few lousy outfits. Yes, it appears Rockstar Games originally planned to include a sex-based mini game as a "reward" for wooing your woman. Rockstar Games did sagely determine that it was a bad idea to have something so... pointlessly soft core in their game, and decided to remove it from the final product. Only they forgot to, you know, do that. While it is, as of the time of this writing, impossible to access the sex mini game without a cheating device, with the proper code, your digital avatar can be having sex... fully clothed... with a digital female... semi-clothed. Be glad, for the record, that C.J. is fully clothed, as it is possible to cause C.J. to weigh approximately 300 lbs., so you don’t want see that. Come to think of it, wonder if you can actually see the woman at the point that C.J. dwarfs small planets. Now I appear to have gone blind. So Rockstar Games left the code in, and released it on the Playstation 2 version, where it was not found. The PS2 version was released on 10/26/04. On 06/07/05, the PC and Xbox versions were released. Incase you’re not paying attention, and can’t fault you there, that’s a difference of over six months. Six months Rockstar Games had to modify the PS2 version for release for Xbox and PC, and they saw fit to not remove the code. I understand that video games are essentially endless strings of spaghetti code and that removing or altering the slightest thing is more dangerous than improperly disarming an atomic bomb, but guess what guys, this is an atomic bomb. The video game industry is now in the most dire situation it has ever experienced. Hilary Clinton, champion of human rights and a woman obviously very opposed to the idea of any creature alive getting naked, can say that the video game industry is sneaking pornography into games, and she’s right. Hilary Clinton is in the right. Rockstar Games, what have you done? Does anyone remember the Comics Code Authority? It was a body of self-censorship for the comic book industry, started when some nut called Batman, man of a thousand boners, gay. It came into existence in the 50’s, remained unmodified for two decades, and was used in a less serious degree for another three. And what did it do to the medium? It made comics almost entirely for kids, because code dictated that good must always be good, and evil must always be evil. Sex was prohibited, as was drugs, alcohol, and excessive death of any kind. Essentially, it turned a medium written by adults for people of all ages into a medium meant exclusively for five year olds. And to top it all off, the code nearly killed publisher Entertaining Comics (EC), as many of the comics they published featured murder and the undead, two things not allowed under the code. Eventually, EC escaped the code by making their popular comic "Mad" a magazine, but not without significant losses. Wonder why I’m bringing this up? Wal-Mart controls 23% of video game sales. That may not seem like the biggest number in the world, but in the past two years, the game industry has consistently made $10 billion annually. 23% of 10,000,000,000 is 2,300,000,000, for you slowbies. That’s enough money to buy your way out of about twenty murders in Washington DC. Wal-Mart refuses to sell games that are rated "Adults Only". If your game is rated Adult Only, it has already, even without other retailers with the same policy, lost nearly a quarter of its possible sales. 16% of all game sales in 2004 were rated "M for Mature". Theoretically, the final ramifications of this, if Wal-Mart, and just Wal-Mart, gets "scared away" from M rated games (and my math isn’t as sucky as usual) is the video game industry would lose $416 million. To say nothing of the companies like Rockstar Games who produce, almost exclusively, M rated games. These companies, possibly the Entertaining Comics of our generation, would likely go out of business or start producing GTA themed versions of Spyro. My final point: Rockstar Games, through deciding not to take out on measly bit of code for the PC release, has opened an entire can of worms that may very well set the video game industry back twenty years. For two decades we have grown up with our games, and we’ve gone from Big Bird’s Hide & Seek to C.J.’s Sex & Stomp, and, for better or worse, it has held our interest. We may be facing a crisis of maturity for this beloved medium, all because one company wasn’t mature enough to just remove something that even it seemed to find stupid. Thanks, Rockstar Games, hope you suffer as much as we will. "The only question to ask yourself is, how much are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this success?" Larry Flynt (Lover of porn) Well, may as well use this ESRB rating system for something. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Final Rating: 8 Mature Ratings and 1 AO Rating. Leave a trail of dead hookers back to Game'in

All non-copyrighted material is copyright 2005 Robert Pollack. Reproduction of most anything without Robert's express permission in whole or in part is prohibited by law. Ain't that a kick in the pants?