Old, but still disappointing news.

Jul 15, 2005 16:01

Hillary Clinton gets her Republican on.Remember me saying that God gets away with heavy handed symbolism that we couldn't ( Read more... )

gamedev, politics

Leave a comment

Comments 6

(The comment has been removed)

cvirtue July 16 2005, 00:17:21 UTC
One can begin several times. More rhetorically satisfying.

I remember my father pointing out the "killing is ok, but not love" thing as it related to James Bond movies, when I was around 12.

Greatsword, do you think the minigames were in there all along, or added by the mod as some have claimed? Metahacker, I've been wondering for months what that icon is; could you enlighten me?

I don't know from minigames, except someone told me about the little micro thingy in Excel years ago, with the 3-d hall and ... steps, was it? I forget. It was cute.

Reply

metageek July 16 2005, 00:39:37 UTC
EA asserts that the mod creates the sex scene out of whole cloth. It ought to be fairly easy to tell whether they're telling the truth, but I haven't yet heard from anybody who's tried.

But the other thing that EA said was that the people who created the mod must have decompiled their program, to get the source code, and modified that, so they would take steps in the future to obscure the source code.

This makes no sense. You don't need to actually decompile a program to do the kind of patch we're talking about here; all you need to do is point a debugger at the program and identify a single address where you can insert a call to your own code. (Besides, if they decompiled it, they could change and redistribute the whole thing. Why bother with a patch?)

That sort of patching EA will never be able to do anything about, so why not just say so and say it's not their fault? I mean, someone could just as well provide a patch to make Republican perverts come on screen and start ranting about Jimmy Carter when you start up Microsoft ( ... )

Reply

greatsword July 16 2005, 00:52:25 UTC
Not EA. Take Two.

They are very different companies. EA makes their money on Madden and big, big licenses.

I think the basic models were on the disk. I don't know about the minigames, but it's possible, even probable.

I don't think the ESRB should be accountable for examining content that's not exposed to gameplay.

What you'd really have to do to put in hardcore content out of whole cloth is to deconstruct the model file format by running the code in a debugger - assuming that the file format isn't made public. Then you can override the load (perhaps just by replacing a file) and presto - new images in game.

On the Xbox you have to do a hardware mod to make the game run off a hard disk image, as the bootable disks aren't in any standard format and (as far as I know) haven't been spoofed yet.

Of course, to get access to the mod, you need access to the net. And of course other than this the net is completely devoid of porn, right?

Reply


re: Old, but still disappointing news. nitnorth July 16 2005, 03:33:03 UTC
> Very Republican of you, Hillary. Newt would be proud.
Um. Two words: Tipper Gore.
-- Nitnorth

Reply

Re: Old, but still disappointing news. greatsword July 16 2005, 03:57:39 UTC
To be fair, Tipper Gore would have been crusading against this franchise pretty hard since GTA3.

I don't have as strong an objection to Leland Yee. His bill is malformed, and he's against the ESRB - which works pretty well, actually. But he didn't just jump on this bandwagon after the sex thing broke. He's against the violence.

I think there's a level of violence which should land a game an AO rating. Personally, I'd put GTA at that level. But if you're not offended by the basic content of GTA enough to speak out, this isn't the time to jump in.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up