I can’t leave it at that. Here’s how stupid it is.

Hillary Saddam Clinton, having spent a little too much time around Tipper Tori Spelling Gore, went after RockStar for...lemee see if I can find the official reason real quick, and then translate it if it really seems necessary....

The sex scenes, inserted in a game whose main character seeks bloody vengeance on gang-filled streets while picking up scantily clad women, had prompted outrage from parent's groups and politicians including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York. –cnn.com

Now. Let’s read this single paragraph very carefully. Let’s even go so far as to rearrange it to make sense in context. The game, whose main character seeks bloody vengeance...gangfilled streets...scantilyclad women, had prompted outrage from parents’ groups and the former first broad once it also appeared to contain thousand-polygon spoofs of naked chicks.

Right? It’s okay to beat cops, dealers, pickups, and the odd lawyer to death with a baseball bat to get enough Wanted Stars to invoke the M1Abrahms and carjack them from the fucking army; but adding in sprites whose polygonal definition is so blocky by design that there’s no need to pixelate over them...let’s make sure we’re all still on the same page here. This is what bothers these fragile little morons:

You can click on this image to open a slightly larger version, though it’ll still be a thousand polygons of ambiguous suck. Up to you.

Now. Before anyone leaps to conclusion on this thing, understand that this is not, in fact, an element of the game. Okay? Throw the disc into the PS2, and this will never, ever occur. On its own. Discover a GameShark code for it, or, as was the case in this instance, download an EULA-breaking patch, and you’ll pull it off. So to speak.

Naked chicks got past the ESRB, whose Patricia Vance [No relation to Lance Vance, I assume] claimed that this pseudoeasteregg ‘seriously undermined’ the entirety of her bullshit whimperfest, because they were never intended by RockStar to be seen. Okay? It’s a simple matter of bloatware. Shit which could potentially make the final cut of a game, or in cases an operating system, may linger in varying stages of completion on the disc itself. Think of it as an unrated deleted scene from a film. You watch the thing from start to finish, never seeing the alternate ending. Unless the alternate ending is made available. These deleted scenes weren’t made available; it took a criminal cracking the code to find them. It’s exactly that simple.

Kinda.

That’s not to say that GTA was the only game ever to contain these little deleted scenes. You want a game with a kidfriendly rating? Trick question: no one wants that; but I bought one anyway—SeaMonkeys2004, better known as Sims2

If this happens to seem really scandalous, remember that Sims2 is rated T for Tard. Or Teen. Or something. I think the first game was actually rated E for Everyone, and had the same Achilles’ Firewall. Naked chicks all the way back in Livin’ Libidinous.

I’m now waiting for Hillary to propose software reform on shit from Maxis, too.

Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure there’s always been some nudity in videogames. I remember the Atari VCS [later named the 2600] and its lack of colouration. Did anyone else happen to notice that the entirety of each guy in AtariBoxing had the same colour of pixel for a face as for the rest of its sixteen-pixel body? He’s either wearing a scubasuit, or Hillary missed something in 1978. And you didn’t even need to hack the game to see that shit.

Betcha never look at that fucking Pilsbury Doughboy the same way again, knowing that....

Dating back further still, there were other available patches to remove inconvenient clothing in toys. Take this example from nineteen sixty-mumble. Even stupid people could figure out how to get these things all undressed and ready for hot plastic action. But, those were simpler times. Before videogames. Before this horrid bitch spent twelve years thinking up a way to fuck up something other than healthcare.

It’s been said that democrats can’t remember the past, and that republicans can’t stop living in it. That being probable, I’m neither: I remember this shit, and I look forward to its replacementware. What I don’t look forward to is having to buy videogames at the fell-off-the-truck sale because stupid, fragile morons are actually too dumb to ascertain what is and isn’t good for their larvae without federal fucking mandates from a group which could be most generously described as ign.com without a sense of humour. I happen to like wandering into EBGames and impulsebuying things like GTA. Partly because I do it often enough that they all know me and tend to give me cool free stuff I’m not supposed to be able to receive. Forgive me if I frequent the joint less often if the most exhilarating title they’re still allowed to stock is PaRappa the AssHat. I’ve got standards of decency, see; and that chittering fucking dog is bloody indecent.

So. This has been educational. Hillary has got my attention. And I’m now looking greatly forward to the 2008 presidential election. Go Condi.