Scared of Poo

So yesterday I was sat in the car while Gemma was in a shop getting stuff when suddenly I heard something on the radio, specifically on the news that really pissed me off, I actually grumbled “For fuck sake” at the stereo. This article is the news story that pissed me off. There are a few reasons why it pissed me off, first of all is the fact that I was looking forward to this game, sure this isn’t the most important factor for my anger, so I thought i’d quickly mention it and leave that at that.

The main thing that got to me was that the game has actually been banned, it’s now illegal to sell it in the UK, sure Rockstar can still appeal against the ruling, but with how the media love to paint things, I doubt an appeal will be successful. The strange thing is that the game had a bad rap straight away because of the first in it’s series, where the parents of a murdered 14 year old boy claimed that the murderer (a 17 year old male) was “inspired” by the first game in the Manhunt series. So even though the Police, Courts, Prosecution and Defense didn’t mention Manhunt as a factor within the case, which was finally ruled as a drug related robbery that led to murder. The most frustrating factor about this whole thing is that 17 year didn’t even own Manhunt (indeed he could have sold it previous to the event for drug money) but the 14 year old did own the game, which had to be bought for him by an adult (most probably his parents).

For fuck sake the game is rated 18 and as I work in retail I have come across customers that were intending to buy age inappropriate games and I have warned those customers that they are 12, 15 or 18 age rated games and then in most cases the customer thanked me and didn’t buy the game.

Ok so I’m a bit of a hypocrite in the sense that my parents would buy me and my brother games such as the original 18 rated game, Grand Theft Auto (this was in 1997 so would have been 13 at the time and my brother would have been 9). The key thing is that my parents monitored us and if they felt that there was any negative influence caused by these games or films, they would remove them from our environment. That’s what parents should do, not complain to the media about how the media is the reasons for their woes.

So yeah that’s pissed me off, which reminds me of an article that I read that concluded movies have more of an effect on a person’s personality than games, because of the simple fact that games are interactive and you aren’t forced to do anything, whereas with movies you can only sit back and watch as the violence happens.

Anyways in conclusion, I hate how games are considered to be violent or sexy, but now you can say “Fuck” in a 12 rated film.

To quote a Bad Religion Song….. “Fuck Armageddon, this is Hell”