So I missed a couple.
Zurai wrote:
Would it be acceptable to ship a porn movie on a game cd, just because it wasn't a part of the game (but could be watched in game with a simple mod - or even if not)?
Irrelevant comparison - porn movies aren't normally part of games. Minigames with fairly extreme content
are part of Rockstar games, pretty much constantly. If a porno flick were on a game CD, it would mean that somebody either put it there deliberately or snuck it in. In the case of unused game content, all it means is that they forgot to remove it - assuming that it was some nefarious conspiracy on Rockstar's part just doesn't match with the unfinished nature of the content.
Zurai wrote:
Why shouldn't they be punished for it? If you leave a porn movie under Finding Nemo and tape to the front of the case "little jimmy, you may find this interesting" is it not your fault for doing so, even though you never physically put it in the dvd player?
What does GTA:SA, a game intended to have a 17+ rating, have to do with Finding Nemo, a movie made for toddlers? Furthermore, what does hardcore porn have to do with this minigame - it was less graphic and less revealing than Cinemax softcore.
The analogy might hold if you compared it to an NC-17 sex scene hidden on an R rated movie.
Comparing it to hardcore in a kids movie, though, just exagerates the reality so far that it becomes a meaningless comparrison.
Zurai wrote:
Rockstar knew they couldn't ship a sex game with an M rating. Why, then, did they spend money creating one?
If cost were the object, why did they pay to make it in the first place?
Because they may have considered something like that? We're not talking a $10,000 investment here, just a little bit of code and maybe one texture (the woman in underwear skin). Some developer may have coded it in to present to the team as an idea, then had it shot down. Hell, they may have suggested it in a meeting, coded a sample version, then decided that there was no way to pull it off without losing their rating and cancelled the idea. For every idea that ends up in a final game, a handful are tried out and discarded.
I'm not saying Rockstar is blameless. I'm not saying it isn't a problem (although I think it is exposing more alternate problems than the scope of its own).
I'm saying that, first of all, it isn't uncommon to have unused content in games. The KOTOR II example is right on - there was a whole alternate ending and alternate level that was changed, with the originals left behind in the code. Sacred was shipped without blood for a lower rating, but left the blood textures, code, and animations on the disk, which were hacked back in a day or two after release, then patched back out. System Shock II had models removed from some levels at the last minute to lower LOD and improve FPS, which were left on the disk. Morrowind has whole dungeons that were cancelled, but left in the game. Hell, even the infamous GTA:SA had a whole skateboarding system that was cancelled - but the models and textures are still right there, on the disk.
Yes, Rockstar made a mistake, but given that experimenting with different ideas, including coding samples for testing, is a vital part of the development process, and that leaving unused or cancelled content on a disk is exceedingly common, I say that the mistake was in not realizing that part of their unused material was something that should have been removed for obvious reasons.
Anyone who has worked on a comlex product with a deadline can tell you how common small oversights are, especially with tertiary material that likely hasn't been seen in months. The idea that Rockstar just had a bit of an oversight, forgetting that
that particular piece of content was amongst their leftovers is far, far more likely than Rockstar having some sort of nefarious plan to slip a poorly executed, poorly textured sex game into their product.
What doesn't kill me makes me stranger.
