It's a shame they scrapped the Kevin Butler commercials. Those were the funniest ads in the gaming world behind those squirrels and their "portable nut."

How many of you have ever witnessed this scenario?

Pre-pubescent kid goes into store. Kid tries to buy M-rated game. Saleperson refuses. Kid leaves store and returns shortly with parent. The parent, annoyed that he/she had to come into the store, buys the game over the warnings of the salesperson who advises that said game is shockingly inappropriate for children.

I can't count the number of times I've seen that scenario. I'm convinced that parents are the problem with kids getting M-rated games, not retailers.

And what of those games that were made before the ESRB ratings system? Are they no longer allowed to be sold?

This seems like a strange issue for the feds to take up. My guess is that Rep. Matheson knows that this legislation won't hold muster, but he wants to look like he's "doing something" on the issue until it eventually blows over.

@codeman101360 I was thinking the same thing about how useless (and unconstitutional) this bill is. And I haven't even seen an AO game since the San Andreas "hot coffee" scandal.

How much confidence can I have in the beta software if they can't even get the sign-up web page working properly? Sheesh.

I'm assuming based on this article and the comments that the two games are not actually related as I had assumed before. But for the uninitiated, that could have been made clearer in the article.

This should mollify a lot of grumpy PS3-bound Skyrim gamers. :-)

I have always thought that Sony missed an opportunity by not redesigning their controller with the PS3 launch. I think they got scared by the backlash over the rumored "Batarang" controller and decided to do nothing instead.

In contrast, the XBOX had a very good controller that became a great controller with the XBOX 360. Just my opinion, but it feels really good in the hands after a long time.

Still, I'm not sure I'd recommend that Sony go all derivative. As far as I know, the Move controllers were tepidly received by PS gamers; I'm not sure they'll be much more welcoming to this biometric LCD-screen thing described here.

I don't buy it. Sexism may not have it's roots at EA, but the lack of females in game programming (and engineering generally) isn't just some evolutionary curiosity. It's the result of millennia of females being told from childhood that science, math, and higher education were intellectual heavy lifting that should be left to the boys. And this was pretty much consistent throughout history up until about a generation ago and only in a few western countries.

Here in America the doors are open wider than ever before, but there are still many underlying assumptions about the gaming community, both the gamers and the players. The first assumption is that you're a white male. All of the Hall of Fame game developers are white men. And if you're a player who isn't a white male, you might not even want to bother going online. Or at least mute the voice chat...it probably won't be pretty.

Last year word surfaced that Irrational and/or 2K was debating whether to put Elizabeth on the cover of Bioshock Infinite. How does that make sense? If it were a movie, we'd call her a co-star. If it were a song, we'd put her out front. But since it's a videogame, let's stick with the masculine hero on the front of the box.

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Consider me part of the eleven percent minority.

NRA President Wayne LaPierre threw that red herring out there and people jumped on it like a dog on--well, a red herring. I knew the discovery that the Columbine High shooters played videogames (Doom, uh-oh!) would lead to some connection being made between videogames and mass murder. But in this latest case in Sandy Hook Elementary, there has been no notion that videogames were connected...but somehow they're the problem!

I have no doubt that legislatures around the country even now are drafting legislation that will get shredded when tossed up against the First Amendment, but lawmakers will draft and/or pass it anyway in order to be seen as "doing something" to keep kids safe from the scourge of violent videogames.

People fear what they don't understand, and until people understand that videogames are not exclusively for kids, then they'll see any moderately mature game as being as inappropriate as The Boondocks on Disney Channel.

In all the mass shootings I've seen, the common thread was never videogames, music, or movies. It was the shooting. Maybe the guns are the problem, not the games.