Leland Yee slams ESRB over GTA rating

California assemblyman Leland Yee is back on the warpath over videogame violence once more, this time accusing the ESRB of failing parents after the discovery that the PC version of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas contains hidden sex scenes.

Yee believes that the game, already rated M (Mature), should have been given the extremely rare AO (Adults Only) rating, which would have prevented the majority of mainstream retailers from stocking it.

"Once again, the ESRB has failed our parents," he rages in a press release on the subject, issued this week. "This particular game has been known to include extremely heinous acts of violence, and now it has been uncovered that the game also includes explicit sexual scenes that are inappropriate for our children."

"I have urged the ESRB on numerous occasions to rate this game AO basd on its blatantly graphic nature," he continues. "Clearly the ESRB has a conflict of interest in rating these games... Parents cannot trust the ESRB to rate games appropriately or the industry to look out for our children's best interests."

This is far from being Yee's first attack on the industry and its ratings board - the outspoken assemblyman has also tried to pass a number of bills in California which would have restricted the sale of violent games to minors, moves condemned by the games retailer body IEMA as unnecessary in the face of voluntary moves towards demanding ID from customers purchasing M-rated titles.

All of his bills have been either defeated or massively watered down, however, not least because of suspicion that much of what he has proposed would be unconstitutional - and in this instance, again, Yee seems to be shooting from the hip.

The sexual content he refers to in San Andreas is an unfinished and apparently abandoned minigame concept that isn't actually available in the game, but exists in hidden files that can be unlocked only by downloading a specific patch from the Internet.

The game is also still rated as an M title, which is a clear rating that marks it as suitable for mature audiences only - and is widely accepted as a much more sensible rating for general game content than the AO rating, which is designed largely for explicitly pornographic products.