GTA IV Trailer - Controversy

http://www.rockstargames.com/IV/trailer_splash.html

The Trailer is there. Looks like the next chapter in the saga that is Grand Theft Auto, returns to the place where its 3-d roots began, Liberty City. And it looks like they got a new physics engine, which was a long time coming (the engine used on GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories, and Vice City Stories was all the same, and it originally was used on a game called Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64, so it pretty much had overstayed its welcome).

But, wherever GTA goes, controversy follows. In the 1 minute trailer there are images of the Statue of Liberty, Empire St. building, and many other things. Of course, this is a fictional New York, but it didn't stop New York Mayor Bloomberg or many other people from getting upset about it.

"Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland" - City Councilman Peter Vallone

"The mayor does not support any video game where you earn points for injuring or killing police officers" - Jason Post, spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg.

Let's not mention that if you do kill a police officer on the game, your heat level goes up, and police begin to persue you. No instead lets tell people you are REWARDED for killing cops, and the article even mentions selling porn to children! Where are they getting this?

This is becoming more common today. The game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas, based in the city of Las Vegas, you infiltrate Casinos and other Vegas locations to stop terrorists. The City of Las Vegas was very upset about this game.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 is the sequel to the game where you save the Mexican president. These games are set around the year 2013, and in this time there is a wall between the border of Mexico and the US. You infiltrate the border and do missions trying to stop Mexican Rebels. The Mexican Government went as far as removing all copies of the game from circulation.

So as graphics progress and storylines go beyond the norm, and extend to issues that may be controversial, the video game industry gets a bad name for itself. And this is at a time when more people play games worldwide than ever before. Will people accept video games in the mainstream? I guess the Wii, even though it is nothing but two gamecube's taped together, can help bring it back to the forefront. (Hecker said what most people were thinking, in my opinion.)