I seem to notice almost every hardcore game out there needs to have an “M” rating slapped on there by the ESRB since M stands for “Mature” and “Manly.” What amuses me a lot about some of these so-called “hardcore” games is that there are some out there with an M rating on there that makes me scratch my head as to how in the world they got that rating to begin with. Halo is the first one that immediately comes to my mind. I have no idea as to exactly how the game would be classified with an M rating by the ESRB because Doom is a lot more gorier with a lot of satanic implications.
However, what really makes me laugh are game series that transition from a Teen rating to an M rating over the course of its lifetime. One of my favorite game series, Dead or Alive (which is incorrectly labelled as Hardcore because it’s one of the most noob-friendly fighting games out there) started off with Teen ratings:
Then when they re-released their definitive versions of Dead or Alive 1 and 2 on the Xbox, they got slapped with a Mature reason for… I have absolutely no idea, to be honest:
Oh wait, I know the reason why. The clue lies in the ESRB’s verdict for the 3DS version of the series:
Because this release of Dead or Alive is on a video game system made by a company that is not considered “hardcore” by the hardcore, it doesn’t deserve the M rating.
There’s another example with Relic’s RTS adaptations of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop games as well. After Dawn of War, the ESRB has condemned the series with an M rating from the game’s first expansion onward. What confuses me about this is that the death animations for both starcraft 1 and 2 disturb me a lot more than Relic’s well-animated deaths, and yet Blizzard is able get away with a Teen rating. Heck, Starcraft’s dialog has a lot more SWEARING than Relic’s Warhammer 40K RTS games.
But yeah, there seems to be a trend that the hardcore tend to gravitate towards games with a “Mature” rating to them. Personally my game library doesn’t have a lot of M rated games because a lot of the classics never really cared about appealing to a certain demographic to begin with.
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You bring up a great topic for discussion. How does the ESRB work and why do games get certain ratings?Off the top of my head, I’d say the Dead and Alive series got rated mature as it became famous more for its ‘boob physics’ than its gameplay. The purpose of the ESRB is not to accurately rate games in a scientific way but for the Game Industry to police itself to keep the big government gorilla off its back.In Korea, Starcraft 2 had a ton of problems because of the implication of drug use (stim packs the marines use) and some other things. However, I do not understand what all goes on in Korea. From what I gather, the situation was more about KESPA’s interference than anything else.
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