Remember the popular number by OMC, which went, “How Bizarre”? It seems that the president of Factor 5, Julian Eggebrecht is singing the same song. GameSpot is reporting that Eggebrecht has blasted the American Entertainment Software Rating Board, calling the ratings as ‘bizarre’.
Julian Eggebrecht wanted a T for Teen rating for Lair and had to go through a long process of tweaking his game for it. He said, “You can set up to 5,000 people on fire, and they run around and scream, and that’s fine because there’s no blood. It’s a flat-out bizarre system, and I think it has no relation to what is happening in other media.”
In fact, Eggebrecht cited examples of violent movies like A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers. He found the ratings problematic and also expressed his concern about the way Manhunt 2 was treated by the American and the British ratings agencies. The executive felt that it was a very scary development that the game was banned in the UK.
Julian Eggebrecht also called for a game with real sexual content in Germany! He remarked, “I want to see a game with real sexual content in a store here in Germany. I don’t think it will happen unless we really recognize games as an artform. How (San Andreas) can be drawn off the shelves based on a cheat in which you can barely see something that might be interpreted as a sexual act, as an Easter Egg no less is absolutely beyond me, when at the same time movies have been pushing the envelope for a long time.”
His call for sexual content in a video game in Germany may seem ‘bizarre’, but one has to agree of what he said about the treatment of Manhunt 2 as even gamers were concerned when they found the game was banned. They fear that other games with the similar content would also face the same fate.