Games & Entertainment

Lesbian Scene in Mass Effect, Gets the Xbox Game Banned

In Singapore

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

15th of November 2007, 12:36 GMT

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If you think that a little girl-on-girl action never hurt anybody then you are sadly mistaking. Case in point, Singapore's Media Development Authority found the lesbian scene featuring two females, one human and one alien, in Bioware's upcoming title Mass Effect, a tad too spicy and hard to swallow. And while you might think that the controversy was sparked by the inter-species sexual relationships, the fact of the matter

is that the Singapore censors decided that the lesbian context could not possibly fly with the local gamers.

Mass Effect is a science-fiction role-playing game developed by BioWare and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The title is scheduled to drop on November 20, and the lesbian scene is but an insignificant detail in the RPG designed exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. In fact the scene has to be triggered by making a few steps and is directly dependent on the character. A female character will end up kissing and caressing an alien woman, but this is about it. There is in fact no hard-core action of any sort involved and BioWare has made sure to dodge further controversy from the get go and did not include a human man on alien male action at all.

The deputy director of the Board of Film Censors confirmed in an official statement that the scene of lesbian intimacy is what generated the decision to ban the game. Singapore has quite strong guidelines in place when it comes down to entertainment and bans all content featuring exploitative or gratuitous sex. The same applies for violence although this is not the case of Mass Effect. This is of course not the first time Singapore has exercised concern over the gaming content allowed in the country, having also banned God of War II and The Darkness, earlier in 2007. Microsoft had nothing more to comment than to reveal that it will comply with the decision.

TAGS:

Mass Effect | Bioware | Xbox 360

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: Lost Angel on 15 Nov 2007, 18:00 GMT	reply to this comment
neither good nor bad, on one hand - it is up to gamers really what to play and what scenes to see, on the other hand - too much of gay/lesbian stuff in the media already - one has to halt it somewhere somehow - why not there.

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