Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I just got the following in my email from Text Link Ads:

Important Advertising Script Update

We have made an imporant update to our TLA publisher code. [...] Note: This will not become common practice. Periodic code updates are not in the works, but this is something that we do need you to do this time.

Curious to know what had changed, I diffed the files:

echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%; padding: 0; display: inline;\"><span style=\"width: 100%; padding: 3px; display: block; margin: 0; font-size: 12px; color: #000000;\">".$arr_xml['BeforeText'][$i]." <a style=\"color: #000000; font-size: 12px;\" href=\"".$arr_xml['URL'][$i]."\">".$arr_xml['Text'][$i]."</a> ".$arr_xml['AfterText'][$i]."</span></li>\n";

Yep–they changed the styling for who knows what reason.

Blizzard just released the Warcraft III 1.20e patch for Battle.net, which means that everyone playing using no-cd versions of 1.20d has been scrambling to find the latest patch, crack, or nocd. Fortunately for you, I’m going to mirror it here, along with instructions on how to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Find your Warcraft III directory, usually C:\Program Files\Warcraft III
2. Rename the 1.20d cracked exe war3.exe to war3-d-old.exe
3. Rename the old 1.20d non-cracked exe war3.120d to war3.exe
4. Download the Blizzard 1.20e patch and install it
5. Download the 1.20e nocd and install it

At this point, you should now be able to play Warcraft III on the Battle.net servers without using a cd. You’ll still need a valid serial number, though, which means you’ve already bought the game. This is just a convenience for us lazy gamers who want to dota without sticking in the Frozen Throne cd every time.

Please note that this post contains pictures of trivial female upper body nudity

You remember the GTA sex scandal where a mini-game could be unlocked that simulated sex between the main character and nude females in the game. For that, Hillary Clinton got involved, and the game was yanked to put an M rating back on the box. Now, according to Joystiq, it seems like Oblivion is next in line for the M stamp because Bethesda included a naked upper-body texture on all its female characters:

In the process of trying to create a nude skin for Oblivion, I found Bethesda had already done all the work for me. They just covered it up with underwear afterwards. Please note, this is a realistic nudity mod, not a pornographic one. The file included removes the bra welded to the skin of females of all races, showing things as most people know they are in the real world after removing upper body clothing. It will not show every female in the game as topless. I do this because I hate government/society/whatever forcing companies to “protect our innocent population from seeing those evil dirty things 50% of them posess personally anyways” not because I’m trying to turn it into a porn game.

Fileplanet already has a list of other naked mods for Oblivion in what the media would call the latest “video game sex scandal.” In actuality, the ESRB is overreacting to the artistic development of character models, where people are realistically built up naked, then layered with clothes. Here’s a sample screenshot of the base texture which has so many people upset, because it’s a realistic depiction of the female body:

Bethesda Softworks \ Oblivion \ Data \ textures \ characters \ orc \ female

Of course, in the game, this texture *could* with a patch be used to unlock naked upper-body characters. However, they look completely non-sexual and rather silly, as the following photo shows:

Here’s what the ESRB says about the Oblivion nude mod:

The pertinent content causing the change in the ESRB rating involves more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating of the game (the game already carried a Blood and Gore content descriptor), as well as the presence in the PC version of the game of a locked-out art file that, if accessed by using an apparently unauthorized third party tool, allows the user to play the game with topless versions of female characters. The locked-out topless skin was found by ESRB to exist in a fully rendered form on the game disc, but is not accessible in the Xbox 360™ version of the game.

Why should the game carry a nudity descriptor when this content is not part of any part of the playable game? There’s a difference between pornography and nudity, and unlike Grand Theft Auto’s intense sexuality, Oblivion’s nude models are used in the artistic process of creating the game.