October 15: wallet threat level Rohan

Lord of the Rings Online finally comes to Rohan this week. At this rate, the One True Ring will splashdown in the Crack of Doom sometime in 2017. Go Frodo, go!

007 Legends is a box of chocolates approach to celebrate fifty years of James Bond movies and 10 years of mostly forgettable Eurocom tie-ins. The Jewel of the Nile add-on for Serious Sam III adds Egyptian themed levels to a game that consists entirely of Egpytian themed levels. Furthermore, Serious Sam III itself comes to Xbox Live. The Legacy of Rome add-on for Crusader Kings II will get Byzantine on your ass. Dance Central 3, aka “the only reason to have a Kinect”, is out this week.

Finally, a Japanese RPG called Mugen Souls is out for the Playstation 3. It would have been out earlier, but publisher NIS had to edit out a sequence in which you grope women to level up. I am not making that up.

The Japanese version of the game contained a mini-game in which the player had to scrub/grope 2D depictions of female characters in a variety of bath scenes. The characters and surrounding audio/visual elements were extremely sexualized, and a number of the characters were depicted as potentially being pubescent or pre-pubescent. We decided to remove this content out of concern for the potential of receiving an AO rating from the ESRB, which would prevent us from releasing the game. In addition, as a company, we did not want NISA to release or be known for content that could be seen as sexualizing or objectifying children in this way. As this system contained no real story elements or gameplay (it was used to level up your characters, but the player’s inputs had no impact on the final stats) we felt it was not a substantial loss of content. Note that your characters will still level up as if you had viewed the scenes, so no gameplay functionality is lost.