Originally, this post was about how I had the title in my hands twice yesterday and my experiences with the retailers not selling it to me—but they had them on the shelves.
I guess this might be a good thing because it appears that Sony is recalling the title with less than a week to release. Why?
Somebody screwed up and included a song that has lines from the Qur’an. Apparently, this is a no no.
Quoted Sony:
During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Qur’an. We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologise for any offence that this may have caused.
I only have one question. A patch? I don’t understand why a patch would not fix this? One of the most customizable games ever made and it simply cannot be just turned off or told not to play?
IF “offending song” PLAY
THEN PLAY rnd(“other songs”)
Fixed.
(I’m not a game developer for LBP, and I know this is simplistic, but…)
I’m seriously considering taking my $60 and getting another title now. Also, this doesn’t make my experiences I had yesterday almost purchasing it all too funny.
I know they say that they need to do that so that people who are offline don’t hear the offending song (which is easily available via MySpace and it won a Grammy, if I recall correctly), but there’s just something about this that bugs me.
From a game perspective, I actually am fine with it being pushed back a week because it gives me time to finish Dead Space without feeling rushed and I’ll have Fable 2 to tinker with as well. That said, I still wish I could play with Sackboy next week!
This adds an interesting angle to your quest to obtain this game early. Certainly there will be some of these discs that got out in the wild. How will Sony deal with those?
Those copies that got sold early will become Collector’s Items, for sure.
I thing Sony is being overly cautious, maybe still feeling the sting of the Catholic Church going after them because of the Cathedral in Resistance.
The devs did make a patch, but Sony opted for a recall instead.
Funny though…from what I hear it was 1 person making a stink about this on the NeoGAF forums. I find it hard to believe its true though.. 1 person causes a fuss and Sony does a recall?
Very disappointing on all kinds of levels. What a waste.
It’s a no win situation for Sony.
It would be against the Q’ran for them to have those songs in there, so thus they will offend Muslims.
They will also offend those that are easily riled by religious references or by fundamentalists who would feel it might push some kind of pro-Islam message.
Thus everyone is going to be ticked at Sony.
Except for me, because as a non-Muslim and Christian who doesn’t care if people actually know there are religions besides Christianity it means absolutely nothing to me. However, I am some kind of mutant freak. Everyone else feels the need to get offended about SOMETHING.