Oklahoma Tax Bill, Twisted Metal Censorship, and Simpsons Arcade Game

A few news items today, two of which are annoying and one of which is awesome. So let's get into it.

Thank you Destructoid for the image.

In the Oklahoma House, a House Rep. by the name of William Fourkiller (seriously) has proposed a law that would impose a tax on games that are deemed violent. What constitutes a violent game? That's something that most bills don't specify at all, so this one gets a few points. Any game rated T or higher would have a tax imposed on it.

It still doesn't get a lot of points given that quite a few Teen games don't have much violence in them at all. You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of that dumb bill proposed by California Congressman Joe Baca, which would place cigarette-style health warning labels on their games telling us how they could do irreparable damage to our mental health and potentially turn us into psychos.

Look, I'll grant that a lot of time playing violent video games can lead to increased aggression and maybe a little desensitization. Studies have shown this. The keywords though are "A LITTLE". Killing someone in a game isn't even close to killing someone in real life. And I'm not just talking about learning how to shoot a gun. I'm talking about making yourself so dead inside that you have no clue that murdering someone in the real world is wrong. This is coming from someone who has played video games for 75% of his life.

These bills come from people who have ZERO understanding of video games or psychology, one of which I'm incredibly knowledgable of and the other I've taken classes on in high school and college. With last year's Schwarzenegger v. EMA being beaten, this bill will likely never be passed into law, and if it is, it will quickly be declared unconstitutional. It's still annoying as hell to see these people never shut the frack up when they've clearly been beaten already.
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Another bit of annoying news comes for the new Twisted Metal game. The game was supposed to be released in Europe on the same day as in North America, February 14th. It has been delayed to an unknown date, though David Jaffe has heard a rumor that it would be released on March 1st.

The reason it has been delayed? To censor it of course. Now from what I've heard, the censoring seems to be somewhat limited. But this is still a very irritating thing for me to see as I hate censorship of retail items with a passion. An even bigger kick to the balls is that they decided to announce this less than two weeks before the game was supposed to come out.

So to any European readers, sorry but it looks like you're going to get the game a little later than anticipated.
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On a positive note, today The Simpsons Arcade Game has been released on Xbox Live and will be released on PSN on the 7th (8th for Europe). The Simpsons Arcade Game is, without a doubt, one of the finest beat-em-ups and arcade titles in history. Hell, it's one of the best licensed games ever released and one of the few Simpsons games that had any business of being released.

From what I've read, this is a really solid port of the arcade version, so if you've got some Microsoft points and want to play a classic, put them in for this.