Nowadays you could be forgiven for replying with the words ‘Delay’ for the Playstation 3 in a word association game what with the ever growing pattern of delays hitting Sony’s exclusive line-up…and today is no exception.
The highly fought after title, LittleBigPlanet has suffered yet another worldwide delay with Sony pulling the curtains over the October 24th release date due to offensive language being detected in one of the tracks lyrics. Speaking to Three Speech, Sony released this statement:
” 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.
We will confirm the new launch date shortly.”
You would have assumed that the Quality Assurance department at Media Molecule and Sony Liverpool, who have been working on the game for over 6 months, would have located the offensive expressions in the track. Such quality assurance checks would be a fairly simple and routine process in the day to day work of a videogame QA Technician. A cynic could say this is yet another good PR exercise as some claimed with the title Resistance which caused controversy by using the Manchester Cathedral in the UK without the churchs permission as a setting for a level, leading to the game receiving massive media exposure and further sales.
Developers Media Moleucle commented on this disappointing announcement on their official website:
” We learnt yesterday that there is a lyric in one of the licensed tracks which some people may find offensive, and which slipped through the usual screening processes. Obviously MM and Sony together took this very seriously. LBP should be enjoyable by all. So within 12 hours of hearing about this issue involving a lyric (in Somalian, I believe!), we prepared an automatic day 0 patch and had a new disk image ready; however a decision was made within Sony that the right thing to do for quality and support of people with no on-line was to replace existing disks. They assure us that they are doing everything in their power to get things straightened out as fast as possible, and will announce dates soon.”
Sony is yet to announce a new release date for LittleBigPlanet although it still highly likely to meet a 2008 launch
ich weiß noch nicht wirklich ob ich meinen Spaß dran hätte, aber sieht irgendwie schon alles super interessant aus ^^
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