Parent's Guide to understanding the ESRB

Are you good, godfearing parents disturbed because of the recent discovery that your child's clean, fully-family-appropriate game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" had a SEX SCENE IN IT? Hookers and the beating thereof is fine, but when sexuality gets into your GTA, you know good and well that the decline of morality has hit, and its time to regulate which games your kids play. So here's your guide.

The first rating is the EC rating. The EC rating is essentially a flop of good gaming. If your child, from age 5 on, wants to buy an EC game, slap them over the face and make them watch something like pornography. No kid in the entirity of the earth wants to play a d*** EC game, because the only EC games out there are either "My Little Pony", "Early Start", or "Blues Clues", all three detriments to the society of gaming. If your kid wants anything like this, he or she is either mentally retarded or homosexual, or very possibly both.

The next rating is the "E" rating. This is a rarity for any kid to want. E games usually fall under the following catagories:
1. Kiddie crap like the Harry Potter games.
2. Racing games like Gran Turismo
3. Games that just seriously can't have anything along the line of bad stuff in it, like Katamari Damacy.
Unfortunately, #1 crops up quite a bit more than 2 or 3. Which essentially means this requires GOOD, DETAILED researching of the game your child wants to buy. If the game contains any of the following keywords, you know it's full of childish s*** that's innapropriate for anyone with a brain:
- Family Friendly
- "Party"
- Mario
- Nintendo Seal of Approval
- Made by Naughty Dog
- Christian Game Developer
All of these are death keywords and guarantee a lack of gaming quality and/or just enjoyability, and should not be purchased.

The next rating is when you begin to see normality in your child. The T rating, for Teen, is the most common rating in gaming. This usually means that it has violence, swearing, sexuality, or just general action in the game worthy of being made. While T games can suck, they usually don't suck as bad as an E game of the same quality, which shows something important to your gamer. Expect the following keywords to be used fluently with T games:
- "Mild Violence" (Means you hit people with a sword and they die.)
- "Sexual Situations" (Means BOOBIES)
- "Dramatic Situations" (Means someone (the female character) might cry or something stupid like that)
- "Mild Language" (Means that people say the often-thrown pure evil D word once or twice!)
Overall, a T rated game is a good purchase for any kid, but doesn't ever guarantee pure quality. Look it up on our Reviews section or something.

Here's the cream of the crop. A M rating essentially means that your young 5 year old child will be able to play this game and learn valuable lessons! Such lessons involve:
- How to beat up a hooker!
- How to kill people mercilessly!
- How to steal people's money or items!
- How to swear like a sailor!
- How to shoot a full-auto rifle in a nice spread on an enemy!
- How to raid a fake school!
- How to disrespect your parents, the police, and anything else!
Such lessons are VALUABLE for kids. You know the game will be a definate kid's game when it has such descriptors as "Gore" and "Sexuality" on the back of it. You DEFINATELY know it's kid friendly when it has "Grand Theft Auto", "Doom", or "Manhunt" before the name. A definate kid's game.

And here's the best of them all- the AO rating. If you have nothing better to do, go buy an AO game. Actually, you can't buy one from most stores, so you'll have to hunt one down online, and then buy it online, but it's worth it, definately for little kids. Such things as sexual minigames, full-on nudity, and extreme violence and gore are in these games until your eyes bleed from PURE GOODNESS. Pick this game up, no matter what you do.


Overall, I hope this guide helps you confused parents find a good game for your childeren. Remember, no matter what anyone else says, Mature and AO games are perfectly fine for your childeren, and foster family values, weapon knowledge, and general happiness. And isnt that what it's all about?