Little Big Planet getting Delayed?

[Stewie]

I just read that It is being delayed worldwide (original reports were just europe) till Nov 14th because there is a song that has some quotes from Qur'an in it.
Anyone hear any info or can confirm this?s

[fuser]

linky

As some of you may have noticed, LBP has been slightly delayed in some territories. At MM we were as shocked and dismayed by this as anyone - shellshocked and gutted. We can’t wait for you all to get playing and creating!

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.

Apologies to everyone excited to play the game and I can assure you that when it arrives, it will be worth the wait! We want everyone to be able to enjoy the game, and this tweak should help - we’re just gutted it couldn’t be sooner. MM continues to work hard to support the game too.  We know that LBP will be something that you can enjoy for a long time to come, when all of this is forgotten and all that remains are thousands of incredible levels and creations to play, create and share.

[Stewie]

Gamespot has more more info
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6199562.html

[fuser]

Local EB games has no recall yet.. here's hoping 

[tazelbain]

Is this another Spore or there some deep behind it?

[ClydeJr]

Here's the forum post that started it all: http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board/message?board.id=b_EN_GAMES_general_lbp&thread.id=23576&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

The original poster asked if they could remove the track by an online patch and remove the song in all future shipments. Sony decided to remove it before it ships and remake the discs.

[Sauced]

Oct 27th, apparently, so not too bad.

[schild]

See, nothing good comes of religion.

[stray]

Is this another Spore or there some deep behind it?

physics heavy co-op friendly platformer excitebike. or something

[ahoythematey]

Actually, I'm kind of surprised this sort of thing hasn't happened already.  Games have been doing this sort of thing for ages with christian symbolism, so it was bound to happen at some point.  I'm less than surprised, though, that this started in europe.  As I understand it from what I've been told, a good deal of the moslem community there are big fucking crybabies about anything and everything.

[schild]

Christianity is the biggest religion, as such they can't call shit like this out when they're the target of whatever.

Sure, some Christians are fucking whiny enough to think that various media is shitting on them, but whining about it won't do dick.

Muslims on the other hand have the luxury of being a minority, thus they have the opportunity to pretend their shit is more sacred than other shit. Much like it's OK for anyone to make fun of white people while white folk better not be making fun of the black, brown, yellow or other.

[Rasix]

They just take their shit too seriously. It's not a minority thing, although you'd love it to be, schild.  You just love to whine about this shit.

Register it as 'whoopdee fucking do" and move on to the 27th.  I really didn't know there was some sort of taboo about Qur'an verse being in used in other mediums.   Thou shall not entertain with the holy book!

[Ratman_tf]

Moohamad! Why are you wearing a football helmet with a fish on it?

[Moaner]

This makes me angry.  I took the day off and everything.  God damnit!  (haha)

[JWIV]

I guess this means we won't be getting Jesus and Mohammed  sock boys any time soon.

[Big Gulp]

I guess this means we won't be getting Jesus and Mohammed  sock boys any time soon.

I bet some artist spent weeks modeling the bomb-turban, too.

[Strazos]

What a load of crap.

So if some phrase HAPPENS to also be in the Koran, we cannot use it in any other context? The Koran is fairly big, and the situation is made even worse if you also include Hadith.


Just silly. The song/phrases were not even insulting or insinuating anything.

[fuser]

Checked around with local shops, stock is in two retailers and they are going to sell the media on tuesday 

[Strazos]

But where do you live?

[Dtrain]

At first I thought this was a bitchy little reason to delay a game's release, but I've realized it's probably for the best. Sony, I'm sure, want this game to sell well in all terretories. Meanwhile, the spirit of the game seems to be about inclusion. Islam just happens to be a very touchy religion when it comes to representing it in any form of media (much moreso than any form of christianity.)

And this was supposed to be "the big thing" for the PS3 this quarter. I'm starting to think that Sony must be cursed.

At least there are plenty of other games out this month.

[fuser]

But where do you live?

Canada :)

FYI big box stores ala best buy have also said the same here. I'll take it with a grain of salt, but all signs here point to the "recall" isn't mandatory.

[Yegolev]

Cool, I'll keep my LBP box next to my picture of Mohammad and my copy of the Satanic Verses.

[Triforcer]

I dimly recall this being an issue in Ocarina of Time.  Something about the Fire Temple. 

But we are obviously overlooking the real issue....the publisher's secret attempt to lure our children into Islam.  That's the reason they had it in!

[Grand Design]

So if some phrase HAPPENS to also be in the Koran, we cannot use it in any other context? The Koran is fairly big, and the situation is made even worse if you also include Hadith.

The phrases were, "Every soul shall have the taste of death" and "All that is on earth will perish."  I think the Koran is exclusive with those gems.

Islam is a particularly nasty breed of self-delusion.  At least Christians have the god-damned common courtesy to not practice what they preach. 

To paraphrase Dr. King, I await the day when people of all creed and color grow the fuck up.

[fuser]

It's TITS!

Been playing off and on the past day, soon as the servers go live look me up!

[fuser]

http://www.mediamolecule.com/2008/10/27/powering-up/

Cables have been connected, switches have haven flicked and buttons have been pressed. The servers are on, let the sharing commence!

W00t Indeed!

[Dtrain]

It's TITS!

Been playing off and on the past day, soon as the servers go live look me up!

Tits indeed.

I can't wait to get home and log in. I was playing through the levels on the disk last night and had some good fun. It's got a very nice difficulty, the puzzles and levels are extremely varied, and just incredible to look at. I especially like the dia de la muerte levels in south america.

If you are any type of collector or completionist, you will want to have a second player around. Many of the challenges are cooperative and just can't be done with 1 person.

[fuser]

I take it back 


It was better playing with the servers offline, the lag is currently horrible and makes the game almost unplayable single player due to the community features trying to update the main/overview map. The creator was slowed down also due to the same reasons (ie updating your current place in the world and retrieving some asshats comments etc). I wanna unplug my ps3 from the net just to get some decent performance out of it.

[Yegolev]

Crap.

[Moaner]

Blah!

I hope the server issues are resolved quickly and this is not a sign of what is to come for Resistance 2.

[fuser]

I'll update to clarify some points.

 The game has so much "web 2.0" "community" (whatever buzz word is relevant) content its bogging it down atm. You can power up the game and the first thing that happens is loading your pod (where you choose what level and what you basically want to do, your menu selection). Currently this can take 20seconds-2mins. Where the world is currently updating all the time, information is fed to your pod and people can find you/join your pod (no shit I had all kinds of random people just joining in my pod). When you view down on Little Big Planet to choose a "level" (a choice on a continent of little big planet) you can see real time how many people are currently playing each level, read user comments on levels and see what info people have been putting up about the level (ie: people had playstation eye pictures of themselves on the level selection.. quite odd). You have choice then to *default* play the level or play the level solo which locks the game out of allowing random people joining your level (which happens quite frequently).

 This has got to be a huuuuuge traffic load of database commits/syncing to clients etc which is currently causing the game to slow to a CRAWL. Whats really infuriating is the current performance of multiplayer. I'm assuming when you "host" a game where someone joins all the syncing happens locally to your client but when a friend and I were playing last night the game would take forever to load a level but would experience bursts in lag. Like it was trying to update or poll the central server that we were playing a level causing the game to slow to a crawl then randomly sync up in a burst of traffic (PITA on a platform game). We would loose voice comm's etc. FYI we both are on the same ISP in the same city with a ping of 20ms between us and we were both averaging 8-10KB/s of traffic.

 It's really painful at the moment where its going to have impact on everyone's single player performance (loading menus etc). Hopefully their database can handle the incoming impact of tonight's load...

http://www.mediamolecule.com/2008/10/27/powering-up/#comments   further reading about the situation.

[bhodikhan]

I pulled my ethernet connection to stop all the crap. Maybe later I'll go online. Right now I'll just mess around.

Irregardless, at the moment the servers are offline as of this posting.

[Moaner]

I fail to understand how these companies consistently underestimate the amount of traffic they are going to generate.  They've been hyping this fucking thing for 2+ years now?  Did they think no one was paying attention or do they just not care their customers are going to suffer for 2 days to months while they increase bandwidth allotted?

In any case, it pisses me off.   

[Yegolev]

Tightwad executives don't want to drop a roll on something that may not take off.  Nothing new.

[Margalis]

Why the hell would anything related to the network make level creation and playing slower? Sounds like terrible tech design.