Oh no!

Well, the new patch for 360s brought good stuff and stuff. The good stuff: Social networking. Now you can display your real name, a litle blurb about your self, and look at other peoples friends list. So now for the bad stuff: Parental controls. This is not necessarily a bad thing. How it works is you set a timer and you are forced to logout hen that ends. Now I have a way to prove to my dad that I have not been playing for 5 hours straight. The bad news: M rated content. Even T rated content. None of this can be downloaded if you are flagged as a child account. So if you use your real age to sign up, and you are under 18, you can kiss that Halo 3 ViDoc goodbye. But Mricosoft is not completely heartless, and you can promote your self to not be a child account, so there is a way out.

This incident has left me and more then a few other gamers gasping. I tried to download the Frontlines: Fuel of War demo, and only to get a "you are not allowed to get this content due to age restrictions" message. I immediately went in search of a solution. After a bit of googling and forum searching, I found that promote to parent button. I was saved. But what caused this sudden and unwarned change of policy?

Probably Manhunt 2. This was an ultra-violent stealth game from Rock Star. The content was so bad that the ESRB forced Rock Star to filter all the kills. The game was not even that good, released to mixed reviews, and had average sales. The end result was a media opus that almost no gamers cared about. So this may have sparked this sudden change. The thing that shocked me was that this stuff could be locked away, but with a few passwords that could be undone. All Microsoft did was remove this and force it upon child accounts.