The first pic of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' insidious, child-corrupting drug-dealing mini-game has wormed its way onto the Internet via T3. You can see it right here. Acid would appear to be the drug of choice for this particular client. SPOnG wouldn't know anything about that L.D.S.^* stuff.

The mini-game has already started to make ripples in the mainstream media. The Sun has now run the inevitable 'FURY OVER DRUG DEAL VID GAME' headline. The paper quotes Darren Gold, 'Outreach Team Leader' at Drugsline (a charity that helps those struggling with addiction), as saying, “Anything using drug-dealing as entertainment is sending out the wrong message. Glamorisation doesn’t help our work trying to educate kids of the dangers of substance misuse.”

One Sun reader, Tommy29, opined in the comments section, "(Ancient British TV presenter) Timmy Mallet made his name by whacking kids over the head with a Mallet, therefore accountable for a whole number of horrific murders! Ban him instead!" SPOnG feels that Tommy29 should, in fact, be editing the paper.

The paper also reports, "Experts predict the final edition is unlikely to feature explicit criminality." SPOnG would have to question what stealing cars and mowing down pedestrians in all the other GTA games counts as, if not "explicit criminality". If explicit criminality won't feature in the published game, it will be a pretty shallow experience. Needless to say, the 'experts' in question weren't named.

Rockstar has no intention of pulling its punches, however. According to Rockstar VP Dan Houser, "No one disagreed with [Rockstar president and Dan's brother] Sam [Houser]'s very clear edict that GTA has to be an M rating. It can't be softened to make it family-friendly--that's not the game we're making...[Nintendo] didn't want us to make a GTA for kids, and we weren't interested in making a game we wouldn't normally make."

The mini-game will enable players to peddle in heroine, cocaine, weed, ecstasy, acid and downers. You can see SPOnG's original coverage here.

Drug-dealing, eh? Genius boundary-pushing, we say. But we are coked-up to the eyeballs all day, every day. Maaaan.

<sup>Sources: T3
The Sun
Edge via Gamespot

* Sic</sup>