...Wow. That's just silly. I was going to make an argument that Fable had plenty of alcohol, sex and violence in it, but it turned out THAT was rated M in America too.
The whole ale thing is very abstract, too, how can that count, really?
( It turns out that Empire : Total War, that game where you gun down Native Americans whilst you take over their land in a surge of Imperialism, was rated teen. Americans have funny standards. I'm fairly certain you can do SOMETHING involving alcohol in that game, too. )
Yea the ESRB is a complete joke. It's pretty much a bunch of self appointed up tight individual who rate things based on their own subjective opinions rather then some objective scale. If your interest check out the wiki and see how ratings are done section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board
Basically 3 people watch game footage then decided on rating.
Also the ESRB has done some crazy stuff in the past. Morrowind was rated Teen and the developer was aiming for a Teen rating again with the sequal Oblivion and it got the Teen rating right uptill the ESRB found out that someone was able to make a Nude mod for it just like with Morrowind. So they changed the rating to Mature even though the content in question was not part of the release game and not on the disc like the "Hot Coffee" thing in GTA.
So basically ESRB gave a rating based on content that could be added to the game. Well if they are gonna do that they might as well give all games a Mature or Adult rating cause they can all be modded to have "inapprorate" content. And it's not anything recent either as Nude Raider mod is among the most well known and that was well over a decade ago.
