Advisory: These games aren’t fit for kids, says Common Sense Media

With Christmas slowly getting closer and closer, parents are starting to shop around for games to buy for their kids. In turn, Common Sense Media has published their list of 10 games unfit for younger gamers. They’ve also included alternative titles, some of which seem to be, well, rather weird choices.

With Christmas slowly getting closer and closer, parents are starting to shop around for games to buy for their kids. In turn, Common Sense Media has published their list of 10 games unfit for younger gamers. They’ve also included alternative titles, some of which seem to be, well, rather weird choices.

Here’s the list. The ones in parentheses are the alternatives.

• Assassin’s Creed (Mirror’s Edge)
• Borderlands (Infamous)
• Brutal Legend (Ghostbusters)
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Battlefield: Bad Company)
• Dead Space: Extraction (Deadly Creatures)
• Dragon Age: Origins (Braid)
• Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (Batman: Arkham Asylum)
• Demon’s Souls (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (Overlord II)
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (C.O.P.: The Recruit)

While Common Sense Media’s goal is a good one, I’m still wondering what criteria they used to pick the alternatives. Take Borderlands and inFamous, for example. They recommend that parents refrain from buying the former since it involves “human enemies used as target practice,” but can’t you do that in inFamous too? It’s even arguably worse when Cole does it since he’s basically frying those people with lightning. Same goes for Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company. No Russian aside, you still shoot people in both. Maybe they’re just going with the ESRB ratings.

Another strange thing regarding the choices are the differences in genre (Braid, a platformer, as an alternative to the Dragon Age: Origins RPG?) but maybe that’s just too nitpicky.

[Common Sense Media via GamePolitics]