It's a Wil Wheaton two-fer today, as he provided some voices for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, also.

The game's producer, Take-Two Interactive Software's Rockstar Games, said it stopped making the current version of the game and is now working on an iteration with enhanced security to prevent modifications that allow access to the sex content, according to an Associated Press report.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB, has been investigating the content and revoked the M rating on Wednesday after concluding that "sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs of all three platform versions of the game (i.e., PC CD-ROM, Xbox and PS2)," Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB, said in a statement.

Rockstar initially claimed it wasn't responsible for the so-called "Hot Coffee" mod, blaming it instead on "the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game."

But in an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, a Take-Two spokesman acknowledged that Rockstar did create the racy material.

"There is sex content in the disc," Take-Two spokesman Jim Ankner said. "The editing and finalization of any game is a complicated task and it's not uncommon for unused and unfinished content to remain on the disc."

People who don't write software sometimes fail to realize that you can't just rip parts of it out at the last minute. Even if the game doesn't use those parts, another part of it may assume that they're there and try to load them, or validate them for anti-virus protection, or use parts of them (characters, backgrounds, sounds) in other scenes. If Rockstar thought there was no way to get to that content, it was safer for the schedule to leave it in than to start the new, massive round of testing it would require to take it out.

Just about every major piece of software contains parts that no code path is supposed to use. Now, granted, most of those parts are small subroutines or unused strings or icons, not full 3D scenes of nekkid women doing things with guns for money. But that's why they can't just rip those scenes out and rush it back into production. I would, however, think that they'd try to rip it out - not just admit that it's still in there but that it's "now much harder to access, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more."

I just watched Relics, the TNG episode with James Doohan, this past week, as part of a summer-boredom complete replay of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I recalled that he had withdrawn from public life due to Alzheimer's and wondered how he was doing.

Newsday:

LOS ANGELES -- James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

I'm too shocked for a thoughtful eulogy right now. Everyone who watched Star Trek liked Scotty, but everyone who met him loved Jimmy … I'm sure I'm not the only person today who feels like they lost a friend. My thoughts are with his family.

Aye, laddie. Aye.

(Via Wil Wheaton.)

This news came back in June, but I didn't see it until today.

Drum Corps International (DCI), the world leader in producing and sanctioning touring marching music competitions, today announced that its dynamic and award-winning World Championships television program will be broadcast on ESPN2 this fall. This is the first prime-time broadcast of the program on commercial television, and it will be available to more than 88 million households.

The two-hour program is tentatively scheduled to air on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time. Dates and times are subject to change. Additionally, the program will be rebroadcast later in the year as two one-hour specials. Airdates and times will be announced when available.

"Drum Corps International wanted to bring its exceptional television program to as many people as possible, in prime-time, so that we can have a large audience watching the program simultaneously, regardless of where they live," said Dan Acheson, executive director of Drum Corps International. "ESPN2 is available in over 88 million households and more than 80 percent of all U.S. households, and can certainly help us to achieve that goal."

The DCI finals have a very strong high school and college following, as well as among corps veterans or their followers, but the program has been syndicated to PBS stations for the past 30 years, and it is all but impossible to find it unless you're looking for it. I have a TiVo wish list on "drum corps" and it only triggers once per year. If I remember correctly, one year OETA aired the program at 9PM on Labor Day, and the other two of the past three years, aired it at 5PM on the first or second Saturday in September. If you didn't know to look for it, you'd never find it.

The new arrangement (no pun intended) will stretch the formerly 1:20 program to two full hours with commercials, but it will air in prime time at the same time nationwide, and will actually get some reairing. PBS stations (or, at least OETA) seem very bad about airing or re-airing popular syndicated programs. OETA is always 5-6 months behind on America's Test Kitchen, for example.

Now here's hoping that the event is recorded in HD, and that DirecTV adds ESPN2 HD by September 6, though I ain't holding my breath. If you can't wait that long, you can watch a live big-screen digital broadcast of the DCI Quarterfinals at a nearby participating theater. The broadcast is on Thursday, 11 August, at 5PM EDT, and is scheduled to last six hours.

Here in the OKC area, it's at the Regal Crossroads Mall Stadium 16 theater. Tickets appear to be $15, plus a 75-cent service fee, which is not bad at all for six hours of musical competition. Click the link above to find tickets in your area.

And there are still two chances to see DCI Live in Oklahoma this year: July 25 in Enid, and July 26 in Broken Arrow. Both shows include the Bluecoats, Glassmen, Madison Scouts, Santa Clara Vanguard, and Southwind. The Enid show also has the Capital Regiment and Seattle Cascades; the Broken Arrow show also has the Boston Crusaders, Teal Sound, and Phantom Regiment. There are also lots of Texas events in the next few days, so if you want to see late-season drum corps, now's the time.