The PS2 was already out when the original XBOX brought parental controls to console hardware.
Nintendo used to simply not allow mature games on their consoles (in the US, anyway) but with Gamecube they dropped that policy.
Sony never did anything until PS3.

NM, I was thinking of DVD parental checks. The PS2 definitely had those.. :P

Just becausae *you* do your job raising your kids right and policing what they see or play, doesn't mean the neighbors do. And kids lend each other games all the time so hardware-based parental controls are a good idea.
The problem the article alludes to is that many parents are lazy to start with and hardly bother with *easy* parental controls. Quirky and odd ones they just give up on. And then they go squawking about the games to FOX and other idiot media venues.
Good parental controls are the only shield the industry has against the busybodies in congress so if even a few parents start complaining to the idiot politicians that parental controls don't work, the pols will use them as an excuse to censor games.
That is why this concerns all of us.

fjtorres...great point...

once again these articles filter directly back to the parents...and while every parent feels they are good parent (most anyway), few take the time to actually learn the things that kids are interested in...

this entire ME thing centered around people in the media, a mildly retarded author-psych major, not understanding video games...they 'heard' in one way or another that explicit sex material was in a wildly successful video game...and ran with it...but then blatantly admitted to not once playing the game...apparently even parents do not grow out of hear-say...someone said its in there, so lets put it on the news and look ignorant...

us gamers though will someday make amazing parents in this regard...I know I will be playing every good game before any kid of mine ever gets his/her grubby little mits on it anyway...and I will know then and there whether its something my child should play based on their age...my parents did the same thing...my dad had to take my gameboy for 3 weeks to get sick of Tetris before I was deemed old enough to enjoy it...I was 5...I know that was more him just wanting to play the game...but he spent many hours at an arcade learning all the fatalities in Mortal Kombat, and seeing everything the game would possibly show...before he decided when I could play it...in the end he let me play a lot of violent video games at a younger age than a lot of my friends...but he understood the industry, and made sure I was never seeing anything that he hadn't...He played through Doom II on the PC twice before christmas back in late '94 or whenever that was...I was 11...I got the empty box and manual christmas morning, and he told it was already installed and ready to go...

I didn't know that he was doing this kind of stuff until I was much older, my mom ended up telling me when hearing about some game on TV...but my dad admitted to the fact that the stuff he would hear on the news would make things seem way way worse than they really were...according to the news, Doom II was the work of the antichrist...and that any home containing that game would be swallowed into an open rift leading straight to hell...same with MK...but when he actually played them, realized that they are hardly realistic (his quote of Doom exactly was "when you shoot a guy in doom, it looks like red trash falls out of him"...fi these parents would actually take the time to watch and learn what the kids are playing, they would probably start to wonder what the big deal is all about in the first place...granted something like Gears of War and the upcoming Dark Sector look to be radically more realistic and violent than some in the past...but it doesn't change the fact that if have a stable kid, and is raised properly, that they will understand the line between reality and a video game...

he stopped doing that though when i was around 13...at that point he was more worried about me drinking and chasing girls I guess than a video game with blood in it...

sorry for the long post...but there are ways to handle this violent content maturely...just know what your kids are playing...if you want to get all adult with them and 'talk about it'...thats better...no one wants a bunch of murderers being raised...its just being a lazy idiot and barking about shat that you don't understand isn't going to help anything either...

If parents are really worried they could get a cabinet with locking doors and lock the consoles up in it when they aren't home. That would actually be best with younger kids anyway. They shouldn't spend all their free time playing games. They can do homework. Do chores. Go outside and play. Whatever. I think people use game consoles as babysitters and that just isn't good.