Oh boy, the hippies are at it again. The animal-welfare wannabe freedom fighters at PETA are no strangers to being morons (following last year’s not-at-all-copyright-infringing Super Chick Sisters) but today, rather than going after something genuinely threatening, they seem to be taking advice from a certain disbarred Florida lawyer and are going after video games. Oh dear. This can’t go well at all.

Not for them, anyway. Hit the jump to find out why PETA have really, really missed the mark.

Then again, for PETA, missing the mark isn’t really too difficult. While I’m all for freedom of speech and letting people have their say (yes, even if that say is “yay animals, boo human beings”) I’m not for the sort of thing PETA gets up to. The aforementioned copyright infringement has happened many a time before, along with rather offensive comparisons to the Holocaust and a few court cases here or there. Basically, they’re an irritant.

Imagine how raised my hackles were when I read that PETA were going after, of all things, a game. Not just anu old game though – it wasn’t Fallout 3, where you can murder your dog; nor was it that obscure line of hunting games where you can shoot polar bears in the face. Nope, of all things, it was, um, Cooking Mama. The one on the Wii. Where you cook stuff.

Hardly offensive, and hardly harmful to any real animals. Certainly, there’s meat preparation in said game (going by what I’ve read about it; as a Sarcastic Gamer writer I avoid anything to do with Nintendo) but it’s not exactly going to affect the real world.

According to PETA, animals shouldn’t even be eaten in a game. A Wii game, at that. In the – really, really funny – statement released by the organisation alongside a Flash game, the freedom fighters (I’m being generous there) are asking wannabe hippies to write to Majesco, the game’s publisher, and ask them to, um, aspire to the top standards of silly political correctness:

If you take just a minute to think about what happens to the animals who are killed for Mama’s meals, a fun cooking game no longer seems…innocent.

If Mama knew what happened to animals on factory farms, she very well might want Majesco Entertainment to make a new Cooking Mama game that is much more animal-friendly…ask that [Majesco] create more vegetarian recipes for Mama or even a game with just vegetarian recipes.

Are PETA actually serious here? I always thought videogames were about escapism; getting away from the big, serious issues of the real world like politics, war, the economy and animal rights (wait, scrap that last one). The last thing I want is to have wannabe hippies trying to ruin my fun just for the sake of namby-pamby political correctness.

I thought being PC had gone far enough when nurseries across the UK were being told to teach children Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep because a “black sheep” just wouldn’t be ‘correct’. Obviously not. It’s almost enough to make you eat even more meat than usual, just to annoy them.

What do you think though? Am I too harsh on hippies? Is it cool to change the content? Are these awesome alliterations actually awful? The comment box is just down there: let me know!

All PETA hatemail can go to my usual email address and from there straight into the trashcan: yamster [at] sarcasticgamer [dot] com. Come get me, hippies.

PETA launches anti Cooking Mama casual game – CasualGaming.biz via MCV