Singapore Bans, Unbans Microsoft Video Game

Singapore in mid-November banned and then unbanned Microsoft's new Xbox video game Mass Effect because it offers a sex scene between a woman and a female alien.

The Board of Film Censors at first prohibited the game, citing "lesbian intimacy," but then decided to implement a rating system, gave the game an adult rating and unbanned it.

The nation also recently has banned God of War II, because of nudity, and The Darkness, because of violence and religious profanity.

In October, Parliament decriminalized oral and anal sex for heterosexuals but declined to also legalize gay sex. Penal Code Section 377A punishes sex between men — "gross indecency" — with two years in prison. The law is rarely, if ever, enforced.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong supported keeping the sex ban, saying: "We do not approve of them setting the tone of mainstream society. They live their lives, that's their personal space. But the tone of the overall society, I think, it remains conventional, it remains straight and we want it to remain so."