Author apologises for Mass Effect comments

Author and commentator Cooper Lawrence has apologised for criticising the sexual content of the Xbox 360 game Mass Effect.

Last week, Electronic Arts wrote a letter to Fox News Channel asking the organisation to correct alleged inaccuracies during a news segment on BioWare's Mass Effect game.

Ray Muzyka, boss of developer BioWare, had said: "We're hurt. We believe in video games as an art form, and on behalf of the 120 people who poured their blood and tears into this game over three years, we're just really hurt that someone would misrepresent the game without even playing it. All we can hope for is that people who actually play our games will see the truth."

So far, Fox News has refused to make any retraction or corrections, saying only that EA was invited to tell its side of the story.

Lawrence, however, told The New York Times that she jumped to conclusions.

"I recognise that I misspoke," she said. "I really regret saying that, and now that I've seen the game and seen the sex scenes it's kind of a joke.

"Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it's like pornography. But it's not like pornography. I've seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit," she confessed.

Lawrence later admitted that she had never actually played Mass Effect.

Fans of the game responded by posting hundreds of negative reviews of Lawrence's book on Amazon.com, despite the fact that many of them admitted to not having read the book.