Author "regrets" Mass Effect nudity accusations

Author Cooper Lawrence has apologised for publicly attacking the EA over the sexual content in Xbox 360 title Mass Effect.

She admitted jumping to conclusions when she slammed the game on Fox News. Having now seen the offending content, Lawrence admits it's no worse than the kind of sauciness you'd see on TV.

"I recognise that I misspoke," Lawrence told the New York Times. "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.

However, Fox News is refusing to budge - sticking to its claim EA was invited onto the channel to tell its side of the story.

Jeff Brown of EA previously wrote an open letter to the news channel to refute an ignorant stance made from misinformation.

Ray Muzyka, boss of developer BioWare, added: "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."

Cooper Lawrence originally accused the role-playing game of portraying female characters as sexual objects in a storyline that has the male lead "deciding how many women he wants to be with".

Lawrence later laughed and said "No" when asked if she had actually played Mass Effect.

Subsequently angry fans of the game found her book The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever on Amazon and decided to apply the same logic, resulting in its user rating plummeting from hundreds of negative reviews.

By Friday it had 472 reviews, 412 of which were one star. Most had not read the book.