Melin, I can’t understand why you thought it would be appropriate for your kids if it had a Teen rating. I’ll admit that the rating system is seriously screwed up but generally the rating are less harse than people think they should be so you should have assumed that your kids should have been at least teens before they were exposed to it. One notable exception to this was when Doom and Simcity 2000 had the same violence rating because both depicted animated beings that died. In Simcity they are killed out of view by such things as tornados whereas in Doom you stand face to face with them before hacking them up with a chainsaw. But recently the rating system has been getting better and you should look to it as the minimum requirement to playing the game if you lead a conservative life.
Personally I feel that this type of game isn’t as bad as people make it seem. I’ve been playing video games since I was about 8 and I’ve grown up to lead a normal, nonhomicidal life. My father introduced me to Wolfenstien when it first game out and though I don’t really like that type of game I’ve played almost all of them upto Quake 3. I’ve played GTA and my only real problem was the overhead view(it really pissed me off). But I could see that it wasn’t real life and I knew better than to try such stuff when I got my liscense. Another game of that type is Driver. I like it better than GTA but though the content is much the same you don’t see any people getting run over. All the destruction is to cars and miscellaneous street stuff.
You said that we couldn’t change your mind but I hope that maybe you could be a little less harsh on the games and spend more time making sure that your children realize that they are games and that you can’t actually do that stuff in real life. And next time you go to buy a game come talk to the people here first b/c at least one doper is bound to have played it and be able to explain it to you well.