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Last month Rockstar Games, the maker of the Grand Theft Auto series, released Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which surpasses a hit predecessor not only in the extent of its violence but also in the abundance of sexually heated situations, bulging bust lines and megabytes of digitized poolside sirens.

Though it has yet to reach consumers, BMX XXX, by far more the most risqué of the new games, has generated so much criticism that Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Toys "R" Us, KB Toys and Best Buy have banned it from their shelves.

Sony had second thoughts about releasing the game uncut for its PlayStation 2, the most popular game console. Alan B. Lewis, the spokesman for Acclaim, said that after discussions with Sony, the game's developers removed a function that allows players to design a female biker to appear topless. In addition, a BMX logo now obscures the breasts of the real-life strippers who appear when a player wins a bonus.

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So far the game remains unchanged for the Xbox and the GameCube. Spokesmen for Microsoft and Nintendo said that those companies had not asked for any changes in BMX XXX. When asked about the game, John O'Rourke, Microsoft's director of worldwide Xbox marketing, took the opportunity to note that Xbox is the only console with parental controls and could be set to lock out all M-rated games.

Acclaim executives are hoping that the editing of the PlayStation 2 version might allay the concerns of retailers who have refused to stock the game. "The company believes that the PS2 version may be more palatable to those retailers,'' Mr. Lewis said.

But editing and parental lockouts seem unlikely to satisfy the game's opponents, who assert that the game is fundamentally unacceptable.

The American Family Association, a group that says it advocates traditional values, became so incensed recently upon learning that Best Buy was considering selling BMX XXX, which the association denounces as a pornographic game, that it mobilized its members. Best Buy received more than 33,000 e-mail protests about the game in a single day last month, the association said.

"Our contention is that these games promote negative social behavior," said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the association. "They teach boys to disrespect females."

Executives at Acclaim, based in Glen Cove, N.Y., maintain that critics of the game are applying a double standard.

They emphasize that the video game industry is maturing, with more than half its players now over the age of 17. At the same time, they say, the realism resulting from advances in hardware and design blurs the line between video games and movies, which routinely include nudity, raw language and adult situations.

"We are disappointed that there are groups who fail to see how this humorous product is truly on par with such widely accepted mainstream entertainment experiences, including movies like 'American Pie' and TV shows like 'The Sopranos' and 'Sex and the City,' " Greg Fischbach, co-chairman and chief executive of Acclaim, said in a prepared statement.

In an interview, Ben Fischbach, Acclaim's senior brand manager and director of Internet properties, said that the decision to up the ante on BMX XXX was simply an attempt to give an older game audience the kind of entertainment it wanted.

Game industry analysts say that M-rated games - usually so rated because of graphic violence - are now the fastest-growing genre in the home market.

Over the last two years Acclaim has released Dave Mirra BMX and Dave Mirra BMX 2, games based on a star rider in BMX, or bicycle motocross. Together the games have sold three million copies. But when it came time for another sequel, Mr. Lewis said, the company wanted something fresh and daring.

"The direction that we were taking with BMX XXX was to design a game from the ground up for a mature audience," he said. "They're not always wanting a guy on a bike on a ramp. They're not always looking for games that are warm and fuzzy, that are cute. They want stuff that's relevant to them and their lifestyle."

The core of the game remains true to its BMX legacy, he said, although the name Dave Mirra was removed by mutual agreement.

Mr. Lewis said that Acclaim expected BMX XXX to sell well despite the controversy surrounding it.

"When we were designing this game," he said, "we anticipated that certain mass market merchants would not carry the title, but other merchants might carry more."

He added, "Consumer demand is not going to diminish.''