While there are plenty of cantankerous old bastards (like myself) who’ve been playing videogames for 30 years or more, our industry is still seen by many as a pastime for children and teenagers.
Though we’ve moved out of the total lack of mature content that defined gaming in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there are still many game elements that are removed from games before release, because the publisher doesn’t want to court the dreaded ADULTS ONLY rating, which pretty much guarantees that the game would be carried by no major retailer.
While the most famous case of game censorship is the infamous “Hot Coffee” scenes from GTA: San Andreas, there are many others that don’t make it onto most gamers’ radar. While most instances of game censorship are understandable, I’ve put together a list of the 5 most ridiculous cases that have stuck in my mind over the years.
5: Playboy The Mansion
OK, this entire game is pretty much an excuse to play the Sims. but with bare tits and actual sex. Simple, right. You play as a young Hugh Hefner, just getting the Playboy empire up on its feet. You build the mansion and host lavish parties to make connections that you then use to fill the pages of your magazine with articles, interviews and pictorials. About those pictorials.....they extend to just topless photos, which is understandable. Heaven forbid a teenage boy who gets ahold of this game sees a three polygon bush. What always stuck in my head about the game was the sex. Another famous aspect of Hefner’s life that the game tries to recreate is his famous hedonistic attitude. Hef is famous for fucking just about every woman who sets foot in the mansion (I think that they hand out a Viagra tablet and tube of KY as you come in the door). Well, the in-game Hef can indeed engage in sexual relations with many of the women in the game, but the developers censored themselves to the point that the sex became less titillating and more laugh inducing. After talking up a female character successfully, Hef will invite her to have sex in either a bed or on a nearby couch. You need not be in private, Hef will drop his load in public, no sweat. The sex itself consists of the female participant stripping to her panties and Hef to his boxers. They then proceed to have what can only be described as sex as imagined by a spastic 8 year old who was raised in the monkey cage at a zoo.
It’s easier to show you than to describe it. The show starts at the 4:30 mark.
4: Samurai Shodown
Samurai Shodown was famously censored for the home console ports. The blood fountains that resulted from the game’s fatality like power moves were removed, the zoom out feature when the fighters moved apart was left out and several of the fighters’ taunts were toned down for language and content. One character’s opening taunt was reduced to idiocy, however. Charolette, the female French knight wears a suit of full armor. In the arcade version of the game, she sometimes tells her opponent “Don’t ever talk about my breast plate again!”. Nintendo of America apparently thought that gamers were too sensitive to read the “B” word, though, so they removed it, changing the quote to “Don’t ever talk about my plate again!”. Really, NoA? Was the word breast so upsetting that you had to make it seem that the poor woman was being remorselessly taunted about her choice of flatware?
3: Indigo Prophecy (Xbox)
This game from “Heavy Rain” developer Quantic Dream was presented as an interactive murder mystery/supernatural thriller for adults. It was released on the Xbox (and later the PS2 and Gamecube), a console seemingly aimed at more mature gamers (Halo 2 Timmies aside). Why, then, was it so stupidly censored whenever the slightest adult situation occurred? The game contains two shower scenes, both of which are rendered ridiculous by the same juvenile method of censorship. Take female lead Carla’s shower scene as an example. Carla, fresh from a day of detective work (a day that was that was capped off with a boxing match, no less) comes home and decides to relax with a nice hot shower. Sounds, reasonable, no? However, American audiences were considered incapable of dealing with a little fuzzy, 128 bit booty, so underwear was added to the character model. Tyler, one of the male leads, also does this. Showers while wearing his boxers. Hell, why do laundry separately, right? Now I’m not some digital pervert just aching for polygonal tis, but this kind of thing just draws you right out of the story. It still happens today, as well. In Mass Effect 3, if you manage to romance Samantha Traynor, she and FemShep take a shower together while fully clothed. Mmmmm...sexy.
Head to the 7:30 mark:
2: Mortal Kombat (SNES)
We all know the story behind this one. The SNES version of MK came complete with neutered Fatalities and copious amounts of sweat replacing the blood. Only Liu Kang’s retarded cartwheel uppercut and Sonya and Scorpion’s nearly identical fatalities survived unchanged ( because ripping someone’s spine out is too brutal, but burning them to death is just fine). The stupidity is not in the way the game was censored, but that it was censored at all. This was at the height of the SNES/Genesis wars, and Nintendo had been holding a firm lead up until this point. This game is what allowed the genesis to pull ahead of the SNES and take a large chunk of the big N’s game sales for the rest of that console generation. The Genesis port, through the use of the ABACAB code, sported gloriously unaltered blood and gore. This meant that, even though it was more technically superior and more arcade accurate, the SNES port came in a dismal second to the offering from Sega. The loss was so great that Nintendo actually made a point of advertising that the SNES port of MKII would be uncensored, basically saying “Hey, we want to protect the kids, but we want their money more”.
1: Conker’s Bad Fur Day (Xbox)
Back when RARE was exclusively a Nintendo developer (and when RARE made games that were worth a shit) they released an adult-oriented adventure game called Conker’s Bad Fur Day. It was dirty, vulgar, scatalogical, politically incorrect and hilariously brilliant. To this day it’s my favorite N64 game. So, when Microsoft purchased RARE and announced that they were going to release a graphically updates port of the game for the Xbox, I was understandably excited. New graphics and a controller that’s not a hand-cramping monstrosity! What could go wrong? Well, Microsoft could misplace their testicles, that’s what. Historically, Nintendo of America has been the company known for censoring games for their consoles. They’ve always chased the family-friendly image, tending to the extreme when sanitizing games, but even they didn’t cut Conker’s up as badly as Microsoft did.
On the N64, pretty much the only word that was censored was fuck. Shit, twat, damn, bullocks; all flew by the Big N’s censors. Move forward a few years to the Xbox; a console marketed as being more mature. A game system for those of us who don’t get the whole summer off for vacation. A system laden with games whose characters routinely drop more ‘F’ bombs than Andrew “Dice” Clay pissing on an electric fence while suffering from an urinary tract infection. But not Conker. Not only was fuck censored, but most other curses were also bleeped. I’ not a fan of swearing as a shock tactic, or vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, but when I play a scene in which an animated shit golem, who’s standing in a lake of shit that is itself inside a cave made of shit, sings an operatic tune about shit, and the word “shit” is censored, then I have to call Shenanigans.
They even changed the tune to the point that it sounds like it’s been re-recorded (it may have).
The original:
The remake( go to the 10:15 mark):
Feel free to post your own ideas in the comments.
