Censorship in Germany: How they changed your fav games …

[Dtoid community blogger OpiumHerz shares his experiences gaming in Germany. Want to see your own blog appear on our front page? Go write something! --Mr Andy Dixon]

My name is Jim and I am German. I've been writing a blog series titled "The worst thing about censorship is " for about a year now in order to give you a little insight into videogame censorship, which is still pretty much alive and kicking here in Germany (and elsewhere). In this episode, I'll discuss censorship in various games spanning multiple regions, including Soldier of Fortune II, The Witcher II, Bulletstorm, Balder's Gate, Dead Rising, and more. For more entries, check out my Cblog!

Soldier of Fortune II

We start right off with one of the most ridiculous censorships ever: Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. You remember how in Half-Life some enemies were exchanged for robots? Yeah, they pulled that one again. Except, this time it wasn't only the enemies. The WHOLE game was robotized. Now don't get me wrong: Soldier of Fortune 1 and 2 were brutal as hell. The gore engine developed for those titles was incredibly detailed and I would dare to say that, as far as simple splatter goes, there are few games that have matched them. You could literally dissect killed enemies up to the organs.

As I said, in Germany the whole game got the robot treatment. This means that not only your enemies are robots (and thus no blood and no gore exists, only sparks fly when you shoot somebody and burning robots don't scream of course, because they know no pain), but everybody. They even have welding seams. In fact, the whole story takes place in a parallel universe, as a convenient text explains. Yeah. The German version of SOF2 takes place in another universe where the machines took over the world and humanity went extinct. Over time, the robots became feeling beings and because they only know humanity, they started living like humanity. Isn't that a great explanation why those robots go to work and have families and build cities with human-like politics and stuff? So while the original story was about biological warfare, the censored version is about a computer virus. I shit you not.

Funfact: the UK version had a region lock. So when you played it in German, it still had human enemies, but no gore. Human enemies in this version just dropped dead and that was it. However, this region lock could be circumvented with a simple console code. I personally had a Russian version of this game, where this region lock was in effect too. So I guess it was coded into every other version.

Also, the censored version is incompatible with uncensored versions in terms of multiplayer. So German players were only able to play against other German players. They also didn't even bother with patching the game to Version 1.03 over here.

And the real kicker? This censored version was still rated 18+, so it got our highest possible rating. Later on the game was released on the original Xbox. It came to Germany completely uncensored -- with the same rating. There is no set process in rating a game in Germany, and stuff like this is the result of that.

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