On the Left 4 Dead Ban

[Metalrocks]

australia is still harmles. i live in australia but i lived a very long time of my life in switzerland.
in germany, they are even worser. it just needs one drop of blood in the game, and they are already upsad about it. they have 18+ ratings, but the game is still cut. most of the games you cant get in a shop. if you want to get quake 3 in germany, good luck finding it. quake 3 is bad because you get points for killing.
in quake 4, they dint only cut out the blood and gore, they also cut out the strogg change scene because its too brutal.
half life; good luck too. you can only get the german version. it has no blood and the seals are replaced with robots. no joke.
germany has the tuffest child protection in the world (so i have hurd).

there were few school shootings in germany. the government blamed counter strike, that this kid took a gun and killed some peopel at school. counter strike is the game which makes peopel go postal. so they say.
the truth was, that this kid had trouble at home, got bullied at school and the teachers dint like him either. did they say anything about this??? no, they dint. it was all the violent video games he played.
with FEAR they ahd trouble too. they wanted to have all the blood cut out but monolyth said no. later on germany agreed to leave the blood but you cant dismental the bodies.

its stupid anyway that left 4 dead 2 is banned. how come part 1 is not?? michael atkinson is a stupid idiot. i was shocked when i came back to australia and saw that the highest rating for games are MA 15+. thats so wrong. it really makes you wonder how so stupid people like atkinson can get a job like this. he has for sure no idea about games.

but as i said before. germany is much worser then australia. i can go on about germany and there stupid rules about violent games. they really think, they make germany a better place by banning all these games and movies.

 

[mehmehmeh]

why dont you ask somone to send it to you from another country

 

[NeoAC]

So can we get some names about the renaissance critics that make up the ACB? And addresses? And lists of their childhood fears? I just like to know what I'm working with here.

 

[MolestedGibbon]

Just because its not going to be sold at retail doesn't mean people won't play it; it's a Valve game, Steam duh.
One of my first games was Dino Crisis 2. M Rated for some reason.
When I was 8 I was playing Vice City.
I'm 14 and I recently bought GTA IV which had a giant red 18 sticker on it. Did the clerk so much as bat an eyelid? No of course not because no one actually takes the ratings seriously.
Enlighten me as to what there is in Team Fortress 2 that makes it unsuitable for anyone under 16/17.

 

[Ninja_X]

Yahzee, if you wanna organize a revolution against the Australian authorities then me and my army of ninjas are at your service.

 

[tonsoffun111111]

Maybe the Australian government is trying to make the world forget that it was a prison colony by being all goody to shoes

 

[theSovietConnection]

*Snip*

Thanks for that bit of logic. Good to see some people can look at this situation and not go "OMG POLICE STATE!"

Not much else to add to this, NewClassic summed it up quite nicely.

 

[Dioxide20]

Wow, I live the other side of the planet from Australia, and reading about this STILL gets me pissed off...

I feel the same way, first Australia, then the rest of the world. Videogame companies now have to cater to these assholes.

 

[tsolless]

Not everyone seems to understand what is happening here. Australia has absolutely no rating for adults for video games, or for North American's an equivalent of M. Any game that Australia feels deserves what should be an M rating can not be classified. It is the Office of Film and Literature's job to rate games and they didn't feel right rating this game for teenagers.

Australia generally rates games much more leniently than other organizations but because they this one couldn't be rated for teenagers and there is no higher rating, the game can not be classified.

It is not as if there was, at any point, someone who said, "This game is horrible. We must ban it/refuse to give it a rating." What happened was that someone said, "We can't rate this game for teenagers, and since we have no higher rating, we can't rate this game."

Huge, huge difference. Get upset at the lack of a higher rating, not at Australia/the rating organization. The organization did it's job and if there were a higher rating then that rating would have been given instead. Australia generally give games ratings much lower than their North America counterparts. This is not leading to a police state and the logic behind that idea is absurd.

 

[DayDark]

I'm really tempted to fly to Australia if there comes a protest because of this, I'm not Australian, but this pisses me off to no end.

 

[Krios]

Yahtzee kind of summarized what I thought when I heard of this L4D2 ban. So it´s suddenly better to ban a fairly normal violent game to "protect the children" at the cost of creating the murderous hate of *all* well-informed gamers in Australia? Nice. This also brings us to the question of how flawed democracy really is. My guess would have to be that 99,999989% of all Australians would either want this game to be released or doesn´t care. But the few idiotic politicians ban it and will not bother to create a K-18 marking. Brilliant. The sad thing here really is that the world is driven by two things. Money and violence. If a gamer or even the entire nation of Australia (politicians are not counted as a part of the nation due to their need to survive on pure gold) wants to get L4D2 out in Australia... he/she basically needs to kill every politician who is behind this. This really is a sad thing but that´s basically the only way people can have a say on things in the current dictatorship we call "democracy". It won´t be long before the Australian government bans the critisism of the government and innocent people are thrown into jail because they "work against Australia". Australia just took the crucial step of becoming Burma/Myanmar. Very soon the army will start killing innocent civilians because they feel like it. Riot. Now.

 

[Nouw]

Why does everyone hate blood and gore? It's anatomy. And violence is a natural occurance. Kids are gonna see it in school anyways...

Well I dont see it in my school


EDIT: I hope u read this I just remembered the irony of austrailia.

Halo 3 ODST M no legal restriction. Halo 3 as well. Fear 2 Ban'd
New Zealand Halo 3/ODST R16. Fear 2 not Ban'd


WTF

 

[Hot_in_the_pants]

The problem is parents are too bloody lazy to look after their children and actually care about what happens to them, that the Australian Government have to do everything to control their children. It is shown by the no red food in schools law, what the balls is that? Just because parents give their children junk for school doesn't mean it what they eat all the time and even if they did it none of the Governments business to butt in and get their old wrinkly arses in their making everyones lives worse.They are like pedophiles with the way they constantly watch our children and the way they stalk families. They need to stop taking what power we get as a parent and let parents decide what their children should eat, watch, play, touch, do, etc.

 

[Taco of flames]

Apologies to anyone who may have said this, but I think it would be damned funny if some guy tryed to mug someone in a dark alley with a video game controller. "X, Y, LB, LB! Why won't you drop your loot?!" Worst case scenario, someone gets beaned in the head. Really, no video game can teach someone how to kill.


Until the Wii perfects the motion controls.

 

[Sonicron]

australia is still harmles. i live in australia but i lived a very long time of my life in switzerland.
in germany, they are even worser. it just needs one drop of blood in the game, and they are already upsad about it. they have 18+ ratings, but the game is still cut. most of the games you cant get in a shop. if you want to get quake 3 in germany, good luck finding it. quake 3 is bad because you get points for killing.
in quake 4, they dint only cut out the blood and gore, they also cut out the strogg change scene because its too brutal.
half life; good luck too. you can only get the german version. it has no blood and the seals are replaced with robots. no joke.
germany has the tuffest child protection in the world (so i have hurd).

there were few school shootings in germany. the government blamed counter strike, that this kid took a gun and killed some peopel at school. counter strike is the game which makes peopel go postal. so they say.
the truth was, that this kid had trouble at home, got bullied at school and the teachers dint like him either. did they say anything about this??? no, they dint. it was all the violent video games he played.
with FEAR they ahd trouble too. they wanted to have all the blood cut out but monolyth said no. later on germany agreed to leave the blood but you cant dismental the bodies.

its stupid anyway that left 4 dead 2 is banned. how come part 1 is not?? michael atkinson is a stupid idiot. i was shocked when i came back to australia and saw that the highest rating for games are MA 15+. thats so wrong. it really makes you wonder how so stupid people like atkinson can get a job like this. he has for sure no idea about games.

but as i said before. germany is much worser then australia. i can go on about germany and there stupid rules about violent games. they really think, they make germany a better place by banning all these games and movies.

Aside from the fact that your spelling hurts my eyes, I agree with your statement. Australia doesn't get violent games? Boo hoo. In a way, what we get served over here is worse. At least you don't shell out 60-70 Euros on a violent game only to find out they've cut half the content. I've already made it a policy to do extensive internet research on any game I am even remotely interested in buying as to possible censorship... otherwise the chance of getting ripped off is just too big.
Wolfenstein in Germany? Yeeeeaahh... no Nazi symbolism, no gore...
The Darkness? Nuh-uh, no devouring of enemy hearts for you! Instead your tentacles get to absorb friendly green 'soul fog' to power up.
WET? Just finished it, not a single drop of blood, and no severed limbs either.
And yesterday my suspicions about Assassin's Creed 2 were confirmed when it was officially announced the German version is to undergo the gimp treatment as well.
All in all, sucks for you, fellow gamers who happen to be unlucky enough to suffer Michael Atkinson's stubbornness... I hope you'll be rid of him some time in the near future, but thats really all the sympathy I can muster considering the sorry state of censorship laws in my own country.

 

[Andronicus]

Snip

So I assume it will be released in Germany, just with less blood and flying bits of zombie? I too feel an empathetic sympathy for German gamers, but at least there's been no announcements to ban it in Germany (at least, not that I can find) like in Australia, and there have been no official announcements to produce a less violent version here.

It's not as if I play games just to see lots of blood and gore. It's disappointing that I am forced to play games that have been censored, but at least I'd get to play the game, so as long as Left 4 Dead 2 is actually released, I'd be... well, I'd be more or less satisfied. Happiness seems to be a revolution away, though.

 

[Wyes]

I hope you'll be rid of him some time in the near future, but thats really all the sympathy I can muster considering the sorry state of censorship laws in my own country.

While I appreciate that the censorship laws in Germany are a lot stricter than the ones here, in Germany it's understandable, given certain parts of it's history that the German government is very fearful there will be repeats of (mostly unwarranted fears, of course). But here there is absolutely no reason for this kind of censorship; our violent crime rates are very low, there's nothing in our history that we wish to avoid a repeat of (except maybe the Port Arthur shooting spree), we have very strict gun laws so gun crime is minimal etc.

 

[Sonicron]

Snip

So I assume it will be released in Germany, just with less blood and flying bits of zombie? I too feel an empathetic sympathy for German gamers, but at least there's been no announcements to ban it in Germany (at least, not that I can find) like in Australia, and there have been no official announcements to produce a less violent version here.

It's not as if I play games just to see lots of blood and gore. It's disappointing that I am forced to play games that have been censored, but at least I'd get to play the game, so as long as Left 4 Dead 2 is actually released, I'd be... well, I'd be more or less satisfied. Happiness seems to be a revolution away, though.

Well, I'm not one of the gamers who need five buckets worth of blood and entrails on screen the entire duration of the game, but I do feel ripped off when I play a game that features somewhat realistic violence (a game I paid a lot of money for, mind you) without depicting the obvious consequences of said violent acts (say, shoving a blade into someone's face without apparently drawing blood)... especially considering the fact that gamers in other countries paid the same amount of money without suffering a diminished experience.

I hope you'll be rid of him some time in the near future, but thats really all the sympathy I can muster considering the sorry state of censorship laws in my own country.

While I appreciate that the censorship laws in Germany are a lot stricter than the ones here, in Germany it's understandable, given certain parts of it's history that the German government is very fearful there will be repeats of (mostly unwarranted fears, of course.

Well... that may be true in part. Most of the censorship madness we have here at the moment, though, is the result of a school shooting in Erfurt only a few years back - that's when the thumbscrews on gaming went from squeezing the metaphorical fingers to grinding them into paste.

 

[pearcinator]

I live in Australia and whilst i couldnt really give 2 shits about "Left 4 Dead 2" (i found the 1st to be lacking of content and not nearly as good as TF2) I get the feeling that if Valve just changes the name of 'The Infected' to fucking 'Zombies!' or even 'Living Impaired' then im sure the game will be reclassified with MA 15+ rating.

Although i agree that our govt. is full of dipshits...theres a paper out there for R rating in videogames but some cockhead is purposely ignoring it as it would mean they would have to do something else than twiddle their thumbs.

 

[Wyes]

Well... that may be true in part. Most of the censorship madness we have here at the moment, though, is the result of a school shooting in Erfurt only a few years back - that's when the thumbscrews on gaming went from squeezing the metaphorical fingers to grinding them into paste.

I wasn't aware of that, but it makes sense. It seems every country uses video games as a scapegoat, so they can be seen to be doing something.