Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interesting article on Battlefield 3 that explains why you can't shoot civilians in the game. Apparently EA decided to make it so that players couldn't just gun down innocents in the game. It's an interesting policy considering that some might consider taking away that option as removing some of the realism that games such as Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 are promising.

If you happen to live in Japan, you may or may not notice (you will now because we're telling you about it right here, so "you're welcomed") that the Japanese retail version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution has undergone two edits to protect audiences from "body organs and sexual objects."

The Australian Christian Lobby has called for games to be banned if they contain violence that is "excessive or gratuitous." The call came as the world digests the bizarre rambling of a 1500-page manifesto written by Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik and released online shortly before he killed 76 people in and around Oslo, Norway.

The Australian federal government said yesterday that Breivik committed his crimes because there is "something clearly intrinsically wrong with him", not because he played violent video games.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge did say that Modern Warfare 2 should be reviewed to have a more restrictive R18+ rating in the country. It is currently rated MA15+.

VentureBeat is reporting that more than 50 Star Wars Galaxies players plan on filing a class-action lawsuit against Sony Online Entertainment tomorrow in Washington D.C. Several players have emailed VentureBeat indicating that they will join the class-action lawsuit concerning SOE shutting down various petitions to keep the game alive. The company announced late last week that it would shut down the game at the end of this year.

The good news is Atlus’s ultra-weird dating sim/puzzler will be getting a completely uncut release in the US.  Hooray!

The bad news is the cover art’s been tweaked a bit in order to make it happen.  You can see the difference to the left.  Why the change?  Jeremy Cail, a creative designer for Atlus' US branch says retailers were a bit squeamish about the somewhat risqué original covers.

“We have two different versions of Catherine cover art.  There's already two different versions, one for both the PS3 and Xbox 360, but the altered imagery was at the request of some our retail partners. They wanted the change in case people got the wrong idea about the game... or, as I see it, the right idea about Catherine! No change to the games themselves – the disc themselves are the same.”

In late March four United States Senators voiced outrage over iPhone and Android apps that alerted users to local DUI stops being conducted by the police. It bothered them so much that the four got together and penned strongly worded letters to the CEO's of both Apple and Google asking them to ban these apps from their respective marketplaces.

Three months later and one company has complied with the wishes of Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.). According to revised app developer guidelines uncovered by Mac Rumors, section 22.8 offers an addendum:

"Apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies, or encourage and enable drunk driving, will be rejected."

According to Develop, Nintendo has decided not to support Flash-based apps on its 3DS hand-held. Echoing Apple's ban of the platform on iOS devices, Nintendo has decided that it won't allow developers to use Flash for developing games or other applications. This is particularly important for those wanting to use Flash-based technologies in Nintendo's 3DS web browser.

On a related note, Nintendo of America announced this morning that it would release a "major system update" for the 3DS that adds the 3DS Internet browser and the Nintendo eShop, which contains a variety of new content, including Pokédex 3D, an application that lets fans see Pokémon characters in 3D. Nintendo is offering the NES game Excitebike re-mastered in 3D as a free download until July 7.

Australia is an interesting country. On the one hand it has struggled for years to get an adult level video games rating classification (R18+) and on the other it allows a game that has been censored in other countries to be released there with little or no controversy. The game in question is the 3DS tactical fighter Dead or Alive: Dimensions. Several countries have banned the game because it features sexualized depictions of children. The children are three teen characters named Ayane, Koroke and Kasumi who game makers describe as "under 18 years of age."

To be fair, the censoring has been done mostly by Nintendo, based on concerns about child pornography laws in Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark and Norway) that say it is illegal to show young girls as animated characters in a sexualized way. The concern is mostly with the game's photography mode, which allows players to look up characters' dresses when they are in certain poses.

According to a report in UK-based paper The Guardian, China has been using its prison population as slave labor.. in MMORPG's. According to the report, prisoners were put to work breaking rocks and digging trenches in in the coalmines of Northern China. By night prisoners would be forced to play MMORPG's to earn virtual currency, which guards would trade for real-world money.

One prisoner, who served three years at the Jixi labor camp for pointing out corruption in his hometown, described the conditions at the camp in startling detail. Liu Dali told the paper that prisoners were forced to play online games to enrich the guards of the prison. The 54-year-old was a former prison guard who made the mistake of "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown in 2004. Dali says that the online slave labor is probably more lucrative than the physical labor that prisoners are forced to do.

United Arab Emirates retail chain Geekay Games updated its Facebook page today with sad, if unsurprising news:

Unfortunate news, L.A. Noire has been banned. Sorry guys :(

Bummer.  The UAE’s National Media Council (NMC) did not reveal why it banned the game and so far, Rockstar has not commented on the situation.

Speculation has it that The Witcher 2 and Duke Nukem Forever will be the next titles to receive a wallop from the NMC banhammer.

Source: Middle East Gamers via Cheater87

-Reporting from San Diego, GamePolitics Contributing Editor Andrew Eisen

Mod hosting site ModDB has succumbed to pressure from outside sources and has removed the Half-Life 2 mod, School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, from its database. In an open letter to its community, ModDB founder Scott "INtense!" Reismanis said that the site pulled the mod down after "getting quite a bit of mainstream press due to the controversial nature of the content." He went on to say that he got a lot of threatening mail from various sources and the authors of that mail believed that ModDB were the mod's creators.

The Half-Life 2 mod was created by mod group Checkerboarded Studios. The group was obviously pushing the enevelope when it came to its mod. "You are free to do whatever you want. As long as it involves shooting people," reads part of the mod's description.

Earlier this week, we reported on an IGN story that the ESRB had shot down publisher Deep Silver’s first box art submission for its upcoming zombie title, Dead Island.  An alternate, ESRB approved version of the cover swapped out the silhouette of a hanging man with that of a shambling zombie.  IGN has updated its original story with comments from the ESRB:

“The video game industry has set guidelines about the types of content that are appropriate in advertising and marketing materials, which includes game box art. According to those guidelines the depiction in the logo was not compliant.

A Commons committee has recommended the current Canadian government be found in contempt of Parliament, but the ruling party, Conservatives, have a chance of a historic censure if a vote on the budget or other events launch an election first.

The Commons procedure and house affairs committee tabled a majority report Monday concluding that the government is "in contempt" for continually refusing to disclose information about the cost of several major legislative items. They are referring to documents related to the cost of several items including its law-and-order agenda, corporate tax cuts and a plan to buy stealth combat jets. All of the opposition members of Parliament on the committee voted to condemn the government for withholding the requested documents without giving "adequate reasons" for doing so.

According to an IGN report, the North American boxart proposed by publisher Deep Silver has been censored by the ESRB. The rejection was due to a zombie / corpse hanging from a palm tree that represented the "I" in "Island." The approved box art simply uses a standing zombie as the "I" and removes the noose / hanging scene from the equation.

The in-game logo will remain unchanged and the boxart and in-game logo for Dead Island in Europe will remain unchanged, according to the IGN report. Dead Island is currently scheduled for release for an undetermined date in 2011.

Thanks to Andrew Eisen for the tip.

Source: IGN

According to a report on Kotaku Australia Mortal Kombat has been refused classification in Australia. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment issued the following statement to the media:

When taxpayers hear the term "pork barrel spending" they think of ridiculous projects getting an earmark from appropriations secured by their elected representative in the congress. Yes, if you read only the briefest descriptions of these earmarks you might think it's all a big waste of your tax dollars. After all, do we really need to be spending money on researching yoga and condoms when every state in the country is running deficits and the federal government's level debt is out of control?

If we go by the brief summary descriptions of many of these projects then the answer would probably be "yes." The problem is that many of these "silly-sounding" projects are actually important studies that lead to medical breakthroughs. This in turns leads to advanced medical techniques and technologies, or just a better understanding of how certain diseases and medical conditions can affect human beings.  

Epic Games and People Can Fly's latest game, Bulletstorm, has been given a USK 18 + rating by the German Entertainment Software Rating Board. Some serious changes had to be made to the game before it could be released in the region. Despite the adult rating, the German version of the game has a number of things omitted such as ragdoll physics effects, blood, blood splatter, and dismemberment.

While the game can't be banned at this point by the German youth protection board (BPjM) because it has been rated, German gamers will once again get a game experience that has been censored and watered down in the name of protecting the country's youth from violent content. Developers and publishers that want to do business in the country are well aware of the limitations and challenges thrust upon them by government rules and restrictions, with most chalking it up to "the price of doing business in Germany."

EA is the publisher of the game in Europe.

The Writers Guild of America is speaking out about criticism that video game writers have to pay money and sign up for a membership to win the Writers Guild Award for games. In an editorial on GameIndustry.biz, the chair of the Writers Guild of America's Videogame Writers Caucus, Micah Wright claims, "you do not have to be a member of our guild to win our award."

"We ask that all entrants join the Videogame Writers Caucus (VWC), but that is not the same thing as being a member of the WGA," says Wright.

The problem is, the VWC does require a $60 annual fee, which buys a membership. The money does give the submitter access to free film screenings and a subscription to the WGA's Written By Magazine, but it's still a fee.

Capcom attempted to quell the leak of two secret characters from Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition this week by issuing copyright notices against YouTube videos. The videos featured Evil Ryu and Oni Akumfa, two charcters that were to be announced by Capcom later. Now the company has confirmed the characters but users who had videos on YouTube can't turn back the clock and some of them have lost whole channels thanks to YouTube's "three strikes" rule. A user with multiple copyright notices can have their entire account suspended and have videos deleted.

One prominent user, Street Fighter tournament player J.R. Rodriguez, lost his channel and more than 50 videos were deleted, according to published reports.

The two characters can apparently be unlocked via a built-in password system, but the passwords themselves were leaked or discovered. Some say that producer Yoshinori Ono has taken some heat for it.

Kongregate CEO Jim Greer has responded to Google pulling its Kongregate Arcade app from the Android store this week. Released yesterday, the app was on the store a few hours before Google decided to yank it without much explanation. Greer called Google's swift removal of the app "surprising," noting that he showed the app to several people at Google, and that they seemed to approve of it at the time. Greer did acknowledge that the person at Google who made the decision to yank the app had not seen it prior to its release.

"The reason for the removal," Greer said, "and we didn't find out until after it was already gone, was that they claim you can't use their app store to distribute another app store -- which is a reasonable restriction. But to us, what's really bizarre, to call [Kongregate Arcade] an 'app store' seems like a pretty extreme stretch."

Rock, Paper Shotgun reports that there may be a happy ending to the World of StarCraft mod maker story we reported on yesterday. A very public story about Activision-Blizzard taking down video footage from his mod on YouTube caught the notice of someone from Riot Games, maker of the DOTA-like RPG strategy game League of Legends.

A Riot Games employee, commenting on the story over at Pixelated Geek, asked the World of StarCraft maker to contact him (her?) via email to talk about a job opportunity:

"Ryan, I'd love to hire you at Riotgames. Please email me at epak@riotgames.com We can at least chat about it."

It looks like the German government is not happy with the violent content in Dead Space 2 and wants changes to the game before it is released in the region. The main cause of disagreement from the government: Friendly Fire in multiplayer. Naturally, these changes will make it so that gamers in Germany will not have to wait for the game on various platforms until sometime in February. EA announced the delay in a press release this week, saying that the game would be released on February 3.

The single player campaign from Dead Space 2 remains uncut and identical to the international version of the game, but multiplayer has been altered to appease the government. Germany is very touchy about games that let players kills "humans." Many shooters require alterations before they can be released in the region - like turning human enemies into zombies or robots, ot changing red blood to another color.

The Advertising Standards Authority, the government agency in charge of monitoring ads released on television, magazines, and public posters and billboards in the UK, has banned a poster for Sony's Move and the game The Fight: Light's Out. The ad was banned after the agency received eight complaints - two of which strongly objected to one of the men being tackled being "black." The ASA said that the ad features men of "slightly different skin tones" but did not ban the ad based on those complaints..

Instead the ASA banned the ad because it could "condone or encourage violent behavior" in children. Of course, playing in the schoolyard could also encourage the same kind of behavior..

A roughly translated news story on vietnamnet reports that young players in Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam will be subject to a gaming curfew beginning in January. The crackdown by the city's Department of Information and Communications follows a move earlier this year to curtail primary school students from playing games on weekdays between the hours of 8 am - 5 pm.

Under the new rules, gambling companies are also required to shut down from 10pm to 8am daily and not to provide online gaming to internet shops near any educational institutions.

The crackdown on online games is the result of a public outcry on the “negative effect of video games” on youth. Local reports have blamed an increase in everything from juvenile crime to school truancy on online gaming.

Webcomic Virtual Shackles wryly illustrates how California's violent video games law might work when put into practice.

During Tuesday’s oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor pointed out what could easily be viewed as a rather large loophole in the law at the heart of Schwarzenegger v. EMA.

The law seeks to prevent children under 18 from purchasing games in which the player can “virtually inflict serious injury upon images of human beings.”  But what about characters that are almost, but not quite human beings?  Here’s the relevant exchange:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Would a video game that portrayed a Vulcan as opposed to a human being, being maimed and tortured, would that be covered by the act?

 

MR. MORAZZINI: No, it wouldn't, Your Honor, because the act is only directed towards the range of options that are able to be inflicted on a human being.

In addition to being censored in Germany, Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops will be receiving a few trims for its release in Japan as well.

A few weeks ago, Square-Enix, who is distributing the title in Japan, announce that in order to comply with standards set by the CERO ratings board, it would be removing “all scenes of dismemberment and ‘expressions of brutality.’”  These cuts would apply to the both the subtitled and the dubbed versions of the game but the publisher promised that the zombie mode would remain untouched.

Turns out, that’s not the case.

Duke Nukem Forever is scheduled to launch next year and it’s bringing all the guns, violence, blood, baddies, babes, and boobs it can to make sure the decade-plus wait was worth it.

But what will the various ratings bodies such as the ESRB and PEGI think of Duke?  Will they slap him with a sales crippling rating?

Developer Gearbox Software’s big cheese Randy Pitchford revealed his thoughts to CVG:

Activision’s upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops has undergone a few changes in order to appease German censors.

According to CODFeed (via The Escapist), the game, which is set in various locations between 1960 and 2010, will have the following changes implemented for the German market:

Apple's guidelines for App developers are strict, as we have detailed in multiple stories on Game Politics. But as this editorial on Gamasutra points out, the company is also vague in its guidelines - and apparently playing the part of parents who are just too lazy to set up parental controls.

The main thrust of the editorial is about the murky language of Apple's App Store Review Guidelines document, and how difficult it is to get an App on an Apple device given all of these loosely defined restrictions.

Here is a sample on sexual content (from Apple's App Store Review Guidelines document):

"Explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings."

And another on violence:

When it comes to plans for the country's National Broadband Network (NBN), Australian voters are in quite a pickle as the federal elections kick off tomorrow, August 21.

A column in the Age outlines a few of the choices of Australian voters and they are head scratchers: vote for the Labor party and their proposed “$43 billion national fibre rollout, designed to offer at least 100 Mbps to at least 90 percent of Australian homes,” or opt for the Liberals and their $6 billion plan to offer at least 12Mbps service to 90 percent of AU residences.

Sure the Labor version sounds good, but keep in mind that the man behind a proposed (though delayed) mandatory Internet filter in the country is Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, a Labor party member.