Australia Bans Reservoir Dogs Game, Spikes Interest
Did you know a game could be this cool?
As everyone knows, extreme imagery of violence is slightly more fun than it is damaging. It must be. We've seen a load of violent movies and played an awful lot of very horrible, ultra violent games, yet have never once maimed or tortured another creature. Except for ants, but they don't count.
SPOnG had a passing interest in Eidos' Reservoir Dogs spin-off, an interest that was spiked when we heard how awesome the game was from the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification. The board kindly reviewed the game and highlighted all the best bits to potential buyers:
See? Did you know you could blow off hostage's heads all day long in the game? We didn't. Now we do!
Brilliant. Cutting off fingers is probably a gaming first. We don't think that even The Punisher had digit removal. Another mighty plus for Reservoir Dogs.
What an amazing game! Yet for some reason, the Australians have banned it from going on sale. We can only recommend that our PAL-formatted cousins break the law and import the English language versions of the game from the UK.
SPOnG had a passing interest in Eidos' Reservoir Dogs spin-off, an interest that was spiked when we heard how awesome the game was from the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification. The board kindly reviewed the game and highlighted all the best bits to potential buyers:
Players (participants in a bank heist) can literally blow the heads off hostages and police as well as execute hostages at point blank range with a gunshot to the head.
See? Did you know you could blow off hostage's heads all day long in the game? We didn't. Now we do!
Using a series of so-called signature torture moves, players can use different means to torture hostages and thereby cause police to lay down their weapons, such as repeated pistol whipping the side of the head with blood spray evident, burning the eyes of a hostage with a cigar until they scream and die, cutting the fingers off a hostage with blood bursts as the victim screams in pain.
Brilliant. Cutting off fingers is probably a gaming first. We don't think that even The Punisher had digit removal. Another mighty plus for Reservoir Dogs.
In lieu of taking a hostage the player can opt for a more violent scenario where a slow motion shootout occurs, accentuating the violence.
What an amazing game! Yet for some reason, the Australians have banned it from going on sale. We can only recommend that our PAL-formatted cousins break the law and import the English language versions of the game from the UK.
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Comments
thane_jaw 28 Jun 2006 12:02
1/3
Doesn't Aus ban anything vaguely mature due to the lack of a rating comparable to 18?
Still the hype generated from it overseas must be worth more then the potential Aussie market (sorry my antipodean friends) and the people that really want it will get it anyway.
Still the hype generated from it overseas must be worth more then the potential Aussie market (sorry my antipodean friends) and the people that really want it will get it anyway.
tyrion 28 Jun 2006 12:26
2/3
thane_jaw wrote:
Doesn't Aus ban anything vaguely mature due to the lack of a rating comparable to 18?
From this article on Wikipedia (I know!) it appears that they have an "18" rating for films, but choose not to apply it to games.
Also they appear to have literature ratings! Is it just me or is Australia a real nanny state?
thane_jaw 28 Jun 2006 15:42
3/3
Yeah, I meant the 18 rating wasn't applied to games, effectively banning anything with mature content.
Aus is a great place to live, however they do have their own really major problems and the general politics of the nation is rather more conservative (with a small c) then here in Britain, in fact they appear to straddle american culture and politics more then british. They alsoi seem to be trying to maintain the status quo quite heavily, which includes fairly restrictive immigration policies (the resentment amongst some Australians for foreigners, especially oriental immigrants is rather worrying, especially given a population of 20 million and a rather large island to put them all on) and rather repressive policing methods. From my experience there also seemed to be a underlying view of the aboriginal people as an underclass, something which their general poverty and publically percieved high level of alcoholism reinforces. Oh and the australian wine production industry is about to either go down the pan due to low water levels in the regions where its grown or going genetically modified to deal with lower levels of water.
Having said all that, if you can stand the heat and put sun tan lotion on every day, there are great opportunities for outside activites, a wickedly subversive immigrant humour (there's a t.v. show there called Pizza, if memory serves me correctly, which is fantastic. Bad eggs is also a great film), great hip hop and live music scene and standard of living.
Aus is a great place to live, however they do have their own really major problems and the general politics of the nation is rather more conservative (with a small c) then here in Britain, in fact they appear to straddle american culture and politics more then british. They alsoi seem to be trying to maintain the status quo quite heavily, which includes fairly restrictive immigration policies (the resentment amongst some Australians for foreigners, especially oriental immigrants is rather worrying, especially given a population of 20 million and a rather large island to put them all on) and rather repressive policing methods. From my experience there also seemed to be a underlying view of the aboriginal people as an underclass, something which their general poverty and publically percieved high level of alcoholism reinforces. Oh and the australian wine production industry is about to either go down the pan due to low water levels in the regions where its grown or going genetically modified to deal with lower levels of water.
Having said all that, if you can stand the heat and put sun tan lotion on every day, there are great opportunities for outside activites, a wickedly subversive immigrant humour (there's a t.v. show there called Pizza, if memory serves me correctly, which is fantastic. Bad eggs is also a great film), great hip hop and live music scene and standard of living.