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Fallout 3 Edited Version To Hit Australian Shelves
UgLyPuNk contributes this excerpt from Internode Games Network, which might interest Australian readers in particular: "Just last week, we told you that Fallout 3 had been resubmitted to the Classifications Board, in the hope that it would be deemed suitable for Australian audiences.
While the Classifications Board can take between a few days and a few weeks to hand down their decision — it seems that the edits made to the Bethesda Softworks title have been successful, with the second edition of the game granted a new MA15+ rating this afternoon. We don't yet have the details of the decision, but are currently finding out just what was changed in the game in order to secure the new rating — and release in this country."
Some games (like Fallout and GTA) wouldn't be half as fun if they edited out the adult parts. Now, it sucks that the Aussies are getting a watered down version (meaning they'll have to pay a few bucks extra to get an import or just pirate it), but At least the US version might not be total shit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
All in game characters have been replaced with nannies trying to feed you the Australian bottle of ignorance.
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
The European versions of FO1 and FO2 were edited/censored to remove the ability to kill children. I'm not necessarily a proponent of censorship, but it wasn't like the game was really missing anything.
The Bethesda games (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion) don't feature kids because you can kill anyone in game.
I wonder how this was handled with FO3.
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I'd rather see Wasteland 2. It's been 20 years, don't we get a sequel yet??
They'll all just pirate the (american version of the) game, and if they feel socially responsible, they'll also buy a copy in australia.
Then again, social responsibility may encourage them to boycott the australian release, causing the game to have horrible sales in australia, but phenomenal sales everywhere else in the world... that might make the publisher put some pressure on the classification board, and get them to change their policies.
Since Australians are upside-down, they had to change the title to "Climbout 3".
What makes you think the US version won't be edited? I remember the US version of Oblivion, for example, had no titties, while all the (continental) european versions did. Also, if you compare US TV with european or south-american TV, you'll find that there's a lot of censorship in the US (even for US shows and films - you can sometimes find whole scenes in the "export" version that were censored in the US). Not to mention the ridiculous american media habit of bleeping out words, as if people couldn't fill in the gap anyway (does the "evil" word become less "evil" if people only hear it in their heads, not their ears?).
I can sort of understand the UK censoring some stuff, like the USA (after all, not _all_ puritans crossed the Atlantic), but isn't Australia supposed to have been built by ex-cons? What exactly are they censoring? Parts of the game without beer?
I've played both the US version and the censored German version, and the censored problem had a few more problems. They hadn't only removed the ability to kill children, they had removed all children from the game outright.
Which now caused a few quests to be broken. E.g., you couldn't find the kid in the well, because there was no kid.
Some things were removed so brutally that it caused even more bugginess than the game had anyway. E.g., at the vault in the north-east, the kid with the doll was missing, but his idle chat would keep happening, because the game script thought he's still there.
Some of the alternate ways to solve other stuff also got broken in the process. E.g., once you got to the next town, now you couldn't have that kid's wrench.
So I'm not saying it was necessarily fatal, but saying that it's not really missing anything... is a bit mis-leading too, IMHO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
According to what I've read on NMA, one of the major issues concerns drugs in FO3. Not that drugs exist or are used, but that the ones in the game are named for real drugs, such as morphine. They may have to rename the drugs to something fictional to get the game rating changed.