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Duke Nukem Forever Not Edited For Australia
dotarray writes "In case you still somehow didn't believe yesterday's news that Duke Nukem Forever had been given an MA15+ rating in Australia – effectively evading the notoriously strict censors, GamePron now has confirmation that the Duke has not been edited in any way for an Australian release. Hooray!"
What about all these 15-18 year old kids who'll think it's okay to throw pipe bombs at a mutant pig cop!?
This joke is going too far. They have official ratings now? Can they get in trouble for submitting something that they have no intention of finishing?
I don't get it. Duke Nukem Foerever? Rating? You kidding me?
Nope, I think you mistook me for someone else.
Duke Nukem won't allow you to censor him, he'll just kick your ass.
Duke Nukem 3D back in the early 90s was refused classification and had been re-released as a censored version.
There is next to no consistency with the classification board, no logic. The only consistent thing is that most of their reasoning makes little to no sense when they've previously waved through worse games than the one they are classifying at the time.
Not long after the "Atomic" edition of Duke-3D was released in all its glory. No censorship, same game just with 'more'. Makes sense doesnt it?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Left 4 dead 2 had zombie corpses despawning before they hit the ground, no decapitations or amputations, no blood or gore.
It's horrendous to play in that condition. The rules are not applied equally either. It depends on which particular censor you get. Studios can of course contest the rating to a higher board which seems to be a little better.
I remember Duke Nukem 3D having an adults only rating. That title for the time was pushing boundaries. With interactive strippers, heavy profanity and hell, he rips off an aliens head and shits down its neck. Thats what made it great. If even Australia gives this game a 15+ rating how watered down will it be.
The Classification Board is aware of just how much of a joke it's become. They've figured out that anything remotely popular now has to be given an M15+ rating regardless of content because they've been threatened by state governments to have their mandate pulled if they start trying to censor things. Basically they've become toothless, refuse classification and the media will drag you thought the mud so they'll just rubber stamp any level of violence and nudity even when it should be clearly restricted.
Basically this was the worst possible scenario for former attorney general Michael Atkinson, as 15 yr olds can now legally buy material that should be in the Restricted (R18+) category ironically because Atkinson opposed the introduction of a restricted category for video games. Hell, a 12 or 13 yr old could get it as they dont really do ID checks for M rated films, not to mention parents who dont understand the content that will buy it.
Well you made the bed Michael, now you have to lie in it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Duke Nukem wasn't just about the (admittedly very juvenile) humor and one liners.
It actually had really great gameplay for the time. To this day Duke Nukem ranks right up there as one of my favorite multi-player FPS games.
In part it's because of the variety of weapons - you didn't just have guns but you had things like shrink rays. What other game even since then has actually had the player scale down to a tiny version of themselves and then try to elude the massive pursuers around them....
And then there's the jet-packs. Awesome aerial firefights, or flying up to office buildings high above. In todays modern games you are only begrudgingly allowed to even jump, much less fly outside of something like a helicopter.
But really my favorite part was the pipe-bombs and trip mines. No other game since Duke has done booby trapping nearly as well as Duke, which gave you the option to either trigger a trap yourself (pipe bomb) or have an unwitting enemy set it off themselves (trip mine). Best of all, you could combine both for the ultimate trap of doom.
My favorite memory of all time is an extended jet-pack fight with one other guy between sky-scrapers, which ended when he came up an elevator shaft that I had lined with something like six trip-mines. BOOM.
So I have no idea if the new game will be any good but I think it still carries a lot of the same weapons, thus I am really looking forward to it way more than I should be. If it does come out and you go wandering up the skyscrapers, I'd take the stairs if I were you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Duke Nukem was also one of the earlier games to really embrace destruction of the environment, which is another aspect I hope they have carried forward and modernized.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I know I deserve a whoosh for this, but I'm in a pedantic mood
So long as we're ignoring the huge figures of people moving here from overseas: Actually, we're the grandchildren of petty theives. The nasty ones all would've been hanged back in England.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
Bzzt. The vast majority of convicts sent to British colonies in the 1700s (which includes Australia, and GASP, also America pre-1776!) were petty crooks. Small time thieves, people stealing some food for their family, or general undesirables that managed to piss off the establishment. Serious criminals (murderers and rapists etc.) would most definitely have been executed in England at the time. They wouldn't waste time and money shipping them to the other side of the planet.
Perhaps the entire industry can finally get it through its head that labeling a game with a stronger rating than "M" is a better alternative than heavy censoring and will not be the death knell of sales for that game. Just because Wal-Mart will not carry it does not mean that the entire pool of gamers will ignore it!