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Many video games have certain elements removed or edited due to regional rating standards.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2015) |
Many video games have certain elements removed or edited due to regional rating standards.
Some titles in the PlayStation 3 library have been censored according to the console hardware, resulting in consoles from certain regions directly altering game content, regardless of the region in which the game was produced.
Night Trap is a 1992 interactive movie developed by Digital Pictures and published by Sega for the Sega CD. Presented primarily through full-motion video (FMV), Night Trap has the player observe teenage girls having a sleepover visiting a house which, unbeknownst to them, is infested with vampires. The player watches live surveillance footage and triggers traps to capture anyone endangering the girls. The player can switch between different cameras to keep watch over the girls and eavesdrop on conversations to follow the story and listen for clues.
An eroge is a Japanese genre of erotic video game. The term encompasses a wide variety of Japanese games containing erotic content across multiple genres. The first eroge were created in the 1980s, and many well-known companies in the Japanese gaming industry originally produced and distributed them. Some eroge are primarily focused on erotic content, while others, such as Key's Kanon, only contain occasional scenes in an otherwise non-erotic work. Games in the latter category are often re-released with sexual content removed for general audiences. Throughout its history, the genre has faced controversy for its use of explicit sexual content, and as a result has been banned from several console platforms.
In video games, censorship are efforts by an authority to limit access, censor content, or regulate video games or specific video games due to the nature of their content. Some countries will do this to protect younger audiences from inappropriate content using rating systems such as the ESRB rating system. Others will do this to censor any negative outlook on a nation's government.
Mortal Kombat II is a fighting game originally produced by Midway for the arcades in 1993. It was ported to multiple home systems, including MS-DOS, Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega Genesis, 32X, Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and PlayStation only in Japan, mostly in licensed versions developed by Probe Software and Sculptured Software and published by Acclaim Entertainment.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) characters have been depicted in video games since the 1980s. In the history of video games, LGBT characters have been almost nonexistent for a long time, reflecting the overall heteronormativity of the medium. While there has been a trend towards greater representation of LGBT people in video games, they are frequently identified as LGBT in secondary material, such as comics, rather than in the games themselves. In 2018, Sam Greer of Gamesradar+ found only 179 games commercially released games with any LGBT representation, only 83 of which have queer characters who are playable characters, and only 8 of those games feature a main character who is pre-written as queer as opposed to them being queer as an option.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is a fighting game in the Mortal Kombat series, developed and released by Midway to arcades in 1995. It is a standalone update of 1995's earlier Mortal Kombat 3 with an altered gameplay system, additional characters like the returning favorites Reptile, Kitana, Jade and Scorpion who were missing from Mortal Kombat 3, and some new features.
The Videogame Rating Council (V.R.C.) was introduced by Sega of America in 1993 to rate all video games that were released for sale in the United States and Canada on the Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Sega CD, 32X, and Pico. The rating had to be clearly displayed on the front of the box, but their appearance in advertisements for the video game was strictly optional. It was later supplanted by the industry-wide Entertainment Software Rating Board.
Video games featuring sexual content has been found since the early days of the industry and can be found on most platforms and can be of any video game genre.
The Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO) is a Japanese entertainment rating organization based in Tokyo that rates video game content in console games with levels of ratings that informs the customer(s) of the nature of the product and what age group it is suitable for. It was established in June 2002 as a branch of Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association, and became an officially recognized nonprofit organization under Japanese law in December 2003.
The content of Japanese animation (anime) is frequently edited by distributors, both for its release in Japan or during subsequent localizations. This happens for a variety for reasons, including translation, censorship, and remastering.
In film, nudity may be either graphic or suggestive, such as when a person appears to be naked but is covered by a sheet. Since the birth of film, depictions of any form of sexuality have been controversial, and in the case of most nude scenes, had to be justified as part of the story.
Samurai Shodown V Special is the ninth entry in SNK's Samurai Shodown series of fighting games. It is an upgraded version of the game Samurai Shodown V and is the last official game for the Neo Geo platform. A further upgraded version of the game called Samurai Shodown V Perfect was location-tested in late 2004, but not officially released until it was included in the Samurai Shodown NeoGeo Collection in 2020.
Assault Suit, also known as Assault Suits, is a series of futuristic robotic war video games developed by NCS featuring soldiers manning the eponymous gigantic humanoid mecha. Spanning the course of 15 years and beyond, the games would be cross-distributed, cross-published and developed between the U.S. and Japan. It would be known as one of the most challenging series to follow due to the drastic changes from game to game.
Assault Suits Leynos is a run and gun video game developed and published in 1990 by Masaya for Sega Genesis. It was released in America as Target Earth. It was re-released on the Wii’s Virtual Console, and on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. It is the first game in the Assault Suits series.
Mortal Kombat is a 1992 fighting game developed and published by Midway. It is the first entry in the Mortal Kombat series and was subsequently released by Acclaim Entertainment for nearly every home platform at that time. The game focuses on several characters of various intentions who enter a martial arts tournament with worldly consequences. It introduced many key aspects of the Mortal Kombat series, including the unique five-button control scheme and gory finishing moves called Fatalities.
The Australian Classification Board is an Australian government statutory body responsible for the classification and censorship of films, video games and publications for exhibition, sale or hire in Australia. The ACB was established in 1970 and was once part of the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), which was dissolved in 2006. The Department of Communications and the Arts provided administrative support to the ACB from 2006 until 2020, when it was merged into the 'mega department' of the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. Decisions made by the ACB may be reviewed by the Australian Classification Review Board. The ACB now operates under the Commonwealth Classification Act 1995. The ACB is made up of a director, a deputy director, and three other board members, appointed by the government for three- or four-year terms, and temporary board members. The ACB is located in Sydney, New South Wales.
The Mortal Kombat series of fighting games, created by Ed Boon and John Tobias, has been the subject of various controversies since its creation in 1992. In particular, Mortal Kombat has often been criticised from a broad spectrum of politicians and other critics for its unrestrained use of graphic and bloody violence, both in the game's regular combat scenes and its Fatalities—finishing moves which allow the player to kill or otherwise maim the defeated opponents.
Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue, known in Japan as Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, officially abbreviated as Aokana (あおかな) and translated as Four Rhythms Across the Blue, is a Japanese adult visual novel developed by Sprite and released for Windows on November 28, 2014. The game was ported to the PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. The plot follows high school student Masaya Hinata as he coaches fellow students Asuka Kurashina, Misaki Tobisawa, Mashiro Arisaka, and Shion Aoyagi in the sport of "flying circus", wherein competitors travel through the sky via shoes with anti-gravity properties. Depending on the route taken, Masaya can enter a romantic relationship with either Asuka, Misaki, Mashiro, or Rika Ichinose, a student from a rival school and his neighbor.
Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is an action video game developed and published by Marvelous. The game is the third installment in the universe that began with Fate/Extra and the second one to be released outside of Japan. It was first announced in March 2016 and released in Japan in November 2016 for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita consoles; its release in North America and Europe occurred in January 2017. Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Windows versions were released in July 2017 for all three regions. The game's plot involved the conflict between two factions led by Nero and Tamamo from Fate/Extra fighting each other over control of the Moon Cell and the Holy Grail. They are soon joined by a third faction led by Altera who has the intent of destroying civilization as well as Saber from Fate/stay night who wishes to stop the conflict between the three factions. A direct sequel titled Fate/Extella Link was released for PS4 in Japan in 2018, and later worldwide for PS4, Switch and PC in 2019.
On December 7, 1993, and March 5, 1994, members of the combined United States Senate Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary held congressional hearings with several spokespersons for companies in the video game industry including Nintendo and Sega, involving violence in video games and the perceived impacts on children. The hearing was a result of concerns raised by members of the public on the 1993 releases of Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and later Doom which was released after the first hearing. Besides general concerns related to violence in video games, the situation had been inflamed by a moral panic over gun violence, as well as the state of the industry and an intense rivalry between Sega and Nintendo.
With Capcom USA, Phillips's team edited some of the grislier games that came in from its Japanese parent company, although Capcom's own censors weeded out the most offensive touches... When a Capcom USA representative suggested that it was tasteless to have the game's hero beat up a woman, a Japanese designer responded that there were no women in the game. 'What about the blonde named Roxy?' the American asked. The designer responded, 'Oh, you mean the transvestite!' Roxy was given a haircut and new clothes.
Naughty Dog would do a huge amount of work after this on the game for Japan, and even then we would always release a Japanese specific build. Whether it was giving Aku Aku pop up text instructions, or replace a Crash smashing "death" that reminded them of the severed head and shoes left by a serial killer that was loose in Japan during Crash 2's release, we focused on Japan and fought hard for acceptance and success.
Specifically, there's an option in the game where you can create a naked rider - you can create a female rider who's completely naked, but you can't create a male rider who's completely naked. [...] There is an NTSC version created in America which doesn't feature the naked Create a Rider feature, so releasing that here could be an option.