The 10 Most Ridiculous Video Game Bans

There are lots of legitimate reasons to ban a video game.  Honestly!  I reserve the right to protect my freedom of speech as much as any red-blooded American but when someone’s freedom of speech is actually hurtful to another person then a line has been crossed.  For example, when The Guy Game was pulled off the shelf in the States, the action was totally justified (one of the women who appeared naked/partially naked in the game’s footage was under age) I just wished that developers had done their homework so they could have produced a piece of digital media I could have actually consumed without a guilty conscience.

However, there are tons of reasons to ban games that make absolutely no sense.  So here we go around the world to take a look at the Top Ten Most Ridiculous Video Game Bans of all time . . .

10:  50 Cent:  Bulletproof (Banned 2005, Australia)

The Australian equivalent of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (Office of Film and Literature Classification) banned Fitty’s epically bad third-person shooter because of its use of gratuitous violence.  The raters refused to give the game a rating equivalent to the ESRBs own M (17+ only) citing the game’s slow motion kills and blood spray on the screen as being too violent for consumption.  I can see their point but really, who was playing that game anyway?  Two minutes after popping the ass-backward thing in my Xbox I had had enough of the unintuitive controls and constant thug whining:  “where all my G-Unit soldiers at?”  Fitty, they left you to die.

9:  Narc (Banned 2005, Australia)

Are you beginning to sense a pattern here?  Our friends from down under are either a whole lot more uptight than we think they are or their on the right track and we’re the lost sheep.  Either way, the OFLC was having none of Midways naughty narcotics and they declined to rate the game (effectively banning it from store shelves).  Why?  Because the game featured the use of illegal narcotics as power-ups which granted players temporary buffs.  The message was clear:  Drugs are good and they help you survive the battle torn streets of the inner city.  Perhaps they should have banned Train Spotting, the Basketball Diaries, Scarface, and any of the other thousands of films glorifying the same thing.
 

8:  Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2 (Banned 2004, Mexico)

I have to admit this game was a heck of a lot of fun.  Running around first-person style in the boots of a high-tech modern warrior was awesome.  The game pits you against international terrorist and it was refreshing at the time though the theme has since been done to death.  So why did the Mexicans have such a problem with the game?  Well, the people your character was wasting were Mexicans.  Oh, I see.  I can’t say I blame them for wanting to ban the game.  Would we have put up with a game that put players in the boots of an Al-Qaida trainee?  However, when Mexico stated the game was helping to divide the mixed communities that exist in many of the border towns (Mexicans and non-Mexicans) they were getting a little paranoid.
 

7:  Left 4 Dead 2 (Banned 2009, Australia)

Okay, I used to think all Aussie were laid back and chugged Fosters from a can but now I’m starting to see the real picture.  They’re uptight prudes!  (Just kidding.)  I mean what could be wrong with a game that features a group of folks trying desperately to survive the Zombie Apocalypse?  Nothing I say.  However, the old OFLC said that Left 4 Dead’s graphic human on human violence was just too much.  Apparently the Aussies don’t understand that Zombies aren’t human anymore.  They’re no good, brain eating sons of . . .

And what is the only other entity on the planet that gamers can slaughter with impunity?  That’s right, Nazis.  So it would follow that . . .

6:  Wolfenstein 3d (Banned 1994, Germany) and Commandos:  Behind Enemy Lines (Banned 1999, Germany)

That’s right.  There’s really no surprise there that Germany would ban these Nazi killing games.  I don’t really blame them either.  I mean, Nazis as a whole were bad but then again, many of the Germans alive today are descended from them.  Just like many of us Americans are descended from soldiers who killed Native Americans for their land or dropped atom bombs on helpless Japanese citizens.  Its okay that they don’t want to see their ancestors demonized anymore but claiming these two games were perpetuating “racist” stereotypes is just ridiculous.  Both games are period pieces set in the past and the Nazi party really doesn’t have any steam left in it anymore (it kind of shot itself in the foot with the whole holocaust thing.)  Besides, the characters in those games weren’t killing random Germans but uniformed soldiers.
 

5:  Marc Ecko’s Getting Up:  Contents Under Pressure (Banned 2006, Australia)

So maybe you were siding with Aussies when they decided to ban all of these uber-violent games where characters were rewarded for mass murder and drug use.  But when they ban a game because it features graffiti artists they’ve gone too far.  I mean, there’s nothing inherently hurtful about graffiti unless the message being displayed is injurious.  So what’s the big deal with spraying a little paint?  No, no.  The OFLC said that the game was promoting youthful delinquency and vandalism.  Seriously?  Why didn’t they ban Jet Set Radio Future while they were at it?
 

4:  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Banned 2006, USA)

That’s right; we Americans are just as capable of instituting ridiculous bans as any other country in the world.  Take a look at the hubbub that arose when somebody found out that San Andreas contained hidden content (called hot coffee) which included the player getting some play with one of his honeys.  The content was only accessible when the end user actively hacked the game and even then it was fairly tame to some of the infomercials they play on late night television.  11 lawyers launched class action lawsuits (resulting in 1.3 million dollars in legal fees) and forced Take Two to pull the game of the shelf, issue an edited version of the game disc, and pay those offended by the content up to $35 in restitution.  Seriously? 
 

3:  Manhunt 1 and 2 (banned in a handful of countries including Australia and Germany)

This is shocking?  You mean to tell me government agencies don’t want people playing games where the whole point is wholesale slaughter?  In the first place, I don’t even know why these games were made.  There is almost no redeeming value in either and they weren’t even that good.  They were like watching the Saw movie sequels back to back.  However, banning them after the fact is just a little ridiculous.  The game labels (at least those here in the states ) clearly state that the title is only meant for adults (okay so technically 17 is “adult” yet but it’s close enough—my dad enlisted in the Navy when he was 17 so what’s the biggy?)  Just slap an adults only label on them and stick them in the torture porn section at your local movie retailer and everything is as good as gravy.  I forgot, neither the Aussies nor the Germans have such a rating for video games.  Movies yes, video games no.  WTF?
 

2:  Command and Conquer:  Generals (Banned 2003, China)

Political oppression is just not cool and when a government puts the kibosh on a video game just because it makes their outdated regime look bad, that’s not a good thing.  Of course we all know that China is one of the most oppressed countries in the world and everything from the news media to literature is severely censored but there were no direct comparisons in the turn based strategy game.  Besides, it takes place in the future when the world has already gone to hell and come back from the ashes so there’s no real inference at all.  I think maybe somebody was just getting a little paranoid.
 

1:  Pokemon (Banned Saudi Arabia)

That’s right, Pokemon.  I thought the only thing more innocuous that Pokemon was perhaps the Teletubbies but apparently the mufti thinks otherwise.  Saudi Arabia banned all Pokemon games because they “resemble” gambling and trading cards for money is just wrong.  That’s right, because it “resembled” gambling.  Not because it was gambling.  Because it’s clearly not.  I wonder I the mufti banned baseball cards too.
 

So there you have it, for every legitimate ban (you know who you are The Guy Game) there are a host of completely ridiculous ones.  As you’ve seen, even here in the states were not immune to the mania.  Gamers unite and support the freedom of speech in America and around the world before our Teletubbies get banned too!