I’ve been mean­ing to write about Fall­out 3 since the OFLC passed down its rul­ing and refused the game clas­si­fi­ca­tion. I wanted to write about my utter dis­ap­point­ment at the lack of a R18+ rat­ing for games in Aus­tralia. Take the OFLC and the one guy pre­vent­ing the intro­duc­tion of an R18 rat­ing — Michael Atkin­son, Attorney-General of South Aus­tralia — to task. But Kotaku and Aus­tralian Gamer have got those cov­ered. Aus­tralian Gamer even manged to get a response from Atkin­son. The only one I’ve ever seen.

But times have changed, the game will be com­ing to Aus­tralia (albeit in a slightly mod­i­fied form) which, when reported, pissed off just about every video gamer in the coun­try. Includ­ing me.

Then I thought about it, did my research, and you know what? I’m happy it was RC’d. Sure it’s a hor­ri­ble thing to have to bend to the will of out­dated laws and just for the record I’m com­pletly against any form of active cen­sor­ship. But the change they’ve had to make actu­ally works in their favour.

In the Fall­out uni­verse there are a num­ber of drugs that can affect how your char­ac­ter feels, fights and views the world. These drugs, while hav­ing the same affect as those in the real world, do not share their names. Instead they app­pear as  Buf­fout, Jet, Men­tats, Rad Away, and Stim­paks. Just to name a few.

Still fol­low­ing? Good.

With Fall­out 3 it seems Bethesda eschewed all that neat retro-futuristic nam­ing con­ven­tion stuff and replaced it with, you guessed it, the drug’s real world names, like Mor­phine. The OFLC saw these names and promptly banned the game. Win­ners Don’t Use Drugs, kids. The game was resub­mit­ted (and approved for sale) with the drug ref­er­ences replaced with icons.

As I said above, I’m happy Fall­out 3 was orig­i­nally refused clas­si­fi­ca­tion. It means I now end up with a game thats a lit­tle closer in styling to the uni­verse cre­ated by the first two games.

Would it have killed them to rename Mor­phine to some­thing cool like Pain-Away though?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.