Big brother censorship of
video games took a new turn last month when parts of
Canada classified
Soldier of Fortune, a great
FPS albeit with juicy amounts of
blood and
gore, as "
adult material", banning it from
distribution. This puts this
computer game into the ranks of
hardcore pornography. Yet when I plowed through the ranks of
thugs in that very game, I did not recall once when any
NPC stripped down and started to perform explicit sexual acts.
Not to mention that the GHOUL engine, which powers SOF's gory graphics, is far from realistic. Sure, it's about as real as you're going to get barring taped full motion video of real people getting blown to bits (which I doubt game companies are going to do, despite what the politicos say), but person (yes, even a 6 year old) can tell that it is a game, made of pixels, on a screen smaller than the TV which the same child often watches murders happen in movies.
This puts Canada in the same region of idiocy as Germany, another country that bans violent games. Duke Nukem 3D, Die by the Sword, Kingpin, Doom X, Quake X, Unreal Tournament, and now Soldiers of Fortune, gamers everywhere are deprived of quality entertainment by some queezy-stomached politicians and "awareness groups" because they are unable to seperate a game from reality.
The media vultures pounced on Columbine and immediately linked Doom, a masterpiece in gaming history, to social ills in our nation's schools. I doubt any of these journalists, analysts or politicians even played Doom. They have no right to proclaim the effects of a game on a population until they actually see it themselves. Christ, the game is so pixelated (it was good in the old days), it is obvious we're dealing with a game, far from reality. Even Quake 3, the current graphics standard in gaming, is just a game.
Not that it matters to me. If they try to ban games in the US, I've always got ISO's. Let's see them try to ban the internet.