By Kieron Gillen on September 18th, 2009.
You know you’ve hit a raw nerve when a goverment classification board decides to join a boycott of your game. So when Australia’s Classification board refuses a certification for Left 4 Dead 2 because Valve are RIPPING OFF THE KIDS you know you’ve… actually, no, I’ve misread this again. They’ve banned it because it’s a violent videogame and Australia has some of the most agreeably loopy censorship in the democratic world. Man!
By Kieron Gillen on June 25th, 2009.
This is pretty much straight news-blogging. It’d be easy to editorialise on it, but I suspect you know exactly what I’m going to say. Australia is already known for its lack of an actual real 18/R rating, so banning any game that would get over a 15 here. It’s also known for its [forwarding - Ed] net-censoring, with active network-level blocking of sites [being proposed -Ed]. It’s being reported that they’re bringing these wonderful developments together, wanting to block access to sites including any content that doesn’t hit that 15 rating, including everything from shops that will ship real games to Australia to flash games to any other downloadable adult-rated game. Do read the full story, which does explore some of the implications – like, say, World of Warcraft not being rated in Australia due to being an online game. So… is that going to be banned? We’ll follow this one carefully.
Actually, let’s editorialise a bit: Piss Right Off.
