5 Video Games Banned For Weird Reasons
5 Video Games Banned For Weird Reasons
Video games get banned around the world for all sorts of reasons, but some reasons are weirder than others.
Video games get banned around the world for all sorts of reasons, but some reasons are weirder than others.
The kid-friendly game ROBLOX seems like a weird title to ban. The game is a creation platform that has millions of players from around the world. You can create your own game worlds, chat with friends, and generally mess about online.
But it's the chat part that got the game banned in United Arab Emirates. Citing foul language, the UAE banned the game because children could hear some naughty words and ruin them for life.
It's still possible to play the game is you use a VPN, but if you are caught you could face a fine of $13,000. That's a lot of money for a game that's free-to-play, but I suppose the trade-off is that the UAE never had to deal with ROBOLX streamers.
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Half-Life is one of the most important FPS games in history, and has influenced every game going forward. It seemed that Singapore didn't think so as it banned the game from sale because of the violence featured within.
The problem was that Half-Life was already on store shelves for over a year by the time the ban went into effect. This meant that the game was huge and LAN clubs had popped up where people could come play it and its mods like Counter strike.
The government was super serious about the ban and went on to raid places selling and hosting the game. Retailers started petitions and managed to get the government to drop the ban after a week because of the financial impact on the retail market.
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This one is a strange one. EA Sports MMA was banned in Denmark, but if you figured it was over the violence the game is based on you'd be very wrong. It was actually banned because of energy drinks.
Denmark has a law on the books that prohibits the marketing for any type of energy drink. EA either didn't realize this, or simply didn't care, because they did not alter the game for release in the country.
Selling the game is not technically illegal as you can find copies on store shelves, but these are import titles and not released inside the country. But as long as the kids are safe from that evil taurine.
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Command & Conquer Generals, one of the last good C&C games, was banned in China. It's not hard to see why as military type games often cause a ruckus with the country that is depicted as the bad guys in the story.
What is a little bit weird in this case is that that China can be considered the protagonists in the game thanks to how the story plays our from each perspective. You actually defend China from an invading terrorist organization during the campaign.
But that didn't matter and China banned the games for "smearing the image of China and the Chinese army" when it was actually one of the few military games out there that painted them in a positive light.
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Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure is not a good game, but that didn't stop Australia from banning it. Heck, we could put together several lists full of the games Australia has banned for one reason or another.
Their reasoning for the ban was an interesting one as the game originally was released in the country under their MA rating. After it hit store shelves the Federal Attorney-General called for the ban.
He claimed that a ban was called for because the game had what he called "high impact themes" which in this case was the glorification of graffiti. Nobody let this man get his hands on a copy of Jet Grind Radio!
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