It’s ”not that big a deal,” as what does get cut is very little. They did want to make a joke out of it being cut though, ”that was fine.” Stone is happy an uncut version exists.
The scenes missing were of anal-probing in an early section of the game and an ‘abortion mini game’ that features a couple of times later on - they’re brief sections of the RPG.
”I was told that Australia has different standards. They have their own ratings system, as does Europe, so I was told that we had to submit it for ratings and they come back and tell you this will pass, this won’t. Ultimately, the full version of the game is in North America, so at least that version is out there, but anywhere it’s censored, we just put in little black cards explaining what has happened,” Matt Stone told The Guardian in an interview.
”It’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t change things that much, but we weren’t going to change the game downwards somewhere and just not tell anybody. You’ll see how ridiculous that is.”
”It does feel like a double standard, a little bit,” he continued. ”We weren’t willing to change the content, but also it doesn’t ruin the game – it’s like 40 seconds’ worth of the whole game. As long as we could make a joke out of the fact that they made us cut this, that was fine.” He believes the interaction with the content is the problem raised.
”There is an interactiveness that makes it different. In movies and television you can do stuff that’s morally grey very easily, because you get to show consequences, you get to show reward, but in a video game there’s a reason why everything is a Nazi, zombie, or alien - these are pretty clear moral choices,” said Stone.
”There are things that make people more uncomfortable in an interactive world, definitely. But that said, what we had in the game, we could have shown that on TV pretty easily, especially now.”
South Park: The Stick of Truth releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 today in Europe.
Respect my authoritah and check out our review.
