Saints Row 2 cut version is an affrond to gaming

[TigerPlushie]

Firstly, yes, I despise cutting games and censorship in general, i'm biased gna gna, but seriously...

I've got a fair share of games which are censored for release in germany. Most of those title valiantly managed to be sexy and nice without the display of violence and gore. In fact, I rebought borderlands on steam for the DLC and I didn't bother at all. Fallout 3 was still good, etc. etc.. But what I have seen in Saints Row 2 takes the cake.

A game where you have quite a bit of design freedom for your character and gang is nothing new, but the game did it quite well, even providing a set of nice voices to choose from. Helps the immersion immensely. Now, what do we have here censorship-wise:

No blood... No blood is perfectly cool. I don't need blood.

Reduced ragdoll effects. Weapons now officially make people have instant brain function losses instead of kinetic damage... Fine.

Corpse fadeouts, okay, next.

No human shield... kay. Might have been immensly useful, but if it has to be.

Missions altered to be less violent... Nrgg... OKAY. I can live with that as long as the story is still good and immersive.

No finishing moves in melee combat. Okay, starting to hurt now.

No katana special moves... s-still good.

Special combat moves not registered/possible. nnnnggh...

Four violent activities cut. OKAY! Now I'm getting a little jarateed of. So it's okay to kill people in general without blood and heart-stopping pistols, but if you kill many people at once it's a no-no?

Zombie minigame not playable... you mother-

Ho-ing became perfectly silent... ah well.

The following weapons were removed: Flamethrower, Chainsaw, satchel... Keep your dirty hands off my stuff!

No zombie carlos! Nooooo! That looked like fun!


Violent scenes in cutscenes are blackscreened. .......WHAT THE F**K? Who the hell does that? Was it not enough to remove the blood? Did you really have to veil 90% of the instances of people getting killed in cutscenes with a BLACK SCREEN WITH TEXT ON IT? TOTALLY RUINING ANY FEELING OF TENSE ACTION HAPPENING? THIS IS UNFORGIVABLE! THIS IS UNHOLY! THIS IS MY BAT-CREDIT CARD!

Altered meanings in translations.... no... no, stop it. NOTHING can top the black screen thing. I'm done.

Achievements cut. ...I said i'm done.

Weapons cut out of the DVD cover... This one blows too... but still, holds no candle to the black screen thing.

Handbook imagery partially removed... whatever, I don't care anymore.



Seriously, what the what? Why the black screen thing? This is unforgivable! This seriously is at Half-Life (dt.) level!

Wouldn't it have sufficed to just cut the blood out of the cutscenes? I hope, I BEG for the government to realize that, by law, defining video games as toys WILL be changed at some point. Because I cannot stand for this any longer...

....still a decent game.

[Deviate]

You could always just support the dev by buying the game, then pirate a decent version?

[TigerPlushie]

You could always just support the dev by buying the game, then pirate a decent version?

...Did I at any point imply that I pirated it?
I bought it on a holiday offer for a ridiculously small price. Naturally that means I don't technically have the right to gaeg, but in case anyone has a problem with that i'd casually ask them to start biting their own buttocks :I

edit:
On second thought... What does that have to do with anything?

edit edit:
....I just realized what you meant.
I could do that... but I don't feel like it.

[IdolNinja]

The German version is a nightmare hack and slash censor job, and an affront to any gamer. Just one small correction though. Achievements aren't cut in the German version. They simply aren't part of the PC port at all in any region. So that isn't a censoring issue at least.

Not that I advocate this at all, but I think the poster above was suggesting that it would be ethical for you to pirate a fully uncensored version of the game since you have already spent your money on a legal version. Of course, that would introduce a whole set of other problems like being unable to play with other legal players who are v1.2, as well as having issues with mods and tools that were designed for the legal encrypted Steam exe.

Steam will likely do nothing in this case, so the only thing I can think of would be to request Steam support to remove the game from your account. I know they can do this because a couple of people have requested it in the past with success.

Then you'll just need to acquire a different region release. There are a couple of different ways I can think of to do that. The first is to have a friend in the US or UK gift you SR2 on Steam. This gift will actually be their region's release instead of yours. The second method is to have someone in the US or UK buy a copy on Amazon and simply PM you the key from the manual for you to activate. The key itself is tied to what region Steam unlocks the game as. The reason I mention it is that SR2 on Amazon is extremely cheap for $6.

Also, of note is that the latest beta of my Gentlemen of the Row mod for SR2 has multi-language support so you could choose any menu/subtitle language as a launch parameter if you need to.

Not a great solution, but I hope that helps. I was also working on trying to create a mod that would uncensor the German version, but it's looking unlikely now due to how much of the censoring is happening in the exe itself.

[TigerPlushie]

Yeh, I might or might not have tried to use a patch to get a workaround for all the censorship but if I did it probably wouldn't have worked.

As for now, I just try to make the best out of it.

Might as well buy it in austria... like with borderlands.