Quote:And correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you have stricter censorship laws in the US than that of (the majority of) Europe's, when it comes to nudity?
we do, but mostly for console games. a good example would be the older castlevania games (SNES and earlier): a lot of statues, obviously hundreds of years old and sculpted in the classical style (complete with nudity, which was considered art back then), had the robes or whatever that they held pulled up over their breasts.
another example is fahrenheit/indigo prophecy. the nudity and sex scenes are cut out entirely of the US release. if the game had been PC only, it probably would not have been cut. (maybe.) however, as it was also released on the console...
violence, on the other hand, has always been a staple, especially with PC games since in the 80s and early 90s they were not as widespread as they are now. remember when mortal kombat made such a gigantic splash for being over-the-top with violence? that was in the days when arcades still mattered, consoles were mainstream, but PCs were still fringe. we'd had slaughterfests in PC games for years beforehand, and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. look at the original system shock: body parts EVERYWHERE. and i do mean everywhere- corpses, limbs, skeletons, gore, what have you. nobody noticed, because the game has, even to this day, never made it to a console or handheld.
mortal kombat, for all the fact that it's crap, pushed the envelope for violence in arcade and console games here in the united states. though i notice it still took a long time for console games to have any amount of foul language beyond the occasional "damn", "hell" or "bastard". meanwhile PC games have been cussing up a storm pretty much this whole time.