Did Obsidian Just ‘Punk’ The Australian Classification Board?

As you’ve doubtlessly heard by now, South Park: Stick Of Truth is the latest game to fall foul of the Australian Classification Board due to — you guessed it — an anal probe. Rather than remove the offending content, the developers decided to get a little bit cheeky (pun intended). The results sound even more offensive than the uncut version.

Alien anal probes seem to be a bit of a sore point for our censors — who could forget the infamous Saints Row IV fiasco. Despite the passing of an R-rating for video games, the tongue-in-cheek title was refused classification until a certain rectum-probing weapon was removed.

South park: Stick Of Truth has run into the same issues, although in this case the content was made even worse by the inclusion of underage characters, as Player Attack reported. The probe weapon’s visual resemblance to an actual penis was presumably frowned upon too.

After a number of failed attempts to get the game cleared for release, Obsidian Entertainment decided to go down the satirical route, and by gosh it appears to have worked.

In the Australian edition of the game, the interactive scene is now entirely gone. It’s been replaced by text descriptions of the action, including “aliens forcibly probe your rectum with a dildo-shaped probe”, “probe his arse with violent force” and “causing his anal probe to penetrate him over and over”.

Is it just us, or are these textual descriptions far more offensive than the comical 2D animations they are replacing? It appears that our Classification Board just got unwittingly served. Well played, Obsidian.

Oh, and while the text is showing, there’s also an image of a crying Koala. Bless.

South Park: The Stick of Truth — the offensive bits [Player Attack]

Additional reporting by Luke Plunkett.