South Park: The Stick Of Truth – Europe says no to anal probing

Seven separate cut scenes, involving abortion and anal probing, have been cut from the UK version of the new South Park game.

Our review copy of South Park: The Stick Of Truth turned up today, and as many review sites have noted it includes an unexpected admission that the European version is missing over 2 minutes of footage compared to America.

Seven scenes of around 20 seconds each have been censored. They don’t seem to have been removed entirely, but instead ‘each censored scene is replaced by an image background and a description text selected by Matt & Trey’ [i.e. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the show].



The following text is exactly how the missing scences are described by the press release:


A mini-game in which the doctor is performing an abortion on the player.

A mini-game in which the player is performing an aborition on the character Randy.

Five anal probing scenes involving someone actively being probed. The scenes play out as normal before and after the active probing sequences.

As you can see there seems to be an aversion to bodily invasion, but it’s unclear which country in particular is responsible for the changes.

Usually it’s Germany and Australia, but since these are atypical issues for a video game it could be anyone. Especially as the cuts are actually common to all the EMEA [Europe, Middle East, and Africa] regions.

Why we in the UK can’t have our own uncensored version is unclear but it’s probably as simple as Ubisoft not wanting to go to the trouble of distributing different versions in different countries.

Again, you might have thought a patch would’ve been able to add or delete the content as necessary but well… that’s a lot of effort too isn’t it? We’ve asked for an official comment and will update this story if we get one.

Update: Ubisoft has said only that it’s a ‘a market decision by Ubisoft EMEA’ and that ‘we have no other details to share or comment to make’.

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