AdHoc says the core game experience has been preserved on Nintendo platforms despite it blacking out explicit scenes, but fans aren't having it

Dispatch’s release on Nintendo platforms today was poised to be another testament to AdHoc’s tremendous success with the point-and-click superhero workplace comedy, but news of a platform-specific difference has overshadowed much of the excitement for fans hoping to play the episodic series on-the-go. Instead of celebrating the release, fans are launching campaigns against Dispatch’s censorship, returning their purchases, or refraining from playing it altogether.

Normally, Dispatch contains nudity and sexually explicit scenes involving its gang of ex-villains. AdHoc allows players to toggle sexual content like this off on most platforms. Curiously, however, the newly-released Switch version automatically depicts censored versions of these scenes. There’s no option to turn the setting off.

AdHoc confirmed the censorship to Eurogamer, but noted that the overall experience would still be the same for Switch players.

Mind you, Nintendo is cool with putting Doom and Duke Nukem on the Switch.

  • Manjushri@piefed.socialEnglish
    38·
    8 hours ago

    Yep. In the words of George R. R. Martin

    “You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they’ll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.”

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      I recently published my novel, and at the last minute I had this panic about what was appropriate. There’s one bigoted character who calls gay people “f***ot” multiple times, as well as many characters that drop F-bombs on numerous occasions. There’s a (semi-magical) event similar to a mass shooting, many references to torture, and someone’s hand is chopped off. To be really safe, I put a content warning on the first page just to make some of that clear. Surely, that puts it a level beyond the Young Adult region, right? But…possibly not, given what I tend to hear offhand of some series.

      • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        7 hours ago

        Stephen King’s best (solo) book, IT, has probably over 200 N-bombs in it. It’s still his best book. Very much a product of its time (and an author who was so coked up he doesn’t remember writing a lot of it), but still his best book.

        Your novel is Young Adult, or no? It’s not clear. I don’t know what the rules are for YA in America/Europe, but I’m reading the Sword Art Online series (rather, having anime lead Bryce Papenbrook read it to me, via the audiobooks) and SAO (which is LN which means Light Novel, which is Japan’s version of YA) has dismemberment. Arms being chopped off, people being chopped in half… the anime is known for its scenes of SA, but the first two weren’t SA in the books (the anime exaggerated what happened). The one in season 3 absolutely is an SA though. I haven’t gotten to the one in season 4 yet but I’ve heard it’s not. There’s also torture, but it’s not too serious. They’re playing video games, VR based. At one point the pain is amplified and a character is viciously attacked, so he feels it 10x more. In another case, people are trapped in a world that moves 1,000x slower than real life (so like a year in the game is like an hour in real life or something like that). The kind of stuff Black Mirror did (White Christmas, Black Museum, USS Callister). But not a lot of profanity. (Of course, I’m also reading it translated to English. I have no idea what Reki Kawahara actually wrote, because I would not be able to read the original Japanese text.)