Jason Bergman has the skinny on the Chinese version of the only game I still play at least twice a week. They get a shirt.
Apparently some changes needed to be made to get around censors, but he doesn’t say what they were. My guess is removal of religion and nerfing the Japanese. And maybe rice adds two hammers.
I remember that for Civ3, the Chinese government’s initial concern was – and I kid you not – that the Chinese could lose the game. I think we actually discussed just taking the Chinese out of the game altogether to make it work (and, in fact, we did actually “take out” the Forbidden Palace and Communism by renaming them in the Chinese version).
What was the new name for Communism?
China seems to pay special attention to ‘historical’ games. They wouldn’t let Hearts of Iron in at all because it showed Tibet as an independent state and Taiwan as Japanese territory.
I think it was something like “Utopian State”… which is weird that they felt the need to change it. (although, of course, I have no idea of what word is used for Communism in Chinese)
I’m reminded of the CCP banning Hearts of Iron for depicting Taiwan as owned by Japan and Tibet as independent. Never mind that during WW2, the period of the game, Taiwan was owned by Japan and Tibet was independent. Irrelevant!
So in HOI2, China shows up as a fragmented feuding mass of independent warlords. Somehow I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
(Doh, I should read the comments before posting.)
On a really negative level, one could argue “what’s the point of adapting to that market if it’s all going to be pirated anyway” ….. oooooh, that’s why they have the t-shirt and statue items. Makes sense.
I’m still very cross towards China’s government for the communist repression of their citizens. And the rampant corruption which, the NY Times suggests, may be their undoing too. All so very tawdry.
Were you aware the reason Windows cool interactive Time Zone map (I think starting in Win 95) got nerfed because of China? They didn’t like how the map would highlight timezones country-by-country, showing off geo-political alignments in a way they didn’t like.
So Microsoft bowed to them and just disabled the whole interactive animation thing – if you look at it in XP, it’s just a boring map. I loved that cool rolling map/line thingie.
Vista, of course, did away with the map entirely. Too many bad memories, no doubt.
China is pretty restrictive, but you should see the sorts of restrictions that WalMart puts on products.
“you should see the sorts of restrictions that WalMart puts on products.”
I’d love to see WalMart as a World Wonder in Civ. It makes your people extra happy, but gives the poorest rival nations +3 gold per city.