Video games have been awash with controversy for nearly as long as they've existed,

but some have proved so offensive that entire countries have demanded they be censored, or even completely outlawed.

And the reasons why get pretty darn wild.

So, from a cursing hedgehog to a drunk princess, let's explore some banned and censored video games

and the weird reasons behind their censorship.

Few video games have been more influential than 1998's half-life. This violent first-person shooter follows theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman as he's forced

to defend the human race against an empire of

extra-dimensional beasties. Sounds cool, huh? Well, not to the German government. See, Germany

has historically had some of the strictest video game censorship in the world. Excessive violence

has mostly been a huge no-no.

But when Half-Life came out, it was widely hailed as a masterpiece.

So despite the violence, German gamers desperately wanted to play it,

and developer Valve definitely wanted to sell it to them.

To tackle the issue, they came up with some rather interesting ways of appeasing the sensors.

To start, blood and gore were toned down significantly and human enemies were completely replaced with robots so they wouldn't bleed.

Most notably, however, were the changes made to friendly human MPCs. In the original release, players could choose to straight-up attack their fellow humans and even send them to sleep with the fishies.

Rude!

In the German version, though, well, any NPC you try to unalive instead sits down on the floor across like it begins shaking their head disapprovingly at you.

If you want a lore-based reason for this, well, you're all out of luck, but it does kind of make you feel bad.

What have I done?

I love a good meme.

Some people, however, hate them, and they have to make it everybody else's problem. In 2019, small Taiwanese game developer Red Candle Games found this out the hard way.

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