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I've just gotten done wrapping up a strategy guide for Operation Darkness, an Xbox 360 game that's interesting if seriously flawed. That said, it's still a game where you have a giant boss fight with Hitler, and that's the sort of ridiculousness that makes gaming a fantastic medium.

Nintendo's Seal of Quality, however, did not let you kill Hitler. You couldn't even kill Nazis, even though the NES's heyday was also the era of Harrison Ford punching out Nazis left and right. So, there's a famous trilogy of Hitler-killing Nintendo games from the NES and SNES eras where Nintendo required all the Nazis and Hitler-killing be taken out. This left the games as far more sterile and generic exercises than they might have been otherwise.

They also mandated swastikas be removed from games, but that sort of thing still goes on today, so I won't complain about that. I am going to take this opportunity to complain, at great length, about games where Nintendo's damned Seal of Quality denied me my game-given right to kill crazed cyborg future Hitlers. These are the bad old days for a reason, and here's hoping they never come back.

Wolfenstein 3D

The utter hell id Software went through in the course of trying to port one of their greatest hit games to the SNES is one of the best arguments against reinstating the Seal of Quality or anything like it. Thanks to some absurd guidelines involving use of blood, the SNES's Wolfenstein 3D is an FPS where unloading on guys with a chaingun just sort of makes them fall over. It's also not 3D at all, since the cart didn't use any version of the FX chip. Instead things move in an awkward and highly pixelated attempt at simulating 3D with flat 2D planes, like most other early first person games. Check it and its terrible audio out below.

Now, Wolfenstein 3D is basically a game about going into a castle full of weird B-movie mad scientist neo-Nazis, killing everyone, and taking their stuff. The rampant property crime is a-okay with Nintendo, but the actual "fighting neo-Nazis" wasn't. So instead you're fighting... well, it's not really clear at all. The enemies no longer shout German in the SNES port, and command giant mutant rats instead of attack dogs (no, really). No huge swastikas on the wall, no weird creepy photo portraits of Hitler, and even in the pixel portraits they stole the poor bastard's mustache. They're apparently sort of nasty people who rule the Master State, who are jerkwads to the "Republic", so time to go waste them all and take their goblets. Ah, nothing like totally unmotivated action to make a game more... something.

Now, in fairness, the original point of Wolfenstein 3D on the PC was not to kill Hitler. Instead, you fought mecha-Hitler at the game's halfway point, and honestly it was all downhill from there. Sure, the bosses got harder, but fighting any strictly made up futuristic cyborg neo-Nazi loses its thrill after you've already killed crazed death-cyborg Hitler. In SNES Wolfenstein 3D, the Staatmeister (the "Sam's Club" version of Hitler) is the final boss, and the rest of the game is staggeringly different. Check out the wicked-awesome PC fight with Hitler (and the Hitler level) below.

Only two of the other bosses (Hans Grosse and Dr. Schabbs) are actually from the PC's Wolfenstein 3D; the rest of them (Trans Grosse, Ubermutant, and Death Knight) are bastardized from Spear of Destiny, a Wolfenstein prequel. Heaping SNES indignity on the Spear of Destiny bosses is especially sad, since in Spear of Destiny you could acquire the titular magic spear and use it to have a raging battle in what appeared to be hell versus the Angel of Death. That is pretty much the definition of what I want to do in a video game. Sadly, if Nintendo's content guidelines couldn't handle Nazis and a little blood, then harrowing hell is right out. Check out footage of the Spear of Destiny PC battle versus the Ubermutant below.

So, basically, the SNES port made killing Hitler the point of the game, but only let you kill Hitler Lite (with Splenda!). The early id shooters were visually sparse affairs to begin with, but all the Nazi symbols removed from the game didn't get replaced with much of visual interest. Yes, the SNES Wolfenstein 3D controls are surprisingly good, but the gameplay winds through corridors even more terminally identical and blocky than the PC version's. Add in the blotchy lack-of-textures and you've got a game that is mostly good at giving you "FPS sickness", if you're prone to it.

I'm pretty bitter about this one. When I was in the age bracket where fighting cyborg Hitler was the best thing ever (as opposed to merely a really great thing, as it now), my tightwad parents left me with no chance at all of getting a gaming computer. I did have an SNES, though... which meant I got to play this thing. Yay?

Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode

The tale of censorship for this game is much shorter than Wolfenstein 3D's, and more inexplicable than bitter. The two NES Golgo 13 games are based on the super-long-running (since 1969) Golgo 13 manga. It's been adapted into a few anime and movies, but the gist of the franchise is pretty simple: Duke Togo is an assassin code-named Golgo 13 who'll whack anybody for sufficient money. As one of the best assassins in the world, he tends to end up on a lot of exceptionally strange and weird cases, but ones always presented as realistically as possible.

Golgo 13 is, more or less, Japan's homegrown equivalent to James Bond or all those John le Carre knockoffs that clog up American bestseller lists. Given how sexually explicit and utterly amoral the manga could be, it's a bit surprising that NES titles were based on Golgo 13 at all. That they got released in the US with surprisingly little censorship is absolutely mind-boggling. In the US version of the game you could still smoke cigarettes or spend the night with lovely lady to regain health, and see bloodsplatter when you shot guys in the head (which was frequent). If Golgo 13 had been more popular, it could've been the GTAIV of its day.

Golgo 13 wasn't too popular, though, because it was ridiculously, mercilessly hard. There were a lot of things that made it unusually difficult-- it was, after all, probably a game meant for adult gamers to begin with-- but the worst of them were maze levels that expected you to navigate through twisting passageway-like areas filled with enemies. Thanks to the NES's graphical limitations, maze areas were totally featureless. You had no auto-map to navigate with, just a compass bar at the bottom of the screen. Most people gave up there, and I was among them. Check out a tool-assisted speedrun through the game's various mazes below, and see if you can get through wihout giving yourself a raging headache.

Now, if you suffer through the mazes and such, you get to follow an ambitious plot involving the "spy" Togo uncovering the nefarious antics of a secret organization called DREK, which turns out to be run by an evil cyborg brain-in-a-jar called Smirk hooked up to a massive machine that makes clones or something. The end fight is a bit confusing due to the game's highly abstract graphics, but you can check it out below.

Now, one of the in-game files about DREK you can acquire accidentally had a swastika left on it, which makes the major element of censorship in the game obvious. Duke Togo can smoke, kill, and score, but he can't fight a resurrected Nazi party. Smirk was supposed to be Hitler, which makes the brain-in-a-jar go from being random to kind of hilariously awesome. So, in this case, Nintendo quite literally saved Hitler's brain from... I don't know, making gamers think that killing evil undead dictators is okay.

Bionic Commando

Looking back on it, Bionic Commando was an absolutely amazing game given the hardware it was on. When most action titles were utterly simplistic and linear, Bionic Commando introduced inventory management, multiple modes of gameplay, and a world map that let you approach levels in the order that you chose. You could find hidden shortcuts, equip potent defensive items, and wield a variety of guns; you also had to make proper use of communications rooms in order to proceed.

At the time it was also remembered for its radical decision to include platform levels even though the main character couldn't jump. Instead he had a bionic arm he could use to swing across gaps or climb up to high platforms, and you were expected to get along with that along. A lot of gamers, at least the ones that I knew, simply gave up on the game rather than bother to learn how to properly use the bionic arm. This lead to the game being regarded as an especially difficult one, even though it's actually considerably easier than most NES action games once you get past the platforming.

When it comes to Nintendo desperately censoring out Nazis, this is probably the single most glaringly obvious and famous case of it. The game's Japanese title was, after all, Top Secret: Hitler no Fukkatsu (that is, Hitler's Resurrection). Pretty much everyone knows the story: Nazis became Badds, swastikas became eagles, and Hitler became "Master-D". What's particularly hilarious about these changes, though, is that Nintendo apparently didn't ask Capcom to edit Master-D's face portrait, the way Hitler had to be edited in Wolfenstein 3D. When you make it to the end of the game and "Master-D" resurrects, he looks pretty much 100% like Hitler. Hell, in the video below he looks more like Hitler than the actual Hitler in Operation Darkness does!

Now, what's truly bizarre is that there's a remake of Bionic Commando called Bionic Commando: Rearmed in the works, and set to be available on every major next-gen system except the Wii. You'd think the remake would reinstate all the Nazi imagery and having to shoot Hitler with a bazooka, right? Well, wrong. In the remake, you're still fighing Badds and Master-D; we can only hope that for the sake of comedy, Master-D still looks exactly like Hitler. There's also an all-new next-gen title that isn't set to come to the Wii (yet) in the works, essentially a sequel to Bionic Commando, complete with appearances by Super Joe and naughty terrorists to fight.

It would be one thing if the Nintendo systems were getting left out of the Bionic Commando revival party because Capcom was all miffed about the censorship, but no, that's not the case. Apparently they've decided the NES fans of yesteryear are far more likely to be 360, PS3, and PC gamers now. Maybe Nintendo's decided the same thing, as repeated demands for a Virtual Console release of NES Bionic Commando have lead to exactly bupkis. Personally, I like to think that deep down, maybe Nintendo's a little ashamed of the goofiness the Bionic Commando edits resulted in, and so really can't bear to have anything to do with modern Bionic Commando fans and their tittering over Master-D and the Badds. If so, serves them right.

For sake of comparison, I'll close out with a vid of some fine Spanish-or-Portuguese speaking person doing a speedrun of the second half of the Japanese version of NES Bionic Commando. Check out all the Nazi stuff and the talking about Hitler!

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