THQ and SouthPeak convinced Australia that the ubiquitous use of morphine in a World War II game is historically accurate — scoring an MA 15+ rating.
Drugs in video games don’t often fly in Australia. For a while there, THQ — the Aussie distributor — had serious worries that Velvet Assassin would be banned, since they couldn’t really take the morphine out, or make-believe it’s something else like “magic awesome juice.” Even worse, the way morphine affects Violette is far from historically accurate (see below).
“But, [[link]] no,” says Aubrey Norris, Velvet Assassin product manager. “We were surprised we didn’t [[link]] have any issues [with the ratings board]. They rated it like any other game.” Norris said it was “a profound victory” for developer Replay Studios — they got away with something Fallout 3 couldn’t. “We put something controversial out… and we stuck to our guns.” Or rather, syringes.
The way morphine works in the World War II era is like bullet-time: the heroine, Violette Summer, can shoot up morphine to get by [[link]] tense situations where she would otherwise be shot full of bullet holes. When this happens, she appears in her hospital nightgown, the Nazis move super-slow and Violette goes ninja on them with a knife while what looks like rose petals or droplets of blood drift by in a soft haze.
Oh yeah. Totally historically accurate.