Censored Violence against Women

The arcade game SONIC BLAST MAN used to be pretty popular amongst gamers, however, it became an infamous game due to the fact that it was physically harmful for the players. Thats right, during the construction of the arcade machine, the producers did not seem to care for usability. In order to perform stronger hits and moves, one could smack the machine with one’s fist. This also meant that during boss battles, one would constantly hit the machine. The console portings thankfully fixed this by including trigger button functions. Some people actually sued the developers, which actually lead to the machine being withdrawn from circulation, since it was said to cause permanent damage do one’s joints and lead to injuries. Nowadays, there are many arcade machines whose only function is to measure the force of one’s blow, but back in the days this seemed to be out of the question for games.
Still, Taito immediately produced a porting for Nintendos Super NES, which was different not only in terms of controls. While the Japanese Super Famicom’s levels are almost identical to the arcade version, the Super NES Version did not include female enemies, since it was seen as inappropriate to walk through the streets and beat up people lying on the floor (as you can see above). Below we will show you a few screenshots of the characters that were exchanged. Even though it is just a minor piece of censorship that is neither a huge scandal nor concerns any blood or gore, it is still worth talking about.

Putting both versions side by side works best when using the same parts of identical levels. The characters that used to be female can be recognized when taking a look at the clothes which either have the same or at least very similar colors. During one scene you can see a fat balded guy coming in, accompanied by a woman. At this point, they did not keep the colors the same, however, you can definitively see that it is still the exact same scene. During the entire game, only the first two stages have human enemies. During the rest of the game you fight robots and aliens.

SNES Version	Japanese Version