I recall seeing the movie Reservoir Dogs in the cinema. It was not the most brutal film I have ever watched (an essay written in University about violent movies had me watching such classics as Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre) but it did have its fair share of violent moments. It was only natural that any computer game based on the movie was going to be greeted with cynicism in certain quarters.

The Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification have refused to grant classification to the Eidos-SCI action title Reservoir Dogs. This means that basically the game is banned in Australia. The game's content was regarded as too extreme, so it missed fitting into any of the G, PG, M, MA15+ categories. The game's publisher Atari claimed that this was "the end of the matter" when quizzed as to whether they would be reapplying for classification, effectively killing any hope Australians have of getting to buy the game legally. This is, of course, not the only game to be gunned down in Australia of late; GTA San Andreas, Manhunt, and Marc Ecko's Getting Up all suffered a similar fate.

What is likely to have upset the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification so? Well, it's fairly certain that the game makes use of Mr Blonde's ear-slicing technique, and the gunning down of various innocent bystanders is likely to be on the menu as well. There also seems to be a "Threat function" which allows you to wave your gun at other characters in order to scare them into submission, which is unlikely to have gone down too well also. But one is left wondering as to whether the Australian classification system might need some reworking given the number of games that wind up being banned there but released elsewhere in the world.