If your sensibilities can tolerate the incineration and impaling of pus-oozing space zombies, but not the profligate use of cuss words, then Bulletstorm is your game. The raucous shooter will feature an option to tone down its notoriously salty language.
So says Adrian Chmielarz of the game's studio, People Can Fly, in this tweet. "Bulletstorm features optional subtitles, and yes, you can tone the language down if you wish so," he wrote.
While unusual, it's far from the first game to do so. Brutal Legend, another Electronic Arts-published game, featured a bleep option that made some of the dialogue more hilarious. More recently, Telltale Games' Poker Night at the Inventory has featured a variable language setting, and we don't mean Spanish or French.
Going through some Bulletstorm trailers, it's fair to say the devs behind this option have their fuckin' work cut out for them. The script, by Rick Remender (of Punisher comics fame) is gratuitously foul-mouthed, in keeping with the character of protagonist Grayson Hunt. Here's a sampling of words we've heard, and whether they should pass Bulletstorm's bleep-o-meter.
• "Dicktits": The sign off to this developer diary - if this is in the game, we bet they set the bleep flag for it first.
• "Goddammit," "piss," and "son of a bitch" (heard in multiple trailers): These are, or are close to, the kind of 10 p.m. language you may hear on U.S. television. Bleeping them is kind of petty and pointless.
• "Robot-head jerk ass" (Heard in the dev diary's gameplay): Borderline. I think within the context of the story "robot head" may be the more offensive remark here, as it shows bigotry toward those with cybernetic implants.
• "Ugly buttfuckers", "fuck you", "cocksucks" and "limpdick" (dev diary): No, no, no, and no.
• "Son of a Dick" (this trailer): Not unless they're referring to Nixon's offspring - and he had daughters.