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, no," says Aubrey Norris, Velvet Assassin product manager. "We were surprised we didn't 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 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.