Despite being a country in which the general populace regularly shrug off attacks from venomous spiders, roaming squads of Great White sharks and angry gangs of disaffected Koalas, Australia does seem remarkably sensitive to the perils of video gaming. Soldier of Fortune: Payback has just been refused classification, essentially banning it from sale.

The Australian Office of Film and Literature website doesn't shed much light on why the game was banned, though Gamespot.au have quoted a representative of the OFLC as saying that the problems concerned "close-range shooting with substantial blood spray, blood splatters onto the ground and walls, [the ability to] target various limbs of the opponent which can result in dismemberment, and large amounts of blood sprayed which comes from the stump but victims sometimes stay alive."

A quick squint at the video above shows all this to be absolutely true and it's not, to be honest, something we're in a terrible rush to play. Still, while it's obviously not something to buy the kids once they've wrung every drop out of Nintendogs, it does highlight the need, once again, for an Australian 'R' rating for games. We're not all five, you know.