Bad To The Bone

Here's a perfect end-of-week bit of weirdness for us all - it appears that Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on the Wii U has a bit of a shocking swear in it, and it's fan-favourite (not really) Shadow the Hedgehog that's responsible.

It was reported in UK tabloid The Mirror earlier in the week that, during the football / soccer minigame Shadow says a particularly bad word when he has shots on goal that are blocked. As is The Mirror's modus operandi the story focuses on a family, with the father apparently disposing of the game when his daughter started repeating the word.

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At first my wife and I didn't pick up on it until we heard our eight-year-old daughter, start saying it around the house.

We immediately corrected her and told her not to say the word again.

We had no idea where she got it from, until Grace told us that it was what her favourite character in the game, Shadow, says.

My wife and I gave the game a go when the children were out of the room and found it immediately.

Tabloids always exaggerate - Shadow is no-one's favourite character.

In any case, our chums at Eurogamer have produced a video and, frankly, it's hard to get beyond the fact that Shadow is saying a very naughty word. We won't embed it here because we're thinking of the children, so you'll have to follow a link and acknowledge that we warned you about bad language.

Nintendo is yet to comment on the issue, which isn't surprising. As for how this could happen, we can only assume a poor-taste joke sound file got left in the code, or the employee dealing with this part of the game was disgruntled. Either way, we suspect a patch will be inbound to remove it.

Oh Shadow, it's a new low.

[source mirror.co.uk, via eurogamer.net]