Blood Patch

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A Blood Patch (sometimes called a Blood Pack) is a patch to replace the zombies/aliens in a censored PC Carmageddon game with the original pedestrians.

History

See also: Carmageddon (series)#Censorship

During development, the first Carmageddon game had human beings and cows to run over, with red blood. Once the media furore and certification refusal started up, it was decided that a censored version was to be released instead. Many changes were made: The pedestrian sprites were heavily redrawn as zombies and zombie cows, the blood was changed from red to green, the sound effects (screams, moos etc.) were distorted to sound less human, and any game text referring to "peds" (race info, powerup names, etc.) was changed. This was enough to allow the game to be released in several countries, but some countries like Germany wanted still more censorship. For them, the pedestrian sprites were redrawn completely, becoming robots, and the red blood was changed to black "oil".
These three versions have become known as:

  • The Blood / Uncensored version (humans, red blood)
  • The Zombie / Censored version (zombies, green blood)
  • The Robot / German / Censored version (robots, black oil)

For Carmageddon II, which version of the game you have can be identified from the box-art and the CD. A small box on the top-right of the CD cover shows four letters: The first two are the region release, the second two the version. For example, "UK · ZM" is the UK Zombie version. The Blood version would end "BL".

Usage

Patches are either available as a regular .zip file, or as a self-extracting .zip file (with the extension .exe). On the Carmageddon Splat Pack disc, the patch files are not even zipped, just in regular folders. The user simply extracts the files into the correct folders, replacing some of the existing game files. German versions may require a specific German Blood patch.

Availability

  • For Carmageddon, the patches are freely available on the internet. Several Blood patches were also included on the official retail disc of the Splat Pack, with the note that they had "got hold of as many [...] as we could from the internet". Four patches can be found in the Patches/Blood Patches directory; two for Zombie versions, two for the German version.
  • Carmageddon II's patch is on the internet, under the name C2blood. It is also included on the Official Graphics Pack CD [confirmation needed].
To Do: Add details for Carmageddon: TDR 2000.
Care to do so?

Origin

For a long time, the origin of the patches was never explicitly stated, although it was heavily implied that they came from Stainless Software themselves. In July 2011, however, nobby himself confirmed that that was the case.[1]

See also

External links

References