But they removed trading slaves and narcotics! :)

(I think)

Indeed - "slaves" got changed to "robot slaves", while "narcotics" became "rare species" and "liquor/wines" became "beverages". You can still trade firearms, though, so its not entirely squeaky clean...

Nintendo would have had a hell of a time censoring firearms from videogames. Nudity, slavery, narcotics, and alcohol are easy; violence and firearms form the basis of many/most popular video games.

I never understood why UK and Europe got probotector instead of contra, maybe it was due to Germany's very strict game censorship?

Yeah, that's my guess. Violence towards humans in video games was often prohibited in Germany, so drop it for the whole region, because two releases is hard.

Arch Elite is the pinnacle for sure.

> Arch Elite is the pinnacle for sure.

Aw, blush :)

- Chris Jordan, publisher of Arch Elite.

The quote is:

  My greatest published achievements technically would have to be fitting BBC Cassette "Elite" into 32K of RAM including the screen, and later the Nintendo Entertainment System conversion of "Elite" that used a character mapped display and a single NES controller. The NES is my favourite published conversion and was not thought technically feasible until we'd done it.

See http://www.elitehomepage.org/archive/b5081501.htm for the full interview

I interpret this as meaning his favourite version is the BBC Micro cassette version, while his favourite conversion is the NES one. But I'm a BBC fanboy, so that might just be me being hopeful. :-)

> while his favourite conversion is the NES one

favourite /published/ conversion :)

The CHR ROM on NES Elite was actually RAM... allowing for something akin to "bitmap mode" on the TI-99/4A or C64 where they can use the CHR memory as a framebuffer in which to draw those vector graphics.