The uprising kicked up in by the de facto banning ofManhunt 2had some folks scratching their heads. They wondered: why all the ruckus overManhunt?The original wasn’t all that great, after all. Though I count myself among the angry masses, I was never really concerned with the game itself so much as I worried about our ability to, y’know, make our own choices about the content we digest. Y’know, likeadults. I just hope it was a one-shot sort of deal and nobody else starts pulling cont–
The ESRB’s decision to giveManhunt 2an Adults Only rating in the US seems to have already sent shockwaves throughout the industry about what it can and can’t get away with.Condemned: Bloodshotsenior producer, Constantine Hantzopoulos, tells CVG that a few features have already been pulled from the game in light of the ESRB /Manhuntsituation.
Crap. Granted, this kind of thing has gone on for years — in the same CVG article, Hantzopoulos notes that he was the one who removed the sex scenes fromIndigo Prophecyin its journey to US shores — but after theManhuntdebacle, the process looks to be becoming much more transparent, much more public. This can go either way; on one hand we get to see the ways in which the influence of the ESRB and soccer moms everywhere changes the course of a game’s development, but we’re also playing a big part in the circus by virtue of our complacency.
What’s changed isn’t anything terribly huge — I can’t put a dude’s head in a vice, and some instances of decapitation have also been striken from the title. I just wish I had the option to choose whether or not I wanted to see that stuff for myself. Hope you’re developing a feel for this sort of thing, gang — having already made an example out of Rockstar, the ESRB shouldn’t have any issue putting the big squeeze games of comparable maturity.
Nick’s got a preview ofCondemned 2on the way, so keep an eye out for that.
[ViaCVG; thanks Trevor!]
