I know its a hot topic right now but personally I’m tired of seeing people blow up in one extreme or the other regarding this game. Its got to the point where I’m a few Manhunt posts away from perma-removing GamePolitics.com from my RSS feeds. Not that I’m not a GP fan because I am. I just cant read one more Manhunt post this month..
It seems every site is posting this group or that groups thoughts, this industry analyst, that watchdog, this critic… on and on and on, opinions from people I never heard of and quite frankly don’t care about.
I never liked the original Manhunt. Not because of the hyper-violence but because of its repetitive game-play. I tired of the stylised death cut-scenes after the 3rd or 4th time I’d seen each one. For me it just didn’t cut it as a compelling game. Others disagree and that’s fine. A few of my friends are big Manhunt fans and have offered various counters to my dislikes of the game that I can appreciate and I see the appeal, but personally I cant sit through a disrupting cut-scene for every kill made in a game. I just cant do it, its bad enough to have your flow disrupted for a cut-scene but when its the same one you saw 2 minutes ago but with a slightly different background, its time to move on.
That said, I don’t believe in the ban Manhunt 2 received here in the UK. For a classification board to say Manhunt 2 may negatively effect adults and a few weeks later pass the movie, Eastern Promises, and make a statement indicating that they are not here to make cuts and if adults don’t want to see the violence they can just turn away from the screen, is unreal. This alone should show the problems the classification board has, mainly that it doesn’t count video games as a worthy medium. Had it considered gaming to be viable media they would have looked upon Manhunt 2 in the same light that it looked on Hostel, Saw, or the recent Eastern Promises and classified it in the same manner.
The conflicting statements made by the BBFC prove that either their guidelines for game classifications need reviewing or we need a new independent body to classify games. An independent body that knows and values games as a medium of entertainment, not necessarily art but definitely entertainment.
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