When EA first announced The Godfather for Wii, images of beating people down with the remote immediately popped into my head and with Rockstar's announcement today that Manhunt 2 would be coming to the Wii, images of shoving shards of glass into people's eyes popped into my head. As with the Godfather I'm not really sure how I feel about that.While I never played the first Manhunt, mainly because I'm not a big fan of trial and error stealth gameplay (and only partly because it was supposed to be unrelentingly brutal), it should be interesting to see how the Wii-remote is utilized by the title.
This one stands to open up a whole can of worms about the effect of violence on children even though it'll carry an M-rating. The fact that it's on Nintendo's Little White Box of Happiness makes it stand out even more since the system has been flying off the shelves no doubt in large part because of it's social/family appeal.
As it is, games already receive stricter ratings than film counterparts due to the fact that the player is participating in the action. M-rated games like Halo would likely be PG-13 movies and innocuous cartoony games like Super Smash Bros. Melee are rated T for Teen simply because characters can hit each other.
In the past we interacted with games with simple button presses and mouse clicks and that was enough to get people enraged. I can only imagine what is to come in terms of criticism for games like Manhunt 2 on Wii where the level of interaction is raised substantially.
There is a difference between pushing a button to stab someone in the face or beat them and actually mimicking the action to initiate it onscreen.
The problem is that too many people see ALL games as being for kids, hence the outcry against these types of games that kids shouldn't be playing anyway. Whether it's necessary for games to feature this level of violence is a whole other argument but I think everyone would agree that kids shouldn't be playing them regardless...
Personally I'm glad the Wii right off the bat isn't being saddled with the same publisher prejudice that Nintendo has faced since the SNES days: that Nintendo systems are for kids. It has been a self-fulfilling prophecy because the lack of adult content always turned Nintendo systems into exactly that.
It's somewhat ironic that after two generations of trying to shake that image, Nintendo finally threw its corporate hands in the air, stopped trying to compete with MS and Sony on that level and created the Wii...and now they are getting the adult content. Go figure.
Source: Rockstar on the Manhunt Again - GameSpot
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