'Manhunt 2' bloodied, unbowed by M rating

— -- The Holy Grail of video games has been to create an experience that, like the best movies, can make you cry. With its new Manhunt 2, Rockstar Games wanted instead to make players wince in horror.

But the industry's rating board winced first: Manhunt 2 received a dreaded AO — Adults Only — in June, equivalent to an X-rating for a movie. So the developer's dilemma became how to change it enough to satisfy the board but retain its (literal) cutting edge.

Recently, a three-man team from Rockstar offered a preview of the finished game, now rated Mature for ages 17-up (due Oct. 31, $30-$40) along with some insight into the approval process. "We were planning an M-rated game," says Rockstar's Rodney Walker. After the changes, "it's still Manhunt," he says.

The first Manhunt, in 2003, was rated M. That game, which sold about 1 million copies, put players in the role of a death row escapee hunted in a gruesome contest, orchestrated by an unseen director, in which the methods of murder escalated.

Manhunt 2's story line has psychiatric patient Daniel Lamb escaping during a power outage. He's an amnesiac who has been experimented on and must go on a killing spree — using weapons, from hypodermic needles to an ax — to get out of the ward. His quest to uncover his identity then leads to encounters with sadistic killers and sexual deviants.

Late last year — about the time the Wii game system was being launched — Rockstar contacted Nintendo about designing Manhunt 2 for the Wii, because its motion-sensitive controller system promised unparalleled immersion into the game as compared with the usual button-based controllers.

The first hint of trouble for Manhunt 2 came from the British Board of Film Classification (which also handles games). The board banned the game on June 19, citing "sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game." (Rockstar is appealing the decision.) The last game the board banned was pedestrian hit-and-run Carmageddon in 1997.

That same day, advocacy groups in the USA pressured the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to rate the game AO, focusing on the Wii's interactive nature in the killing. That rating effectively bans games because Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony will not approve AO titles for their game systems, and retailers won't stock them.

But the ESRB had already given the game an AO, a decision announced the next day. ESRB president Patricia Vance says it was based on "several factors, including not only the content itself and the context in which it is presented, but also elements such as the reward system and degree of player control."

That left Rockstar without a clear understanding of what pushed the game over the edge into AO territory, Walker says. "It was not easy to understand, and the conversations were vague."

An issue in the game could have been one particular scene in which the player could choose to use pliers on a male enemy in a particularly painful way. The pliers were removed as an option.

In a larger sense, the "killing rage" effect that kicks in when a player is about to begin a fatal attack was lessened. Players still stab, beat or choke a victim — by moving the controllers on the Wii — but the designers have added a strobe effect and blurring to blunt the impact.

"All headaches aside, it is completely where we wanted this game to be," Walker says. "People who like the horror genre are going to love this game."