Rockstar’s woes continue. Not only have they been banned in the UK and Ireland, but they received the ESRB rating of AO (Adults Only) in the US. Now at the time we all figured that meant no big retail chain would carry the game, though none of them have a problem carrying violent movies or ’stickered’ CD’s. While we were all wondering if Rockstar could sell the game somehow with the AO rating, Sony and Nintendo came out and said they won’t allow the AO rated game to be released for their consoles.

Rockstar, in the face of all the bad news, stand behind the product. I applaud them for it.

“The Rockstar team has come up with a game that fits squarely within the horror genre and was intended to do so. It brings a unique, formerly unheard of cinematic quality to interactive entertainment, and is also a fine piece of art.”

Whether or not you agree with the content itself, it has every right to exist. I don’t like movies like Hostel or Saw, gore for the sake of gore. Yet no one bats an eye when such movies are released on DVD. People are able to make their own decisions as to whether or not they wish to partake. As game players we apparently are not allowed to make the same decision.

Until video games get acknowledged as art (or at the minimum protected speech) this will continue to happen.

Now ratings boards, politicians, and asshole lawyers aside the people that piss me off the most now is Sony and Nintendo for showing a complete lack of backbone. Rockstar has been working on Manhunt 2 for quite some time now and Sony and Microsoft were more than happy to have the violent game play on their respective consoles. But when they didn’t get the ‘M’ rating they were hoping for they fall all over themselves distancing themselves from the game, acting like they had never even heard of the game before.

Our industry gets pushed around by everyone, and until these big names start pushing back, giving a game a rating of AO will for all intensive purposes censor it.

Manhunt 2 just garnered the “kiss of death” rating of Adults-Only (AO), instead of the expected M for Mature. What’s this mean? Most retailers won’t carry the game (EB, Gamestop, Best Buy, Target, WalMart to name a few) which pretty much renders it non-existent in the retail world. Naturally this leaves it no chance of commercial success.

It’s the video game verison of the NC-17 movie rating, and in some people’s eyes…. censorship.

Rockstar has a few options, such as protesting the ruling to an appeals board or changing the content to get the rating down, but one has to wonder what in the hell this game has that the 1st Manhunt didn’t. Is it reall a matter of the Wii’s controls? Should it be regulated any differently because of the control mechanism of the game?

A company spokesman had the following to say:

“This is completely unexpected to the whole team. We love the horror genre. We thought we could do something interesting and entertaining with it in the video game medium. When we had this first Manhunt game, there wasn’t this reaction. We thought (Manhunt 2) was consistent with a mature rating.”

[Kotaku]

Not since 1997’s Carmageddon has a game been banned from being sold in the UK. Well now we can add another to the list, Rockstar’s Manhunt 2. It would seem the game has been deemed to violent and depraved to be saved by cuts or changes and would really be a blight on society if released. To me, I prefer to let grown adults make a decision for themselves about whether or not they’d like to purchase and play the game, but I guess that’s me.

Kotaku thinks this momentum will carry over to bans in Germany and Austrailia as well, and I have to say I agree. Germany has already skittish of violent games (Dead Rising) and this decision in the UK could have ripple effects everywhere. I’m quite sure there’s some people here in the States that are downright eurphoric this morning with all the new ammunition they just got in their anti-games crusade.

The British Board of Film Classification’s director David Cooke released a statement explaining the decision, and while I wholly disagree with the banning of anything, I give them credit for playing the game throughly and even reading the script before making a decision. Quite a difference than the people so eager who just want to see games be made illegal. Full statement after the jump. Continue Reading »

So I anticipate this game will get a whole mess of people riled up something fierce. Politicians whoring themselves out to anyone that’ll listen about how “Won’t someone think of the children?” and how this game will single-handedly take down western civilization as we know it.

I just hope it’s more fun that the first Manhunt, which was entertaining but ultimately too repetitive for me.

If the game comes together the Wii version is the obvious choice here. The possibility of the motion controls is just too much to ignore.