Condemning Manhunt

Still fresh for me was the controversy surrounding Manhunt, the only game to have been rated “R” in Ontario. Given I ran an EBgames during that period imagine my shock and horror when I discovered (while at the hospital no less) that I had been “stung” by the local tv crew selling it to a “minor” (girl was 18 in less than a month and made up to look like an adult, then put on camera in pigtails).
Lo these 5 years later I have finally played and beaten the game, and honestly I don’t get it. Hindsight tends to clarify most things and though I can understand the brouhaha, unfairly directed at Rockstar specifically due to the GTA series, the game just isn’t that bad. Other games made around the same time or soon after are far more graphic, an issue that plagued Manhunt 2. Clearly the subject matter and “execution” gameplay mechanic were the tipping points in this issue, but I found the game to be entertaining and reasonably fun. Perhaps more importantly I appreciated the unflinching depiction of human filth and the depravity people are capable of expressing. Not unlike the 24 hour exposure our world receives of horrible images often without context on the news, this game expresses a singular vision of exploitation.
The sneaking mechanics of the game are now well-worn and the limitations of the hardware available at the time are apparent in the graphics and A.I. That aside, 2/3rds of the game make for reasonably varied play, only to collapse into stop and pop shooting mechanics which fail the central conceit. The ending is singularly unsatisfying but again, very little in this game was truly unnerving or disturbing (except for Pigsy’s junk dangling, lovingly).
Comparatively, Condemned, released on the Xbox 360 not long after Manhunt, is a far more visceral, graphic and disturbing game. An FPS driven on what appears to be an early build of what would become the F.E.A.R. engine is brutally violent, and also contains execution style mechanics. However, the player character is a cop tracking a serial killer rather than a serial killer tracking and killing cops (amongst others). This distinction along with the “snuff-film” plot is what drove the controversy against Manhunt. Context, as with all media, appears to be everything