Manhunt 2: Blurry Mess Edition
September 14th, 2007IGN has now had a chance to play the M-rated version of Manhunt 2 and check out the differences from it’s original AO form. The results are slightly disappointing, although not all that unexpected.
Apparently the gameplay mechanics are unchanged, but some of the more anticipated “features” of the game have been changed. For instance, the infamous sequence where the player could actually use pliers to pull out a victim’s testicles has been completely removed. As IGN notes, this perhaps isn’t a huge deal as it only effects one sequence out of many throughout the game.
The far bigger deal is the fact that the “death” sequences are now “blurred” out. IGN writes:
“The biggest and most disappointing change relates to the major death strikes. When Danny sneaks up on an enemy, gamers can hold the A button down, at which point they will be given the option to pick from three different murder animations (on Wii, they get to act them out with Nintendo’s motion-sensitive controllers). In the AO-rated build of Manhunt 2, we could clearly see these over-the-top and horrific animations. In the M-rated version, Rockstar has added both an extreme blur effect and in most cases darkened the graphics so that it is nearly impossible to make any sense of what is going on. Players will be able to see character movement, blood splatters, and sometimes they may catch a glimpse of an identifiable action (for example, Danny jamming nails into the legs of a chair-bound opponent), but mostly it’s guesswork - a garbled, motiony mess that’s far less satisfying. This truth is doubly unfortunate because both everything else is unchanged and because these death strikes are what gamers will want to work toward; they’re the pay off for a job well done, but now the pay off is not nearly as rewarding.”
Perhaps this may sound a bit sadistic, but this definitely sounds like it could effect the enjoyment of the game overall. While the manner in which you interact with the game is the same, now your “rewards” for performing the sequences properly are basically non-existent.
In the end it really brings up a fascinating question about games in general: if the gameplay is unchanged but now some sequences are blurred out, is the game actually worse now? As gamers, we always like to say that “Gameplay is king” so something like this would theoretically not make a difference to us, but I’m just not so sure. From IGN’s description, the game sounds like it degenerates into a simple game where you have to perform certain actions to move blobs around on the screen… that doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
The best analog I can think of to this right now would be if Gears of War was forced to blur out it’s chainsaw death animation. The game would play the same, but would killing someone with the chainsaw feel as good as it used to? To me blurring out something like this would be akin to basically just skipping the animation entirely, meaning, why even have it in the first place? And while that wasn’t really a key part of the gameplay in Gears of War, in Manhunt 2 these sequences WERE considered a “feature” of the game. So has blurring these basically negated part of the purpose of this game?
Posted in Industry, Jeff, Sony, Wii |
September 14th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
“In the end it really brings up a fascinating question about games in general: if the gameplay is unchanged but now some sequences are blurred out, is the game actually worse now?”
The game is only worse now if the gameplay itself wasn’t enough to keep the player interested. If the only reason the player was playing was to be able to see these death animations, then they are only being used to mask bland gameplay, the “meat” of the game. Once these animations are removed, the player is suddenly aware how boring the game itself is. The game is technically worse, but it really wasn’t that good to begin with.
“As gamers, we always like to say that “Gameplay is king” so something like this would theoretically not make a difference to us, but I’m just not so sure.”
Gameplay is still “king”, for reason’s explained above.
“From IGN’s description, the game sounds like it degenerates into a simple game where you have to perform certain actions to move blobs around on the screen… that doesn’t sound like much fun to me.”
No, it doesn’t, but that’s because it’s not an interesting gameplay style. That couldn’t be much better even witht he animations. In the case of most good games, the core gameplay is great to begin with and then the animations, cutscenes, story, etc. only magnify what is already greatness. This could basically be lumped into the first quote.
Happy hunting,
FX-1
September 14th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
FX-1:
Try this thought experiment for a second. We can all agree that “Super Mario Bros.” is a great game, right? So, what if instead of showing levels with various platforms, blocks, pits, enemies, etc, you were instead presented simply with instructions on the screen? So, basically, it acted sort of like a “rhythm” game telling you which buttons to push. To “run” it simply tells you to press “right” on the D-pad and hold down “A” for awhile. A little bit down the line it just says “B”, which would equate to “jumping”. If you didn’t press it with just the right timing, new instructions would immediately appear on the screen as to how to “correct” it (for instance, press “left” on the d-pad to “correct” your jump) and if you didn’t correct it in time (or it was uncorrectable), you die and start over.
So, in other words, the game would still be “played” in almost the exact same manner, but we’ve removed all graphics and animation. This is a somewhat crazy thought experiment, but would this not substantially affect your enjoyment of the game? I agree that abstracting Mario down to essentially the same level as what we’re now doing in Manhunt 2 is kind of crazy, but clearly the manner in which the game “reports” it’s responses to the user (sights and sound) is basically the only reason to play games in the first place. If it didn’t matter, we may as well just play games that tell us which button to press with no responsiveness.
Note that this is a different argument than simply arguing whether someone likes to watch the death sequences or not. The point is, this was a “reward” within the game, and now whether you like to watch them or not, there’s basically no purpose to them whatsoever now.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I’m saying the purpose to it would simply be to have fun doing it, the reward would only make it seem a little more worthwhile. Using your example, in Super Mario Bros., it is different from a rythm game in that your not told when to press a specific button, which does actually greatly alter the gameplay. If the only difference between games was the images on the screen, I can’t imagine them having expanded to all the different genres we have today. I’ve given one example in this post already, but there has to be some real underlying differences that I just can’t seem to place my finger on at the moment. It just doesn’t make sense any other way.