The Manhunt 2 Controversy

So, who has been following this? It makes a great follow up to the Sony Vs CoE story

For those that don’t know, Manhunt was one of the most violent games ever made for the PS2, Xbox and PC. You play a convicted criminal trying to survive the machinations of an rather insane multi-millionaire by executing members of various street games in a large number of ways, including beating them to death with blunt objects, electrocution and hacking characters to death with machetes, sickles and other bladed weapons. It’s known for being extremely bloody and graphic.

Manhunt 2 is more of the same. Not that much is known about the plot, but the main character is a former scientist incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane and teh publicty shots show him hack a victim to death with an axe, executing someone in an Electric Chair and breaking someone’s neck.

The fun, however, started last week, shortly before Manhunt 2 was due to release. Initially, the American board of censors gave it an Adult Only classification and the British Board of Film Classification refused to classify it, meaning that it cannot legally be sold in the UK.
The Adult Only classification in America means that many of the big chain stores will not stock the game, limiting it’s distribution severely.

Following this, several other countries including Ireland, Italy and Germany have stated that it would be banned if released and both Nintendo and Sony refused to licence the game for publication on their consoles.
A few days later, Take Two, who own Rockstar Games and publish the GTA games, amongst others decided to postpone the release of Manhunt 2 for the foreseeable future.

So, the question is, should the censors in various countries have been allowed to ban this game? Were Nintendo and Sony right to refuse to licence it? If this was a film, would the same standards have been applied?

Apple World Wide Developer Conference Keynote 2007

Well, that was an interesting keynote. While it didn’t carry the sheer shock value of the iPhone announcement or the thrill of last year’s keynote, there were some extremely surprising announcements which will affect gamers, Mac users and PC users.

Games for Mac

In an unexpected move, Steve Jobs announced that EA Games was bringing several new titles to OS X based systems under the brand ‘EA Mac’. These titles include Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoneix, Need for Speed Carbon, Madden NFL 2008 and Tiger Woods PGA 2008.

While these are not Grade A quality titles, they are some of the biggest current and forthcoming titles in the EA roster. The introduction of new versions of Madden and Tiger Woods will hopefully mean that more EA titles will be launched on Mac and Windows systems simultaneously.

iD Software’s Tech 5 Engine Demoed

For years, iD have been known for making great shooters with some of the most up to date graphics. These include the Doom, Quake and Wolfstein series, and a number of other games have been built using their Quake series of game engines, including Half-Life and Call of Duty.

Tech 5, which is the latest of iD’s engines, and direct competition to to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, looks stunning. It is also able to run on Windows and Mac based PCs, Xbox 360 and PS3. One of the key features of Tech 5 is that it does away with file limits for developers, which means that a great number of much higher definition textures can be displayed at any more time.

A screenshot is posted below and further details are due to be revealed at the E3 event in a few weeks time. I’ll attempt to upload a video of the demo when I can find one.

Leopard Details 

The news that the Mac Geeks have been waiting for.

Despite being nearly silent on the latest incarnation of OS X for some time, Apple has finally broken it’s silence.  OS X Leopard contains more then 300 new features. Amongst some of the most anticipated and useful are:

• A redesign of Finder, which visually integrates with iTunes 7 and Safari 3. It also uses the Coverflow feature from iTunes.
•  Full integration of Boot Camp, allowing users to boot Windows XP, Vista or OS X on any Intel based Apple system. Drivers are included as standard.
• A redesign of the OS X desktop, with the removal of the traditional blue background and improved menu bar and dock. Icons can now be ’stacked’ on the dock for easy access.
• Revamped and improved versions of Mail, iCal, PhotoBooth, DVD Player, Frontrow and Automater.

OS X Leopard is due for release in October. For full details, see Apple’s OS X Leopard page.

Safari 3 Beta for Windows

And one more thing… (as Steve puts it), Safari, Apple’s home grown browser, is now available for Windows XP and Vista. You can download the Beta version here, and you can expect the final release in October, along with Leopard.

New features include the ability to drag and drop tabs, shift them to a new window, updated visual appearance and much much better HTML and Java handling.

I’ve been playing with both the Mac and Windows versions for a couple of hours now, and I’m pretty impressed by both versions. It defiantly seems to perform better then Firefox, Opera or IE, despite having a few bugs. The only thing stopping me from switching it to my default browser on my PC is the fact that it doesn’t like WordPress’s editing tools.

You Are Not Prepared!

Public Service Announcement – The Machiavellian Nerd Goes On Holiday

Greetings ardent readers,

One of the problems of single-handedly maintaining a blog is that if you can’t write for it, then it end up not being updated for periods of time when you are otherwise occupied. You can see from my post history when I’ve had coursework due and so on.

Unfortunately for the blog, I am going to be away on holiday for the next fortnight or so – without regular internet access. Fortunately for me, I’ll be in Spain drinking San Miguel, Sangria and cheap cocktails and hopefully enjoying the sun. Normal service should resume on Monday 9th of March.

I really should look for some more folks to help out with this to avoid outages and drops in coverage. Or possibly even start contributing to another blog instead.

What do you guys think? Should the Machiavellian Nerd turn on the ‘Looking for More’ tags? Any volunteers?

EU Virtual Console Releases – 23-Mar-07

This week, we have two quality releases.

First up, from the NES, we have the original Castlevania. This franchise has seen a resurgence in popularity of late, with a new DS game and forthcoming PSP and Xbox Live Arcade releases. It’s 2d side-scrolling action, with some control problems thrown in to the mix. Recommended if your a fan of Portrait of Ruin (just don’t expect the graphics to be of DS quality), it will cost you 500 points.

The second game released this week is arguably the best instalment in the Zelda series, A Link to the Past.  For those who didn’t buy this when it game out for the SNES or the GBA, this is an essential purchase. It manages to feature all that is good about the Zelda series, including the top down gameplay, engaging plot and a good combat system. Well worth the 800 points.