ShingoEX Wrote:
If Manhunt 2 can get an initial AO rating due to violence, then MK is not immune to this. They were pushing it big time with the last game (seriously, vomiting in Noob's X-Ray? Kung Lao's buzzsaw fatality starting at the crotch?), and they're going even further here, from what I've seen.
I believe (as others mentioned above) that the issue with the Manhunt games' violence was its overt realism.
Suffocating people with plastic bags, shivving someone in the stomach repeatedly, and slitting someone's throat in several different ways probably struck people a little differently than the absolute ridiculous violence in MK, where you can freeze someone's legs, shatter them to pieces, and while the victim is alive and crawling away (begging for their life,) stomp on their chest so hard their head pops off. That's a massive tonal difference.
Manhunt games didn't play up the extremity of the fatalities; they were quite realistic (often resembling snuff film footage,) which led to them blamed for murders, furthering the controversy. There was no humor or overt tongue-in-cheek, self-awareness; Manhunt made people feel dirty, and I'm fairly certain you had to engage in these stealth kills almost constantly to progress.
In MK games, you don't have to use violent finishers; you can use joke finishers, none at all, or even turn the blood off, making fatalities wholly impossible.
Graphic violence in the Manhunt games is inevitable and able to be replicated, while MK's is optional and almost always entirely impossible to reenact.
That would be a pretty substantial difference to the ESRB, I would imagine.
