For anyone not familiar with the controversy surrounding the original Manhunt, here's a brief summary. Manhunt was released in 2003 and immediately became the focus of a media frenzy thanks to a combination of inherently violent premise and grisly visuals.

The original Manhunt was gritty even graphically.

Perhaps the single defining characteristic of the Manhunt controversy was the game's attachment to the investigation of the murder of teenage Stefan Pakeerah by friend Warren Leblanc. Leblanc murdered Pakeerah with a clawhammer in what the tabloid media said was a manner inspired by Manhunt, of which Leblanc was said to have been obsessed with. Though the police denied any link between the game and the act itself, demand for Manhunt surged in the wake of the media speculation.

Fast-forward four years to 2007 and Manhunt 2 is denied a rating for effectively the same reasons that led to concerns about the first game; visceral content and offering little for players to do but murder other characters. For many the decision not to rate (ban) Manhunt 2 has been seen as a direct result of the attention gleaned by its predecessor, rather than the censors following a consistent policy of rating certain games in a certain way - Eg if Manhunt 2 is being banned, why was Manhunt allowed?

The Wii Angle

Much has been made of Manhunt 2's intended release on Nintendo's motion sensitive Wii, with some critics claiming that the increased immersion offered by the Wii brings Manhunt 2 beyond the level of a game, and warrants caution. "Who knows what effect the game could have on people now that you are physically interacting with the game?" goes the paraprhased thinking of the critics.

Practice for when we go out later to syringe people? Likely.

Vocal anti-violent-games figure Jack Thompson remarked of the Wii, "The Wii device does not utilize traditional push button game controllers but instead utilizes hand-held motion capture devices... It is a training device." While gamers might be inured to Thompson's somewhat sensationalist diatribes the fact is that the man has something of a point.

Given anything more than a moment's thought it's hard not to concede it; the whole point of the Wii's remote is to offer players a deeper level of interaction with their content, and given the context of Manhunt 2 it worth wondering whether more immersion is necessarily a good thing.

The Centre for Commercial Free Childhood too had something to contribute with regards the Wii's input, "In Manhunt 2, players can saw their enemies' skulls in half; mutilate them with an axe; castrate them with a pair of pliers; and kill them by bashing their heads into an electrical box, where it is blown apart by a power surge. On Wii, players will not merely punch buttons or wield a joy stick, but actually act out this violence."

We can only assume this man has been eating jam.

The most concise argument against points like those above is that the Wii Remote cannot offer resistance to actions, and so isn't at all representative of committing real violence. Sadly it's not entirely true, the counter-argument runs that subconscious priming is such that simply standing and swinging an axe/remote around is formative enough an exercise; nobody learns to spell by reciting the alphabet, but somehow, we all get there.