Rockstar rocks again with Manhunt 2

Finally! After so much hoo-ha with the censorship boards in UK and various other countries, Rockstar has finally received the green light to release the highly anticipated sequel to the gruesome stealth game Manhunt! Not before slapping it with an 'M' rating, of course.

For the uninitiated, Rockstar is the publisher of various other notorious games that have changed the gaming world and made everyone sit up and take notice. For all the wrong reasons unfortunately. After the mildly successful Grand Theft Auto III, they took the free roaming gaming environment to a whole new level with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. But this it did with a lot of flak as gamers took on the role of a gangster bent on revenge after being framed for a drug deal gone wrong. A pissed off gangster, lots of guns, a strip club and the ability to jack cars, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the potential mayhem that ensues. Much like the negative publicity that plagued comic books way back in the 1950s, parents were worried, teachers got upset and Readers' Digest even ran an article about the dangers of video games highlighting a boy who shot his parents (or friends, I can't remember) after playing GTA: Vice City.

Manhunt was no different. Players took on the role of a serial killer on death row due for execution who, by some twisted plot of a deranged madman, gets captured and thrown into a reality snuff film where other equally deranged lunatics are out to hunt him down. His mission was simple: to survive and get to the guy who put him there in the first place. This awesome game, while gruesome, offered players some really solid stealth action gameplay which required more thinking and strategy than your average 'point-and-shoot' games. It again received flak for its gruesome killing tactics, among them stabbing an opponent's eye with a shard of glass, whacking his head open with a baseball bat (like a pinata) and sneaking up behind a guy and beating him to a pulp after wrapping a plastic bag over his head.Wonderful!

But at the end of the day, we all have to remember that it's all just a game. It's this same exact reason why we play video games in the first place, to thrust ourselves into an environment where we can do things we know are impossible to do in real life.

Time to kill! Virtually, of course.