Violence: Too much of a good thing?

By Martin Kingsley

James Earl Cash takes time out for his yoga stretches. He calls this one "Angry Shotgun"

You are James Earl Cash, possibly the most sadistic crazy ever to deface a CRT screen.

You were executed for your crimes, but now somebody's brought you back, to kill for this somebody in a sickeningly depraved parody of Big Brother, where the playing field is a town strangely depopulated except for gangs of roaming street thugs.

Your weapons are whatever you can scrounge, and your life is determined by how violently you can dispatch your opposition.

Can I just say that I pretty much hated this game from the moment I started to the moment I took the disc from my PS2 and broke it into infinitesimally small pieces with my bare hands.

Why? Because I'm a tree-hugging goody-goody who doesn't know how to have fun besides learning '1001 More Ways to Cook Tofu', and who faints at the sign of blood, perhaps?

No.

I'm not a squeamish person; I don't shy away from raw violence, hard language or anything else of that nature. I've iron-barred street thugs in Kingpin: Life of Crime to the agonized cries of somebody realizing he's been left with only half the teeth he was born with; I've capped cops down on Miami Beach while rolling in my Cadillac with an arm stuck out the window holding a MAC-10; I've even disemboweled legions of ninjas in Tenchu with a few flicks of my trusty katana.

Jimmy runs from a pair of would-be assailants

So, when I saw Mr. Cash take a thug, wrap his head in a plastic bag and then proceed to pound the living crap out of him with fists, elbows, knees and feet until he went limp from lack of oxygen before breaking his neck, or when I saw him embed a crowbar in a hoodlum's eye socket and lever down, I wasn't too fazed.

Until I realised that there was actually no point to the killing, beyond the killing itself.

Even the movie Kill Bill had a point, for crying out loud, and it was funny to boot. Manhunt is neither humorous nor given to justifying its existence. It's just plain disturbing.

The storyline disappears in the first three minutes, the gameplay is strictly limited to executions, and, while inventive in a of sick-in-the-head way, the graphics and animations tend to get tiresome.

You can't get attached to Cash, because he's just a silent psychopath covered in blood listening to a whispering voice telling him that "the bodies are piling up and we're getting some nice footage".

Did I mention that the violence is backed up by a contingent of fruity language, with clever lines such as, "I'm going to f**k you up real good" and "where's that muthaf**ker gone?" featuring heavily? No? Well, now I have.

It seems to me that Manhunt is a modern attempt at game-making via the Postal Method.

The Postal Method is, simply put, throwing the gameplay out the window in the name of turning your game into a vehicle for a kind of inflammatory content unseen outside of a sado-masochistic interrogation session or a KKK rally.

James signed up to test a new yoga machine released to market: 'The Bak Snappa'

Running With Scissors, headed up by that bastion of bucolic stupidity, one Vincent Desi, created the Postal Method with their debut effort, Postal (hence the name), hoping to sell a crap game through controversy.

If you examine the sales figures for Postal and it's sequel, the imaginatively titled Postal 2, you will see that this attempt failed miserably.

For some reason, Rockstar North have attempted to dredge this archaic concept up from the Abyss in which had once lain, and Manhunt is the end product, yet another example of why the Postal Method does not work.

Things like Manhunt and Postal, games based solely on a novelty that soon wears thin, games that deface the sacred screens of any number of innocent gamers, are a festering abscess on the backside of gaming society, one that should be excised and incinerated soon, lest it grow and eat away once more at the fiber of our very beings.

As for James Earl Cash, I condemn him and his fellow hoodlums to the deepest pit of Hell at my disposal, so that they shalt return nevermore. May the Spectrum ZX plague them with eternal suffering via its little plastic buttons.

Game: Manhunt
System: PS2
Players: 1
Online: No
Developer: Rockstar North
Distributor: Rockstar Games

Rating: 10%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Manhunt is on the shelves now.