Thanks for the download Dennis!

nice

Thanks for the feed. I will have to listen to it when I get home.

I can see... er, hear... a few places where you-know-who could ignore half of what is being said and yell "LAWSUIT!"

The message is still clear, though -- the ESRB knew what was there, and considers the use of third-party hacks to be the fault of those using them, not the manufacturer of the game.

@bakaohki

Yes because the DMCA applies as you need to illegal modify your console to make it work.

@ Andrew Eisen

Vance admitted that was a question for someone far more technical than her. She handled it the best she could--and obviously used [and reused] some fallback statements to those questions.

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To those who wonder the same thing as Takahashi, here's a bit about how 3D modeling and gaming works, based on our current programing standards...

Be aware, I'm not a game or 3D programmer. Just a techie who has a basic barebones knowledge of how 3D Video works.

Layers:

[Object] The character
[3D Models] The "Shape" of the Characters - Including Floors/Walls
[Texturing] The "skin" of that Character
[Animation] The action of the Textured 3D Model
[Lighting] - A (complicated) filter of how light-sources act
[Shading] - This leads to the change in color, as well as our shadows
[Special Effects] - The blurs, the particles, the pretty glowing orbs

Under this basic model, you can sometimes combine Lighting and Shading to just overall "Shading". To fully delete the scenes in question, one would have to go as far deep as removing the [Texturing] of blood and guts, the [Animation], and the underly script that controls the [Object] doing this. Bare minimum.

This leaves a few holes and pits.

The pit is a model or FUNCTION() will sometimes be left "orphaned". The FUNCTION() is coded, but it has no script that wants to call it. Yet the FUNCTION() has to be reported to the ESRB or Removed--once removed ,the game has to be recompiled AGAIN. That's a lot of time and money.

The holes are what to do with the scenes that suddenly skip the death scenes. Is it still the same game and story you want to tell? Even if it is, how do you keep the video and gametime fluid? That requires more planning, coding, animation, texturing, lighting, shading, filtering and compiling all over again . Again--that's more time and money.

Rockstar obviously feels (based on their press releases) that the mood of the game would be seriously affected by removing the death scenes. This means they had to choose a way that would keep the story--and the scenes--with the least amount of work that will go into compliance. They did that by adding a [Special Effect] - a simple blur filter. Minimal compiling needed--all they did was add a filter that goes over textured and shaded animations. There's no fault in this, and it's Rockstar's right to try to do the best they can to tell a story--and sell a product with the most profit.

It simply wouldn't BE Manhunt anymore if the kills were cut. Hell, they put filters in appease the nimrods. At some point, you blame the parents for letting the games get into kids hands. That my friends, is where it ends.

i'm a game programmer (kinda), and i think that rockstar really wanted to not stir up all this controversy, they would have decided to omit the AO content back when the game was just getting started, before it was too late to easily remove the content like what silphion said

@TheBird

In other words, they wanted to stir up controversey because they didn't material months, maybe years, before the ESRB rated it? I mean really...they're not psychic. Yeah, they probably knew they were pushing the envelope, but the guidlines are vauge.

"Violence" can apply to Looney Toons, Fable, Halo or Manhunt. It's the arbitrarily determined "level" of violence that makes the rating...there's no way to know what rating it will get until it's submitted. And by then, the game is basically done, and you're in the situation that Silphion described.

~A deer dance... and inventation to peace.. with war staring you in the faaace. With a helment.. feirce~

for somereason i always think of that song with these mondern day whitch hunters on the prowl.

@Wraithfighter:

You are right. Be sure to consider, however, there are limits on what one can do in a short amount of time. See my above post about 3D Modeling.

Forgot to make it hard? It's just in an INI file for Christ sake! There's no way they could accidentally over look that. This shouldn't be that big of a deal, except for the attention whores with an agenda.

but it's not even the filter that got them the M rating. I believe that there was a castration scene that was removed. And also looking at the file structure of the game (I was looking at it on a site that had the hack posted) level 13 is completely missing.

Assuming that the game was lowered to M because of some silly render effect I think is irresponsible and ignorant. It's obvious that there was a lot more removed (a lot more offensive things) to obtain the M rating.