Manhunt. The game that made Grand Theft Auto look like a cartoon. A grungy, gritty game of brutal realism presented as a survival-horror snuff film. There just isn't anything like it, certainly not in late 2003.
To say it was controversial is an understatement. Those who had an agenda against video games now had the most obvious target under the sun. Those of us who actually played video games just had another third-person game where you take out faceless goons for good. It was turning the violence up to 11, yes, but it was nothing too new, was it?
Well, despite there being two games, both of which appeared on the PlayStation 2, I have never played them. I know of them (who doesn't?), but never really needed to play them. To see them some more, yes, definitely. I want to know what all the fuss is about. But playing them wasn't urgent or essential back then, and it hasn't been ever since.
Until now, when the 1001 list strongly suggests we must play Manhunt.
Frustrations
I've got the PS2 original, but I also saw that I had the PC version of Manhunt already installed and waiting to go (thanks, past me), so that was going to be my entry into this game.
I wish it weren't. For all the supported screen resolutions it offers, what it doesn't do so well is allow the player to walk through chain-link fence gates. That gate up there. It's in the middle of the tutorial, and it will not open for you until you Google a solution, hit the Steam forums, download a fix and patch your game yourself.
It will not be the last of our problems.
Fun Times
Let's roll back to the start for you. An unknown reporter is recording herself, presumably in the hopes that someone will find the footage when she's inevitably found dead. It's just that kind of story. Shady criminal organisations, some conspiracies... something that needs to be exposed to the world, but at what cost?
We are James Earl Cash, and we've been sentenced to death. We were even executed.
... or that's what the world has been lead to believe. We still live and breathe, and we're not a zombie or anything. Someone has enough power and influence to control our own execution, and we don't have a damn clue who they are or why they'd want to.
A voice emerges from speakers in a darkened room...
Manhunt is a game where criminals are turned into snuff film celebrities. If you've got what it takes to be the hero, you'll survive. If not, you'll be one of the untold numbers whose lives have been ended for the Directors' pleasure. It is kill or be killed. Adapt to survive.
The aesthetic of Manhunt is, for me, its highlight. The equipment used to film these crimes - literally - is ageing, breaking down before our eyes. This is not an industry that people apply to be a part of. It is cobbled together by the sick and twisted, and it, like the actual content of the films we're involved in here, isn't pretty.
I mean, it is. Graphically, Manhunt is almost a joy to look at. Yeah, it looks like a PS2 game, but as a style, on the whole, it stands alone. The grainy film look has been done. The broken security camera feeds have been done. The whole package hasn't been done as well as it has been done here.
The core gameplay revolves around staying hidden from your targets - your victims, even - waiting for the right moment to strike. Too early or too late and you risk getting into a bloody fight. You weren't brought back from the dead to get into fistfights, though.
Once locked onto your victim, targetting indicators will change from green to yellow, to red, depending on how long you hold down one of the attack buttons before letting go. The longer you hold down the button, the more graphic and brutal the kill animation will be.
To give you an idea of what Manhunt defines as brutal, the first weapon we pick up is a plastic bag, and James Earl Cash uses it like this:
I know that these scenes were those heavily edited, if not globally then in certain countries. This is where a great deal of the controversy and censoring is coming from. Games didn't have plastic bags until Manhunt, and if they did, they sure didn't allow you to tie it around someone's head, starving them of oxygen while you struggle to subdue them quietly.
The tutorial continues, through the gate that now opens thanks to that fix, onto the melee section.
Melee fighting, even if you have a weapon and your target doesn't, sucks. It is a horribly inefficient way of dealing with your enemy, as you trade blows and lose a lot of health. There are only two buttons, a light and heavy attack, and not pressing anything defaults you into a blocking stance.
After pummelling this guy for a while, he started to run away.
Further Frustrations
That was a problem because the next gate wouldn't open until I defeated him (patch or no patch; this second gate is scripted), and he ran faster than me. There is a sprint button with an accompanying energy reserve, so you can run around and make a lot of noise if you need to, and I needed to. Landing a final hit on this guy was an unexpected challenge.
After reaching the next area, watching a brief overview with the Director advising me through my earpiece, I noticed that some of these guys were moving strangely.
I had noticed it as far back as the first gate, and again with the guy you fistfight. The pathing of these enemies just seems broken. They will stay rooted to a spot, twitch a little, make the tiniest of turns but otherwise remain stuck in place. I even saw rats running around the area with similar issues. It seemed that every other person I saw was broken in some way.
It's tough to see, apologies, but when they were able to walk, it was I who was having all the problems. Sneaking up to an enemy requires you to press the left control key, at which point you start moving painfully slowly. Very stealthy, but terribly slowly.
You yearn to get close enough to your target before they turn around and spot you, but what would happen more often than not is that I'd get close to enough to start targetting them, and then make quite the problem for myself.
I'd swing my weapon (because at this point, I didn't care about waiting for a grizzly animation, I just wanted the job done), at which point I'd miss, make an audible, comical whiff as my glass shard cut nothing but air, which is apparently loud enough for the enemy to be instantly alerted and start a fight.
Yeah, thanks. I get how noise would be a thing in this game, I'm trying to not make any. If you could just, like, work for me, and have things go in my favour, that'd be great.
The last guy in the area got stuck in an awkward position at the front of a van, and only freed himself as I decided to approach him from another direction. Killing him and triggering the next save point, I called it time on the PC version.
So, here we are with the PS2 port. It runs pretty well in emulation, bar some lighting effects, and looks just as grimy as the PC release.
You'd think that I'd be far more comfortable with a controller in hand, but the controls are awful. The analogue sticks are sensitive enough to double as both regular movement and stealth walking, but not sprinting, which needs the R1 button.
The camera controls are limited. It just wouldn't move past a certain point, so I was never comfortable in approaching anything - even what I'd already gone through in the tutorial.
At least the gate works. And this guy knows how to walk too. Proof that the PlayStation 2 is more powerful than the Personal Computer, this...
But I was still having awkward issues of timing my stealth kills, and for a game that practically requires every kill to come quietly from behind, that's a problem. Is it something I'd learn to get better at, though? Of course.
Until that point, on we go.
These guys can walk too! Just what was going on with the PC release?
After yet more failures to kill quietly, I finally got to a new area for me, one that introduced me to two things: the idea of distracting enemies with noise, and the leaning mechanics.
Further Frustrations
I want to put 'further frustrations' here again to stress the point. These controls are utter goddamn garbage. If the camera can't rotate in a particular direction, it snaps into a first-person camera. That's not great for looking around corners, so enter the peek controls.
On the PC, they are sensibly on the 'Q' and 'E' keys, near your movement keys. Here on the PS2, they're on the left and ride buttons of the D-pad, where nobodies thumbs are found in this analogue world.
I didn't struggle in this area, I absolutely slogged through it, and just when I thought I had finally found a target and had stalked my way up to them, what happened?
I've played sluggish games. I've controlled weighty characters. I like some games that are said to be slow and weighty. This, though. This is trash.
I understand the arguments that you ought not to be able to run around the levels like a cartoon character and that the pace should be slow and tense - it's a life or death situation, for goodness sake - but at the same time I really ought to be able to control a realistic representation of something in the first place, no?
Disgusted at the game for reasons that seemingly nobody else is offended with, I abandoned the PS2 run as well. I shouldn't need to wrestle with my chosen form of entertainment.
Final Word
To make it clear, the form of entertainment in question is games, not snuff films. I don't need to watch those, and I don't really get anything about the kill animations in Manhunt. They're violent, yes, but I'm not horrified by what I've seen so far. I'm not outraged by them.
Have I been desensitised to them? Have I seen so much blood and guts across all forms of media that this is somehow normal, or even tame? I don't really know. I suspect there are a lot more graphic animations later in the game, but even they are probably not going to phase me. These are over the top animations from developers looking to be over the top. These are unusually violent to highlight the unusual violence seen in this game.
The Mark of Kri has just popped into my head for its level of violence. It might be a game that looks like a cartoon, but that guy would absolutely dominate in this environment. He's a more ruthless killer than we are in Manhunt, and Manhunt is a game all about killing.
It's bizarre to me, in more ways than one. I still don't know what Manhunt is about. I don't know what kind of game it turns into after these tutorials. I don't know the plot that that reporter seems to have uncovered. Will she feature in our story? Do we somehow come out of this thing a better person than we went in? I want to know. I want to see Manhunt in its entirety.
But there is no way in hell that I'm going to play it. As a game, for me, it is flawed. Be it seemingly broken PC ports or hard to grasp controls, I don't like the way it feels to play. The only struggling I'll be doing with this one is which quality to watch it in on YouTube.
So, should you play Manhunt? Yes. There's nothing like it, it's controversial (only it probably won't feel like it), it stands out... but it's showing its age, and looking back at it will be different to looking at it as it was back in 2004. It's something I want more of, which must mean that I am a sick and twisted individual. So be it.
Fun Facts
I made a comparison between Manhunt and GTA before then going to read that even amongst the development staff, there were concerns about just how far Manhunt was pushing things. GTA could always be passed off as a parody, but Manhunt not so much...
Manhunt, developed by Rockstar North, first released in 2003.
Versions played: PlayStation 2, 2003, via emulation.
PC, 2004.