There I was, circa 2003 installing a little game called ‘Soldier Of Fortune II’. I’d played the previous version and had hours of fun blasting limbs from as far as I could tell a legion of douchebags in wifebeaters and SS wannabees. The install finished and within the first 15 minutes of playing I was having fun manually chopping pieces of my downed foes skull off in something that Ed Gein would get an erection over. See kids, there was this magic time around when publishers didn’t really have to appease the ratings boards as strictly and things like SOF and even Half Life were just expected to be able to turn your opponents into a bloody mess of giblets with a grenade or in some cases a crowbar.

Now it seems that game developers are more focused on creating overly subversive stories instead on giving the player a little more poignant realism in the form of optional total bodily dismemberment. Yeah sure there are still gibs in UT3 and God Of War has bloody decapitations but all in all after being a gore hound for these earlier games they just strike me as a little weak. Which brings me to my next point:

The all powerful, game stomping, fail-safe line of the A-O rating. Publishers shy away from this because there’s a good chance that their product will be outlawed in several countries as well as shunned by retailers. But if you’ve gotten around to playing Madworld you’ll see the same argument that hack directors make when they want to show their cocks in their terribly pretentious arthouse film. And that is; ‘It’s pornography unless it’s artistic.’ This is why Madhouse ever came about the way it did and on that system. Considering that the Wii is barely above the PS2 in graphics power I have a feeling that this game could have been done far more violently years ago for the aforementioned system.

But what is risque now? I mean in GTAIV we delivered drugs, we shot cops, we gangbanged and we did driveby’s but honestly did you really ever see anything in GTA that you wouldn’t see in either a superhero movie or on the dumbed down CNN ticker? What I’m really lobbying for is a publisher to be taken seriously when it wants to depict the horrors of war and violence. Not for the sake of a shock factor but for a: realism and b: immersion. Well perhaps a bit of entertainment at that rate. But I’m not going to quote all those innocuous various studies that have time and time again placated our parents into buying us the new shootemup under the guise that video games don’t kill people, stupid children who aren’t smacked around by their parents enough kill people.

In any case I believe this blanket statement to be true. Seeing as they completely butchered my favorite series, SOF:Payback has become something of a joke to gamers. No longer is that leap of faith such a thing but now we go into our mature rated games like ‘Yes, we’ve got a rocket launcher and it will send you flying into the air.’ However an addendum to that statement as games strive for realism and immersion should have an extra ‘and you can see the mangled tendons trailing (using physics of course) under you as your torso separates from your pelvis‘ tacked onto it.

So yes, I want violence. I want lots of bloody brutal violence that I can choose to inflict on my various legions of frowny-faced foes at my whim. My stipulations are that it be well done and not half assed, that it isn’t the one tagline feature on the game box, and it isn’t the only reason I want to play the game. Too often are nextgen games jerked off by their marketing department for only good things about that particular game. If Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault had dismemberment during the Omaha Beach scene even for it’s day and graphics I think it would still be one of the most revered games out there. If we’re killing people in our games let’s take the fucking condom off and really feel what it is to take a life, and I want the option to be as sadistic as I can when doing so.

For once I’d like a game that I can barely stomach, and not for it’s repetitive environments with big burly dudes spraying down the decks with their machismo. Furthermore I don’t think many games have really captured what it feels like to shoot a gun, the gunshots aren’t deafening enough, the recoil of your screen shooting upwards is a joke and what we pass as action based gore feels so damned arcadey and tacked on. Hit zones is where it started but c’mon now guys; I want to take off limbs wherever my sword hits, not just at the joint. Also, you remember when you could blow off a guy’s leg in games and he’d crawl around and scream and make a lot of noise? You could choose to let him sit there and howl and alert guards or you could put a few into his breadbox. I miss this. There’s something about the penis extending chainsaw gun in GOW that simply doesn’t translate to the days of abandon.

-Veraliis