Jackie Harvey Video Game Reviews: Manhunt (2003)

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I bought Manhunt last week for eight bucks from CD Spins. It's basically "The Most Dangerous Game" as interpreted by Rockstar Games. (For the philistines in the audience: I'm referring to the classic Richard Connell short story in which a crazy rich dude pursues a hobby of hunting human beings as if they were game animals. Yes, you've seen it before; legend has it that it's one of the most commonly rehashed shock-value plots across all media over the last half century or more.)

This one has the twist that the crazy rich dude is actually a snuff film director, and you're the star of his next feature. After busting your guy out of death row, "The Director" gives you instructions over a radio link to sneak around stages full of vicious thugs who will kill you on sight, and you must survive by picking them off one by one. I thought it was kind of like a reduced "Metal Gear Solid", taking out everything but the sneaking and the killing, and ramping up the latter part to the level of pornography: when you accomplish a particularly well-timed kill you get to enjoy a close-up money shot of the resulting decapitation or evisceration. The act is shown through a grainy camera with timecode information doodling away in the corner, reminding you that you're being recorded, and implying that people are getting off to the sight of you doing this.

Yes, disturbing, but I am a well-desensitized American media consumer, and you can only throw so many buckets of bodily fluids on my screen before the remainder becomes noise. The real reason I dropped eight plus tax on it was an intriguing user interface gimmick I had heard about: if you own a USB headset (which I do), then The Director's radio transmissions are played right into your ear, and not through the TV's speakers (which are still used for all the ambient noise and other sound effects). I'm someone who responds very effectively to vocal creativity, and I was hoping they would play the earpice thing up for great effect; I was actually looking forward to being creeped out way more than visuals of polygon gore could ever do to me. But, alas, not so much. It turns out that "the director" is just this old crabby guy, more likely to say things like "You really are a pussy, aren't you? Get out there and kill!" than the subtle psychological menacing I was hoping for.

Gameplay: Good enough, to a point. I was having fun until I got to part where to have to play a mini-game that's completely unlike the standard game play, and if you die you lose about 15 minutes of real-time progress (if you're a slowpoke like me, anyway). I hate that. I turned off the system and haven't played it since. Typical Rockstar pacing problems, similar to my problems with Vice City.

Rating: Meh