Just when the Manhunt 2 controversy was winding down to just a trickle, hackers have managed to uncover the banned footage which was meant to be removed from the game in order for it to get an ‘M’ rated release.

The game was considered too violent in it’s original form to be released, receiving an ‘AO’ rating in America, and actually banned outright in the UK. So Take 2 Interactive, the game’s distributor, decided to remove the most offensive footage from the game to allow it to be downgraded to being acceptable for a mature audience.

The problem is it seems that rather than removing the footage from the game completely, they just hid it from the players view, essentially giving hackers the green light to try and recover it. And that’s exactly what has now happened.

VMUnet are reporting that the PSP version of the game has had a hack distributed within 24 hours of the game being released.

Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick responded in a statement:

“I stand behind the game and the Entertainment Software Rating Board process,”

“It is unfortunately the case that no one in the entertainment software industry is immune from hacking. We hope that consumers will not engage in hacking or download illegally modified copies of our games.”

It was a bad decision to ban the game in the first place as it just built up the want amongst gamers for the gory scenes to be included in the game. It was an even worse decision to then fudge the editing process by just blurring or censoring the more controversial scenes rather than removing them completely.

The Playstation 2 and Wii versions of the game have yet to be hacked, but surely it’s only a matter of time.

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Entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 1:44 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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