Sony just wants to hear parents say something about their console other than "I'm not paying $600 for a friggin' video game system!" This offers Sony the opportunity to generate the appearance of a caring company while it's busy laying off people due to said overpriced video game console. Sony is the opposite of Nintendo. You can bet when times change enough that adult oriented games aren't a big deal, Sony will be rushing them to the shelves.

Right now this is a PR move for a company that's taken more hits over the past few months than Bush's approval rating. If I were doing their PR, I'd probably advise them to do exactly the same thing. But I'm not working in a PR capacity, I'm an opinion columnist who smells more than a little bit of censorship. It may not be censorship in its strictest form. It's more of a censorship hot potato. The ESRB can say they didn't ban the game from being released, Nintendo and Sony have done that. Nintendo and Sony can throw it right back on the ESRB for throwing the rating on Manhunt 2. The overall effect is the same as an outright ban, only everyone responsible for the ban has plausible deniability.

Seems to me that while the level of graphic depiction is vastly different, the end result is the same. If Link takes a sword to Ganon's head, he gets killed. If Carl Johnson puts a bullet in a gang member's head, he gets killed. Ganon will vanish in a flash of light and pixie dust, while the gang member will bleed and beg for his digital life.  But as the aforementioned Ivan Drago might say, "If he dies, he dies." Philosophically there is no difference. Any gamer old enough to buy an M-rated game should be old enough to distinguish video game violence from real violence.

Take-Two Interactive has too much financially at stake to press anyone for the answers to these questions. But rest assured some day in the not-too-distant future, some developer won't be satisfied to push the envelope just with its content. Somebody's going to accept their "retail kiss of death" rating and see where things go from there.

We shouldn't be too worried about Manhunt 2's prospects, though. They'll use this controversy to sell millions more games than they would have ordinarily, just as the 2 Live Crew getting "Banned in the USA" made them more money than any of their other recordings. By not taking ESRB to court to challenge this, Take-Two makes certain this game will make money hand over fist. Or hand over meat cleaver, as it were.