Just recently, I picked up a copy of No More Heroes for the Wii. At the moment I'm just past halfway through the game, and I have to say that what everyone told me about it was right. The game's fucking awesome, a real throwback to the beat'em ups I used to love while rolling everything related to geek culture into one insane package.
I'm having a blast playing it, but there's something wrong, something that keeps niggling at the back of my mind every time I swing the Wii-mote to perform a BeamKatana attack.

The complete lack of blood.

As you probably already know, the European version of NMH got censored so there's no fountains of blood, no dismemberment, no decapitations, and no splitting a man in half like a log (thanks Manhunt 2). After the initial disappointment of playing the game and turning someone into ash instead of lopping their head off, I tried to look at it objectively. I told myself "So what, the game play is still intact, the story hasn't changed, there's just no red stuff, no big deal", and although this is all true and I still love the game, I still feel slightly let down every time I play the game by the fact the the violence has been removed.

Why? Why should i care if there's violence in a game or not? I don't get it.

I thought about it for a while, and I realized that it feels like a lot of the games I grew up on didn't seem to just contain violence, but that the violence was a major feature of the game. In many instances, it was the only aspect that actually got me to play the game! Think of games like Mortal Kombat, Rise of the Triad (Ludicrous Gibs!), Eternal Champions, Splatterhouse, Carmageddon & Night Trap. Whether they were goods game or not... ok, most of them were not (admit it, nobody ever played Mortal Kombat for the gameplay), I often started playing them just because there was violence and gore, and to a kid at that time, that was fucking awesome.



Maybe it's this boom of gory games that I grew up playing that has given me an appetite for the violence in games I play now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some maniac who plays Zelda wishing that I could mutilate my enemies with blood spraying from their wounds, and I don't buy games based on their level of gore either, but chances are that if theres a good game out there that gives you the ability to hack the limbs off people with various weapons and plenty of blood, then that games awesome factor is increased significantly for me.

Of course, my disappointment with No More Heroes might not be about the lack of violence, but more about the knowledge that I'm playing a neutered, bastardized version of the game you Americans are enjoying, but then again, tell me that being able to finish a combo by slicing a man in half vertically with a Light Saber and then see the blood spray from him Ninja Scroll style wouldn't be fucking awesome.



tldr: The violence being cut from No More Heroes is a pain in the ass, I'm going to get Ninja Gaiden II.