Team Fortress 2 has arrived, more or less, assuming you’re a PC gamer (and really, I don’t care if it’s coming for the 360 and PS3 – you should be playing with a mouse and keyboard. How’s that for controversy?) and assuming you’re willing to pay for a “beta”.

In my opinion, it revitalizes the team-based FPS genre, not because it adds lots of new features (though it does have several welcome neat touches), but because it goes back to basics. Back to fun. Back to meaty, bloody chunks of corpse flying around the screen. Violent, to be sure.  So why don’t I think this is an M game?

Because of the context. The ESRB rating might note “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence” – and that’s an accurate description – but the whole game is such a delightful cartoon that I have a hard time putting this alongside Manhunt 2. You’ll be laughing most of the time, smiling with glee at the wonderfully goofy animations. There’s no swearing. There’s no sexual under or overtones. There’s none of that scary demonic stuff. But that “Blood and Gore” will get you an M, automatically.

Now, I don’t know who’ll be covering this for GamerDad, or what rating we’ll give it. We do have to be pretty consistent with our ratings there, and as this is online only, we have to include the Internet Douchebag factor (something the ESRB always skirts around with its “Contents may change blah blah blah”), which would be more only real reason for restricting this to the top-end of the teen scale. But if we’re talking the actual game content? 14+ all the way for me, sir.

Tags: Misc