No Longer Sanitized For Your Protection
May 23, 2006
One of the great unanswered questions of E3 2006 has to be "How can a sword slasher game called Red Steel not include any blood?" I'm not a blood booster, but it seems to me that if you're going to make a sword game called Red Steel that you'd want the game to live up to the title. To do otherwise would be like creating a game called Mortal Kombat that involved intense slap fights. Well, Ubisoft has come forward with a promise of blood for Red Steel. AMN has the story.
In regards to the blood, there will be blood - just not in a graphic way. I believe you can have blood spurt and then disappear and still receive a teen rating.
Some have said that the E3 demo of Red Steel lacked blood because of the concerns of bad press over "another" bloody video game during the Nintendo Wii's grand debut. Others have said that Ubisoft used the time prior to E3 to work on the game's controls instead of visual touches. I can believe the latter theory. Red Steel needs some texture refinement and detailing, so it's not hard to imagine that adding blood is somewhere on the post-E3 task list. E3 was all about selling the freehand controller, not about showing another vein-bursting combat game.