Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2 was slapped in the chops with an AO (Adults Only) rating by the ESRB back in June, meaning that if it was ever to see the light of day on the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 2 or PlayStation Portable in the US, its developer was going to have to tone down some of the title's goriest scenes. So it did.

IGN was one of the first to get their mitts on the newly M-rated (Mature) version of Manhunt 2 and has duly detailed some of its major changes. In a word, the site's Wii journos are disappointed – not, for example, by the removal of a scene in which a pair of pliers is said to rip the testicles from a sorry, teary-eyed, gentleman - but by the censoring of nearly every other significant deadly execution:

"In the AO-rated build of Manhunt 2, we could clearly see these over-the-top and horrific animations. In the M-rated version, Rockstar has added both an extreme blur effect and in most cases darkened the graphics so that it is nearly impossible to make any sense of what is going on," IGN writes.

The site later explains that the animations (particularly when carried out with the Wii's motion controls) aren't completely ruined, just not as entertaining and satisfying as they could've been.

Manhunt 2 is released in North America on October 31.