The Saboteur is the final game developed by Pandemic Studios out of the EA-owned label's former offices, the last hurrah of the studio that brought gamers new takes on combat through Full Spectrum Warrior, Star Wars Battlefront, and Mercenaries. And their last standalone effort may have been their boldest, a World War II open-world game set in and around Paris, starring an Irish race car driver on a vendetta against the Nazi occupiers of France's beautiful city.

The game has received headlines for its inclusion of optional nudity and near-nudity, and it's likely turned the head of anyone who has seen screenshots or video featuring its terrific mixture of black-and-white graphics and color. But what makes it worth playing is its attempt to offer a mix of Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed and thankfully some of its own style, situated in a time and place of history no other major game has explored, letting its players be the hero in a battle they can't truly win, sneakily killing Nazis and brashly blowing up zeppelins along the way.

Loved
Winning Theme: Setting a game amid the resistance movement against Nazi-occupied France is fresh and original. This isn't a game of storming beaches but hiding in brothels, not (often) of driving a tank but of slipping into an enemy uniform and poisoning the rival army from within. You don't play many games in which you can walk around without the Nazis shooting at you until you raid their bases. Better, though, is sneaking behind them to blow up their parked cars, sucker-punching them while they're harassing people on the street, or walking calmly away after you've set a ticking stack of dynamite at the foot of their sniper tower. Basically, this is the ultimate game of griefing Nazis, which is a lot of fun and feels morally sound. That this is all draped in one of the most unusual color schemes in gaming history is a bonus. Nazi-dominated areas of Paris and the surrounding towns and countryside are rendered in black-and-white, save for the colors of flames and red Nazi arm bands and banners. The game colorizes sections after the completion of certain missions, generating a sense that some vitality has been returned to the locale thanks to your actions.

A New Tale: I'm a sucker for a novel plot. This one doesn't have you fighting Nazis because you were drafted. It has you fighting them because your character, Irish race car driver Sean Devlin lost a race against crooked Nazis, tried to prank them and wound up stumbling across a scheme that got someone close to him killed. He's in it for revenge in the middle of a war, the French resistance a convenient cause to assist rather than one he was dedicated to serve. It's a nice touch that you play in the pair of races that are both key to the story, adding the historical nuance of the Nazis' attempt to demonstrate Aryan superiority in sporting events.

Beyond Paris: The game hits its stride best, for better or worse, outside Paris, where the player is most empowered to feel like a saboteur. Climbing rooftops and battling some control and design issues in the big city can hurt the fun, but on the vast outskirts, a player can speed down dirt roads, quick-stop next to a Nazi gas station, plant a bomb and peel out. The biggest delight comes from the explosions you hear and don't see, the sounds of the chain of blasts you managed to trigger from beneath those Nazi noses. All your sneaking and planning is rewarded as they scramble or die while you drive off to your next place to cause more mayhem.

A Man Of Many Talents: An open-world game is often improved by an wide array of character abilities. Our hero, Sean Devlin, can do the stealthy chaos-causing things described above, or he can toss grenades and fire machine guns into a nest of Germans, turning the tactical subtlety that feels most distinct to Saboteur into moments of gun-facing, man vs. army action. In other words, it begins to feel like Mercenaries, a playground, as they said in the commercials, of destruction. Other options, some not commonly seen elsewhere, include arming a bomb in a car you've stolen and then bailing from the vehicle just before it speeds into a Nazi base. Or you can call in resistance fighters to help you out, sometimes with drawbacks (see below).

Dynamic Intent: Almost a "Hated" instead of a "Loved," but something I ultimately cannot knock Pandemic for is its pockmarking of its map with several hundred "freeplay targets." These dots represent Nazi guard towers, trucks, supply drops and other things worth detonating. The winning concept behind them is to empower the gamer of this open-world game to gradually influence the dynamics of his terrain. Destroying a sniper tower while wandering through Paris removes that tower from the map, making a story-advancing mission the player might take right near the sniper tower easier. The game falters in inundating the player with so many freeplay target options while making it very unclear what the incentive is for taking out most of them. Sure, knocking over a guard tower makes a mission easier and earns Devlin some cash for buying better weapons. But does the elimination of propaganda speakers make the pedestrians more willing to resist? It'd be nice if the game made that more clear.

For The People: The most original missions in The Saboteur branch from the game's main story. A lady asks Devlin to stop a Nazi book-burning. A priest requests the murder of the Nazi half of a wedding party. Most of the game's main missions feel like they could have been generated for other action games, but those that engage with the manifold struggles of one society to survive the pervasive menace of another are the most refreshing. They show the scope of The Saboteur's potential.

Hated
Very Bad Timing: In Paris, Sean Devlin needs to climb, But he is no Altair or Ezio, and this game suffers in its proximity to the release of Assasin's Creed II. Sean's climbing is slow and stymied in odd ways by seemingly surmountable out-croppings. Worse, he has a hard time lowering himself down a roof in controlled ways. That the designers named Devlin's race car the Altair or that they included summit points that spin the camera around when he reaches them does the game no favors in avoiding the comparisons. These are Assassin's Creed 1 mechanics in a world that is enjoying Assassin's Creed II. And that makes much of the emergent action in Paris — the escaping from Nazi patrols by taking to the rooftops — or climbing walls to reach ziplines to reach bomb-able targets, less fun that it would have been a year ago.

Very Bad Timing Part 2: Sean Devlin is less the Irish rogue and more the jerk. He's gruff to the point of unpleasantness, the lead in a cast of characters who seem to hate each other except when they are sleeping with each other. Uncharted 2 just showed us how very likable an overmatched, cocky hero can be and how a game with romantically-linked leads can be sexy without being sophomoric. In this game, a stressed Devlin is asked how he feels after a rough battle. He says: "I could eat a nun's arse through a convent gate."

Glitches: The game is glitchy in an absurdly amusing way at least once per hour you're playing it. I approached a Nazi to snap his neck. He animated properly, dropping to his death. But so did the Nazi standing next to him, in synchronicity. I went into a base camp to talk to a resistance leader and wondered why he had a mannequin on his office. That was no mannequin. That was another character, accidentally spawned atop his phonograph. I called in a car-load of resistance fighters while I was taking fire in an intersection. They drove over, some got out of their car, and then their driver ran over one of them. I had to escape a mission on the back of a truck and kept failing because a character not involved in my mission — but who happened to be standing on the road we passed — kept dying, for reasons I can't explain. I'd just get a notification that he was dead. Etc. Once an hour with things like these. Not gamebreakers, but certainly mood-killers.

Truncated: Why Devlin brushes off an aerial crash he survives — right after the scene that was about him not having a parachute — I can't explain. Nor can I explain why the game's main adventure ends before we've again fought the Nazi henchwoman who is set up in earlier missions or why it ends with an enchanting but incredibly easy last mission. This game's story feels like it was cut off, though The Saboteur does offer enough terrain and optional missions to keep players busy past that early end.

The Saboteur has enough originality and enough of a capacity for the player to have fun at almost all times that it's a hard game not to recommend. It's a game for the curious, for gamers seeking something different. But as with so many original games, it is a game that has rough edges.

This may be the most un-polished major-label game I've reviewed this year, which is too bad. Because when The Saboteur is being The Saboteur and not being Assassin's Creed or choking on a bug, it's got the spirit and spark of a game that should be played. That is, if you ever wanted to blow up a Zeppelin with a rocket launcher, kiss someone to hide from the people chasing you or knock over a Nazi gas station without them ever knowing you were there.

The Saboteur was developed by Pandemic Studios and published by EA for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC on December 8. Retails for $59.99 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the campaign to its narrative conclusion, which was, for me, 88% mission progress in about 19 and a half hours. Liberated five chocolate bars and nine cans of caviar.

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Timing is never good for an action that lays off 200 employees and shutters a studio's offices. The Pandemic move shifts the brand into EA's Los Angeles office and retains only key senior employees.

But this timing was made all the more awkward last month due to the pending release of Pandemic's next game, The Saboteur, next week, as well as the fact that Pandemic was purchased, along with BioWare by Riccitiello's EA just two years ago for over $600 million. The studios were bought from Elevation Partners, an investment group Riccitiello had been a part of prior to returning to EA as its CEO.

So what happened?

Riccitiello focused on two factors for the shuttering of the studio's offices: Location and a surging move toward a digital games marketplace.

The EA boss described California as a "bloody expensive" place to employ workers, saying it costs the company two to three times more to employ developers in that state than it does in Montreal, the U.K., eastern Europe or China, all regions where EA has developers and artists at work. He blamed a combination of recent regulatory changes in California that he says are affecting all technology and entertainment companies as well as tax incentives in places like Montreal that subsidize publisher costs.

So, Kotaku asked, mindful that some recent Pandemic games, such as its Lord of the Rings title were not critically well-received, the studio's biggest fault was location, not game quality?

Putting it in the larger context of "facility consolidation," Riccitiello maintained that location was a significant factor. He expressed his sympathies for those who lost their jobs, but said it was nonetheless inconceivable that a business could justify, as he said was the case with Pandemic and EA LA, two development offices, located within 10 miles of each other, both two-thirds full in part because the offices were outsourcing work to the aforementioned regions.

"For good or for bad, we are taking down headcount in California because it is really expensive," he said.

But, Kotaku asked, wouldn't EA have known about some of these hazards just two years ago when it purchased Pandemic?

"The shift toward fewer titles and the acceleration towards digital is moving faster [than expected]," Riccitiello said. He expects digital gaming — everything from dowlnoaded titles to iphone to Facebook games to browser and micro-transaction games — to account for more than half of the game industry's revenue as soon as next year. "In a world that used to be all PC, then used to be all console, now it's neither. It's not a packaged goods business any more."

The broader context, Riccitiello said, is that EA is moving toward making fewer boxed games and more digitally-distributed ones, a shift for which he does not seem to think an independently-located Pandemic was ideal.

Pandemic as a brand and as a talent pool is not done, Riccitiello said. "We know the consumer likes the Mercenaries intellectual property, the Pandemic property, some of the key designers and their insights," he said, noting the recently-announced development of Mercs Inc. as a Pandemic-branded game through EA LA. "We're hoping they're going to want Saboteur. I think they will. Then we'll probably sequel that too. And I don't know if your readers will know whether we kept the lease in Westwood."

I noted that some of our readers would, as some had tipped us off to the changes at Pandemic.

"On the individual basis, like with this particular reader of yours, I feel sorry for them," he said. "One of the things I talk to with key people at Pandemic, EALA and [EA-run Dead Space development studio] Visceral [Games] — there's good and bad… If you're a capable art director, development director, game designer or producer you can multi-task and have a bigger job than you've ever had before, but you've got to have the skill of managing teams that are physically not in your neighborhood. You can get more done than you've ever done before."

Pandemic's last game developed out of its own offices, The Saboteur, ships next week.

The game has not been announced and is apparently being prepped at EA's Los Angeles studio. Mercenaries was previously developed by Pandemic Studios. There is no longer any Pandemic Studios. About two dozen or so former Pandemic developers, Bitmob reports, are working on the project at EA LA.

Mercs Inc. looks to be a "multiplayer sandbox game" — no word whether or not it has a single player campaign.

Leaked Video: Multiplayer Mercenaries Sequel [Bitmob]

Today Pandemic ex-staffers let EA know how they feel. Maybe the publisher should be happy that all they lost was a printer in the mass firings of developers skilled at making games with destructible environments.

We are assured that this is the actual printer the Saboteur team used through most of the development of the game... no word on whether it PC Load Letter issues or was a victim of circumstance.

With a bit of free time on their hands, maybe a gifted writer at Pandemic should hit me up for a "writing assignment." Who doesn't love a holiday expose?

An internal Electronic Arts memo confirms that Pandemic Studios was shut down today with a "core IP team" being moved to Electronic Arts' Los Angeles office. Among those let go were the studio's top three employees: Andrew Goldman, formerly the studio's CEO; Josh Resnick, formerly the studios president; and Greg Borrud, vice president of product development

"I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on," Nick Earl, EA Games Label Senior Vice President, wrote in the memo. "In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises.

"This type of change can be difficult. But the situation calls for us to act decisively, to take control of our destiny and to run a stronger, more focused development operation. That's how we will continue to make great games in our LA studios."

Earl said that the move was made to "improve our cost structure, ensure quality and build schedule integrity for this studio."

Electronic Arts confirmed that about 200 people were let go.

Pandemic was formed in 1998. Following on the success of Full Spectrum Warrior, Mercenaries and Star Wars: Battlefront, they were purchased in 2007 by Electronic Arts.

After the purchase Pandemic released a succession of lacklustre sequels culminating in the cancellation of the costly Dark Knight game, which resulted in the closure of Pandemic's Brisbane studio.

These cuts appear to be part of EA's latest cost-cutting measures which includes the elimination of 1,500 jobs, cutting a dozen in-development games and closing "several facilities." According to multiple sources, those cutbacks include studios like Pandemic, Maxis and nearly the entire Command & Conquer team.

We first heard of the Pandemic layoffs a week ago. The same sources told Kotaku that the team working on Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was warned of its fate last week, with almost the entire team expected to be let go after the real-time strategy game ships some time in 2010.

Also said to be affected heavily are Spore and former-Sims studio EA Maxis, social network gaming acquisition Rupture Studios, and Mercenaries and The Saboteur creators Pandemic Studios LA. Those development studios are said to be hit with substantial layoffs, according to a source, with remaining employees relocated to EA headquarters in Los Angeles and Redwood Shores.

EA is rumored to have already laid off staff at Tiburon, Mythic Entertainment and Black Box, reports which the company has yet to confirm.

The closing of Pandemic Studios is the latest in a long line of acquisitions and then closures or "integrations" in the company's long history. Over the years EA has acquired and later closed or absorbed employees from Origin Systems, Bullfrog Productions, Black Box Games, Maxis, Westwood Studios and Pandemic's Brisbane, Australia and Los Angeles locations.

It's not the first time we've heard this - far from it - but we had previously been unaware of the timing of the move.

Though still unconfirmed, according to our sources almost all of the studio's staff (around 200 people) in Los Angeles are to be laid off today, with those few remaining to be incorporated into other Electronic Arts development teams. The move is expected to be announced to Pandemic staff at 11 a.m. PT.

Pandemic were first formed in 1998, and for a while there, seemed to be on the verge of becoming one of the world's premier development houses. Following on from the success of Full Spectrum Warrior, Mercenaries and Star Wars: Battlefront, they were purchased in 2007 by Electronic Arts, where things should have been on the up and up.

Instead, the company released a succession of lacklustre sequels, and took a body-blow when Pandemic's Australian experiment failed following the cancellation of the costly - and doomed - Dark Knight game, which resulted in the closure of Pandemic's Brisbane studio.

It's believed Pandemic's remaining IP (including The Saboteur) will be passed onto EA's Montreal studio (Army of Two).

Remember, as of yet, this is all unconfirmed; we'd expect an official announcement on the closure later today. We've contacted Electronic Arts for an official statement and will update this post when and if they respond.

I'd only previously seen the game played by a developer and that was in mid-Summer. Back then I wrote a positive preview based on the number of interesting ideas the game's designer conveyed to me. The open-world adventure would put the player in control of Irish race car driver Sean Devlin who circumstances would transform into a fighter against the Nazis in occupied France.

The game world, drained of color, represented the blight of a Nazi presence. Liberating areas of the world would restore color, in a scripted manner. I liked the little things I heard about, like the ability to take cover from pursuers by running up to a urinal or stealing a kiss from a woman. I liked the idea that guard towers and other objects in this world would stay destroyed, making missions set near them easier.

None of this changed when I got the game in my hands on Wednesday. I played the PS3 version. Controls were standard for an open-world game. Running and camera were on the control sticks. The triangle button got my guy into a vehicle. Shooting was straight-forward. Various Achievement-like accomplishments unlocked upgrades in weapons shops or new abilities for my character, like a stealth kill move.

The game ran well, controlled well and looked impressively large-scale. I played a level called The Zeppelin, which introduces the player to the Nazi nemesis they will chase throughout the game. The mission involved stealing a truck, bringing it to a castle occupied by the Nazis, and then either sneaking or shooting my way into it, before ascending to a docked zeppelin for the second phase of the mission.

The Saboteur uses a disguise system, and fills in a circle of color around the circular lower-left mini-map to show how close the Nazis are to recognizing that you're a freedom fighter up to no good rather than one of their own. Until your cover is blown, your character, Sean Devlin, might be wearing a Nazi uniform. It's gone when that meter fills. To avoid that, the player needs to act calm — with the caveat that the Nazis won't be alarmed if you run over French civilians — and not bother the enemy forces. Blowing up the gate to their castle or just walking around in civilian clothes while brandishing a weapon, however, does alarm them. As with Prototype, an icon near the mini-map shows whether Sean can be seen by any Nazis at a given time or not. So stealth is an option, albeit a tricky one.

The most arresting thing about the game is its graphics. Development studio Pandemic has produced a game that looks like nothing else. As you can see in screenshots, it's not purely black and while in its black and white stages. Color seeps in: Red armbands on the Nazi uniforms, yellow muzzle flash and orange explosions. Devlin himself has a little bit of an illuminated outline to make him stand out. Enemies exude a red glow to show they are angry and on-rushing.

I eventually handed the controls over, partially because I wanted to take some notes and partially because I wanted to enjoy the look.

The jury is out on whether the gameplay will hold up in The Saboteur. That's the kind of thing you can't judge without a full playthrough of the game. I do think, however, that the art style can be declared a winner. If you're looking to look at something different, this is a good game to keep an eye on.

The Saboteur is scheduled to arrive on Windows-based PCs, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in North America this December.

Cory Lewis, a producer at Pandemic Studios, which is making the game, was directing me through a missions called The Zeppelin. I was the game's Irish Nazi-fighting protagonist, doing a deed to help the resistance in the game's Nazi-occupied France.

The first task of my mission was to steal a truck, adopt a Nazi disguise and drive into an enemy based. I was gingerly driving through some French streets, near Nazi checkpoints and out of the way of French pedestrians.

It would be okay to run those pedestrians over if I wanted to, Lewis told me. At least, it wouldn't blow my cover or anything, because the Nazis don't care.

I asked him if he was covering for an artificial intelligence glitch, because, sure enough, running over an innocent Frenchman didn't stir the Nazis a bit. Not at all, Lewis told me. "It's meant to recreate the world of the era. These people, [the French], were getting their asses handed to them." The Nazis, simply, didn't give a damn.

Lewis explained that, elsewhere in the game, I might come across Nazis lining up French people for execution. I would be able to save them or just keep on walking by. That's the mood of occupied France Pandemic wants to convey. (No word on whether hurting the French will make them less willing to help in later fights.)

[UPDATE: An EA spokesperson contacted me to say that the development team has incorporated some repercussions for French deaths caused by the player: "There are a couple of different stages of punishment for killing civilians and without giving too many specifics here and spoiling it, the punishment ranges from disabled hiding spots to closed weapons shops and garages and more." The Nazis still won't be bothered, but it appears that the French, understandably, will not ignore the death of their countrymen at your hands.]

When you do blow your cover, by bumping a Nazi or blowing up a gate or brandishing a gun in front of them while you are in civilian clothes, they react in force.

Our conversation reminded me of a chat I had with another EA official, David DeMarini, back when the current head of EA Partners was overseeing the development of The Godfather.

Like The Saboteur, The Godfather was an open-world game. And like The Saboteur's creators, the developers of The Godfather had to determine what kind of mayhem would be permitted and what wouldn't be.

This is what I wrote about that conversation in early 2006:

Some of the possibilities of who you might be have been tempered. Police aren't easily available to fight. At the game's start, violence against innocent women attracts police heat at twice the rate of violence against men. "There are not any benefits to killing innocent people," said DeMartini, rattling off a list of limits that he says are in the spirit of the "Godfather" fiction. They also, of course, provide a roadblock to the police and prostitute violence that has steered "GTA" into controversy.

Chalk this all up as one of those development decisions I don't often think about when I'm playing a game. Who can you kill or hurt and why? In the Saboteur, the rules are a little bit different.

I'll have more impressions of my session with The Saboteur in the coming days.

Pandemic Studios Brisbane closed earlier this year. The embedded clip features the game's working title, No Limits Racing.

Pandemic's Next Big Thing [Australian Gamer News via Kotaku Australia]

“In December, EA announced a cost reduction initiative that will impact facilities and headcount," said Mariam Sughayer, Electronic Arts spokeswoman. "We do not expect to make any more public announcements until our earnings call in early February.

"Outside of our scheduled earnings call, we aren’t providing any new information on the status of individual facilities."

Last night we reported that Electronics Arts has released Pandemic Studios' Brisbane office, the Australian developer best known for Destroy All Humans! and its rumored development of an ill-fated Batman game.

According to our source, Pandemic's Brisbane staffers weren't necessarily laid off by EA corporate, which purchased the developer alongside BioWare in 2007. Instead, we were told that the studio was "set free" with the down under arm of Pandemic retaining its original IP and even its equipment.

"It was more of a 'Find a new publisher. Good luck.' kind of thing," according to the source. And you can keep the tea kettle, apparently. No mention was made of the fate of the other Pandemic Studios office, which is based in Los Angeles.

More to come as rumors around Electronic Arts' planned massive cuts continue to leak out.

According to the information we were provided, Pandemic's Brisbane staffers weren't necessarily laid off by EA corporate, which purchased the developer alongside BioWare in 2007. Instead, we were told that the studio was "set free" with the down under arm of Pandemic retaining its original IP and even its equipment.

"It was more of a 'Find a new publisher. Good luck.' kind of thing," according to the source. And you can keep the tea kettle, apparently. No mention was made of the fate of the other Pandemic Studios office, which is based in Los Angeles.

Pandemic Studios Brisbane was widely rumored to be hard at work on a video game adaptation of 2008's The Dark Knight. That project, while never officially announced, was also said to be canceled. Speaking to a second source familiar with the project late last year, we learned that a lack of direction and an already massive budget may have lead to EA cutting its losses.

According to our source, the allegedly now-closed Brisbane studio was working on an "open world reality show" game called The Next Big Thing for the Wii. It's unclear if the studio will continue to work on that particular project outside of the bounds of EA's ownership.

We're following up with both Electronic Arts and Pandemic Studios Brisbane to get clarification.

'Dark Knight' Game Leaks [The Feed]

The copy of the Venezuela Ahora, dated Aug. 31., announces the invasion of Venezuela by Mercenaries in a headline that stretches across the paper in two lines. Underneath is an explosive image of three of the, I don't know, anti-heroes? And a full story. The faux paper also includes a weather report clasificicado, ads and even an little Mercenaries-themed comic strip. You gotta love it... unless your in Venezuela and have a stick up your ass.

Hit the jump for an up-close scan of the the front and back pages.

The company provided the same window of release for Battlefield: Bad Company, a Digital Illusions co-op shooter originally slated for a 2007 release. We'll, of course, let you know when we hear more solid release dates for these two shoot-fests.

We've contacted EA to see if we can get confirmation on the delay, but our requests haven't yet yielded a response. We'll let you know when we know.

It looks like The Venezuela Solidarity Network crowing over the Mercenaries 2 delay didn't go unnoticed.

Josh Resnick, president of Pandemic Studios, took a second to shoot out this quick response about the VSN and their claims that the game's plot has been made more fictional due to pressure from the group and part owner Bono:

Pandemic Studios never has and never will be intimidated by tyrants.  Our invasion is on schedule: Mercenaries 2 will be released in early 2008.

See what he did there? He aped the story in the game, the whole overthrow-of-the-Venezuelan-government-by-a-drug-lord-turned-dictator dealio. Clever! Personally, I don't care if it's set in my house, as long as I can level entire neighborhoods with explosives.

Mercenaries 2 publisher EA did not provide an official reason for the delay to the European outlet, but I suspect dev kit eating goblins were involved. While most delays are a good thing ultimately for gamers because it afford opportunity for polish, this one is doubly beneficial, giving us more cash to spend on the other bazillion must-haves this season.

Mercenaries 2 Delayed [CVG]

To wit, the VSN has decided to take it to the top! Or at least the most recognizable name sitting on the board at Elevation Partners, U2 frontman Bono. The Elevation group has invested heavily into Pandemic and certain Venezuelans are concerned that the game will "deepen an already antagonistic relationship between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments."

They add "Millions of Venezuelans fear an invasion from the U.S.; knowing that a company that works for the U.S. military has created a game in which their country is completely destroyed will increase those concerns."

Now, maybe I'm just overly rational and think these folks are spinning their wheels, but you can decided for yourself after reading the impassioned letter to Mr. Vox after the jump. Michael McWhertor

Mercs 2 has Bono under fire [Gamespot]

Dear Bono,

We hope that this letter finds you well. We applaud your efforts to erase the plagues of debt and famine from our planet and hope 2007 will bring new energy and advances in these struggles. We write with the hope that, while addressing these significant international issues, you will also use your considerable influence in a matter that is closer to home - a violent video game that has the potential to increase tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela while promoting violence in our communities.

Our faith traditions motivate us to confront the international debt problem that robs human dignity and calls us to counter the culture of violence that pervades our society today. The celebration of violence in much of our media, music and video games is poisoning our children. Games such as "Mercenaries 2" only serve to deepen the alienation that already exists in our society, creating fear that drives people away from each other. As people of faith, we are called to a different way of life. "Mercenaries 2" is an extremely realistic and vicious game in which the player leads a mercenary team to kill a "power hungry tyrant" that has taken control of oil supplies in Venezuela. Images of downtown Caracas are depicted as being completely destroyed during the game, and any "people" on the streets are to be killed.

Pandemic Studios, a company in which your investment partnership has financed hundreds of millions of dollars, is the creator of this game. Behavioral science research demonstrates that playing violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior, particularly in children and youth. A game like "Mercenaries 2" in which the player assumes the role of killer in scenes that appear very life-like is even more likely to provoke aggressiveness. Of equal concern is the fact that the game inevitably will provoke increased tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela. Pandemic Studios has made a similar training game for the U.S. military. This fact is not overlooked by Venezuelans, who see this as further evidence of U.S. government hostility toward their country.

We ask that you do whatever is necessary to see that "Mercenaries 2" is pulled from stores and not sold anywhere. We also ask you to reconsider your investment in a company that glorifies violence and militarization. Most of our organizations have reconsidered past investments in companies involved in life-draining activities and have reoriented our investments to support more life-encouraging companies. We hope that you will consider the same. We feel your connection with this game detracts from your image as a human rights defender. In the end, to paraphrase a statement of yours, we all know that history, like God, is watching what you do. We look forward to your response and would welcome a meeting to discuss these concerns further.

In Peace,

Marie Dennis,
Director, Maryknoll Office for Global
Concerns, Washington, DC

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun magazine, Berkeley, CA

Rev. A David Bos, Presbyterian
Minister and founder of Interfaith
Community Ministry Network,
Louisville, KY

Fr. Joe Nangle, OFM
Pax Christi USA Ambassador for Peace,
Washington, DC are