It's very rare a game is granted to be so graphic and violently abrasive that it receives something like a black and white filter for the sake of 'protecting' those who play it, but in 2006 when gaming was still seen as the basement-dwelling devil's pastime, the very idea of a game putting you in direct control of another character's suffering was apparently tantamount to lamping someone's mother. So it was that one of the game's core mechanics was extracting information out of characters by way of torturing them through a variety of methods - from dangling above industrial threshers and piranha tanks to jamming their heads in piano lids or just whacking them in a morgue furnace and gradually turning up the heat. The Punisher actually played a pretty cool part in the overall evolution of gaming as a medium because of all this, as the question it prompted was "Is violence in a video game worse if something like strangling someone is literally controlled by moving the analogue stick?" Splinter Cell: Blacklist's trailer-reveal of "Move the stick to twist the knife" would suggest not, but upon release The Punisher was slapped with a filter to censor the gore, along with some hilariously-forced camera zooms that moved away from the action because God forbid you actually see the level of violence that you could easily see in any number of films that were out at the time.
