Diamond: 'Games made my hair stand on end'

As gamers await the arrival of a new cinema-style game ratings system, Anne Diamond has written how recent titles "made my hair stand on end", claiming that some were "sickening" in their use of violence.

The former Good Morning With Anne & Nick breakfast presenter, who lives with her four sons aged 12 to 20, was drafted in by The Daily Mail to give her opinion on some of the latest games available to buy.

After trying out a series of titles, Diamond wrote: "Just reviewing these games made my hair stand on end. I have never got into computer games, but my sons all love them.

"I have to guard constantly that they don't use my ignorance to play games that I wouldn't allow in the house, if only I knew their content.

"Some of the games were so mindless it would be hard to see them as a destructive influence. But others were sickening in their gratuitous use of violence and bloodthirsty imagery."

Diamond, who 'reviewed' six popular games for the paper, wrote of Resident Evil 4: "This game shouldn’t be allowed to be sold, even to adults. It wallows in violence for violence sake… You witness truly ghastly scenes of torture and death. When I played, I was stabbed to death with pitchforks amid fountains of my own blood. This kind of violence can only be bad for you."

Discussing the fastest-selling Xbox 360 game of all time Halo 3, Diamond wrote: "My younger sons say all of their age group (12 and 14) play this game, and their parents allow that. This is an ‘in’ game among teenagers, and it came with my son’s Xbox 360 – so it landed in our house at Christmas…. It is violent, but there’s hardly any blood and not too much bad language and my sons reckon it’s relatively non-threatening."

Of Microsoft's Dead or Alive 4, Diamond said: "The girl characters are overtly sexy, half-naked, with gravity-defying breasts and unbelievably long legs."