Two press releases flopped into my in-tray last night, both dispatches from the troubled 'driving shoot-'em-up' genre (or should that be 'combat driving game'? I'm losing touch with the definitions). One announced a smart new website for Driver: Parallel lines, the fourth instalment in a rather damaged cop chase series. The other provided some details about Spy Hunter: Nowhere To Run - a subtitle that may well speak ironic volumes about Midway's faith in its old skool series.
The driving shooter is very much an endangered species, squeezed out on one side by the free-roaming adventure (GTA and its ilk) and on the other by rule-bending racing titles like Burnout and Need For Speed. Desperate measures are called for. And if there's one thing the videogame industry is good at, it's desperate measures...
The Driver Parallel Lines website promises, "a virtual road of high-speed car chases, riveting videos, explosive screenshots, exclusive content, and additional VIP content including music videos and music artist interviews." It's one of those bandwidth-sucking multimedia attacks that blasts your office with unexpected funk music, causing everyone to turn round and tut at you. But my favourite section is the game story, 'written' by lead character, TK:
"New York in 1978 was the coolest place on the planet. Everyone was either finding themselves, having a party or getting laid, including me... From New Jersey to Queens, from the Bronx down to Battery this was my patch, my backyard"
This strikes me as the sort of gangsta fantasist gumph that could only have been written by someone who, a) has never been to America, and b) who has no recollection of the seventies as they actually existed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the New York of the late-seventies a social and cultural cess-pit, a neglected, fallen metropolis, spectacularly revived in the early eighties by a resurgent art scene (Warhol, Haring, Basquiat), post-punk and the very zenith of Hip-Hop culture? I also enjoy the way TK refers to the whole of New York as his backyard - that's an area of 321 square miles. It must be nightmare clearing the leaves in Autumn.
Anyway, Atari is cleverly covering all the bases with this latest Driver instalment. It's set in two time zones - the 1970s, to pull in the retro fetishists, and the modern day so they can have cool new cars. The multiple mission and sub-mission-based structure is also a sensible nod to GTA. It's due for release in March.
Meanwhile, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run has made further concessions to the gangsta adventure, finally allowing secret agent hero Alex Decker to get out of his Interceptor car and start whacking enemies on-foot. But this was not considered a significant enough selling point on it's own. Hence yesterday's press release, announcing that the game would include an advanced 3D scan of The Rock, whose spookily authentic bulk will be filling Decker's shoes. It seems Midway has fallen back on the old familiar tactic, 'if in doubt, include a high resolution, high colour structured 3D scan of an ex-wrestler-turned-actor'.
Will these measures be enough to save the Driving Combat Car Shooting Gangsta genre? Will they?!
Yes, it's a slow news morning.
