I gotta Getaway
I used to be heavily into videogames. I spent most of my school and college years playing them, to the expense of doing any real work. But when I got my first post-university job I just stopped playing. The PlayStation got packed away, to resurface only occasionally, almost three years ago.
I had been tempted to buy a PlayStation2 for about seven months now. I was hoping that Sony would get involved in the price cutting war with Microsoft and Nintendo. But apparently the PS2 has still been out-selling the GameCube and XBOX even without undercutting them on price. Last weekend I decided to stop dithering, and just go ahead and get one. And the one thing I really wanted to play was The Getaway.
Having been out of the video-game loop for while I didn’t know that much of the game. I knew that it was set in London, had taken a couple of years to develop and had cost a good few million pounds, and that it was similar to Grand Theft Auto. Oh, and that my friend Yoz’s sister was on the programming team, and that he appears on one of the in-game billboards.
A few years ago, when entering a new building, I used to assess whether the interior would make a good Quake level. For the The Getaway I can imagine someone walked around Central London thinking “yeah, this entire city would make an excellent level for a video game”. If I needed to come up with one of those short quotes you see in advertising mine would be “London streets so real you can almost smell the urine.”
When playing the game I began to make a mental list of a list of things that were wrong – not the shop-fronts, of which there are numerous oddities, but things about the layout that seemed wrong: The railway bridge that would normally cross Borough High Street is missing (but you can hear the trains when you’re in the warehouse) and Moorgate doesn’t seem to exist south of London Wall (so I’m unable to reproduce my journey into work).
These things are only conspicuous by their absence because they’re what I’m familiar with. I’ve played other games set in London but they’ve been a super-deformed version of the city with an international land-mark on every other corner. Those attempts would never stand up to any level of nit-picking, that The Getaway can (where pretty much the entire London Congestion Charge zone is covered) should give you some indication how amazing a feat this is. I can drive past my flat! In fact I can drive to my flat from anywhere in London and finding my bearings by recognising the area. I can get involved in shootouts in places I’ve lived and worked such as Borough (the warehouse isn’t there in real life) Soho Square (the “Republic” restaurant is, I believe, a pizza restaurant with a different interior layout).
So what sort of things would a Londoner do given a gun and no morals? Run into Hyde Park, steal one of the park maintenance vehicles, tear round the park mowing down joggers. Then duck into the Serpentine Lizard Gallery and wander up behind one of the couples discussing a piece on display. When you’re sick of listening to their critique, pull out your “shootah” and repaint the canvas with their brains. Ha! Fantastic stress relief.
I have no idea how this game is going to play outside of the UK. Outside of London for that matter. Are they really going to notice or appreciate the level of detail involved? Is it going to alienate those who have no real experience of the city. The in-game prompts for direction are there (car indicator lights, when they haven’t already been shot out, indicate whether the target is geographically left or right but don’t indicate which streets to take), but in fact to make some of the time limits a taxi-driver level of street knowledge would really help.
I played in my spare time from Saturday night to Friday night before completing all 24 missions. I imagine I’d be able to finish it quicker now that I have my gaming mojo back, but a week is pretty respectable. Plus I’d neglected to do any housework, so any longer than a week could have resulted an outbreak of cholera or something.
For me at least it was at the right level for getting back into the swing of things. A little bit of stealth, but not the full Solid Snake. A little bit of driving, but not the full Gran Turismo. And the gunplay… it’s the shoot-out at the end of any random De Niro or Pacino movie. Like the scene at the end of Taxi Driver extended, and repeated. Limping through a warehouse, carrying a shotgun, odds stacked against you, knowing that the next shot could take you out.
Well the game became much less difficult after discovering that leaning against a wall and panting heavily not only restores health, but also removes unsightly blood stains from your jacket. Perhaps I should have read the manual, eh?
Now I don’t know if I’m the only one to experience this, but since completing the game the real-life London has come to seem less real. I’ve looked at parts of the city as though they’ve been simplified
to keep the frame rate up…
What if, and I’m ruining the end of The Thirteenth Floor for you here, it’s through the creation of ever more advanced simulations of our own
lives that we discover we ourselves exist in a simulation? What if beyond the boundaries of the London Underground map there is nothing but a void, broken only by green neon grid markers, or a Scott Adams style “mysterious force” that prevents us from going further? Well, I figure if I drive on the pavements I can get to Hyde Park in about 5 minutes.
