Adult grasp of reality

By THOMAS SUTCLIFFE

As premieres go, this one seemed like a traditional affair. Inside the cinema, cast and crew and invited guests drank champagne and made small talk. But a casual observer might have been unnerved to overhear conversations about the comparative stopping power of a Glock pistol and a Heckler & Koch machine gun -- might have wondered, too, at the presence of several heavy-set men who looked as if they had personal acquaintance with the more violent forms of wealth distribution.

But the crowd shuffled into the cinema's largest auditorium for the main event, they settled down to watch The Getaway -- not a film at all, as it happened, but PlayStation 2's big Christmas release.

The choice of venue was calculated to underline the cinematic virtues of a title that aims to "blur the distinction between a game and a movie". It's a blur that advertising for the game will emphasise -- cutting so quickly between the live action and the game's graphics that the inattentive could easily miss the join. And while the NZ$15.46 budget for The Getaway wouldn't go far in Hollywood, it represents the outer edge of the envelope in the world of console games. Team Soho, the in-house creative group, has been working on The Getaway for the past three and a half years, crashing through more than one "final" deadline as they tweaked and improved what they hope is a groundbreaking degree of realism.

This is a big-money bet on the fact that the video games will eventually leap the barrier that separates brain candy from a creative medium with grown-up ambitions.

The huge success of The Sims, shortly to go live in an online version where players can interact with other virtual characters, has shown that human relationships are a promising territory for a medium in which the most sophisticated human connections have usually been those between virtual fist and virtual chin.

Brendan McNamara, who originated and directed The Getaway, uses the word "adult" a lot. Well he might, since the average age of PlayStation 2 owners is now 23.

In The Getaway, "adult" turns out to mean a fairly startling level of obscenity and violence. "It's not Bad Lieutenant," says McNamara defensively. But you get torture to a pop soundtrack, the bloody graffiti of arterial sprays on walls, random acts of slaughter. For McNamara, this is an necessary step, "if video games are going to become a medium which can compete with film and books".

"We're making it for adults," McNamara says. That's pretty clear from the opening cut scene (the film-like sequences that all games use to set up and deliver basic plot lines and information), in which players are introduced to Mark Hammond, a former gangster whose wife is shot dead and son kidnapped at the start. As the game continues, players have to complete missions to keep the boy alive -- and discover why he's been kidnapped.

But the realism of The Getaway isn't simply a matter of X-rated content. One of the game's most distinctive features is its setting -- a detailed reconstruction of 40 sq km of London, in which virtually every detail of the topography and street layout is exactly as it is in life.

If there's a theatre, pub or photocopy shop there in the real London, then there's a good chance it will be there in the game.

The attention to detail extends to other areas, too. Gavin Moore, the chief animator, says the team developed new techniques of motion capture and used actors to generate recognisable physical movements for each character.

Whether The Getaway can achieve the broader emotional realism of movies is another question. The Getaway tries to bring the texture of films to a medium that has usually dispensed with it. And with that in mind, it's dispensed with much of the familiar furniture of video games, such as onscreen information, health bars and maps. Instead of registering information in a graphical way, it embeds it into the scene.

Significantly, for seasoned game players, the team chose to deliver their cut-scenes at the same graphical level as the game-play, sacrificing visual polish in the interests of continuity.

On a brief acquaintance, it isn't easy to say whether The Getaway will provide the emotionally layered experience its makers have set out to deliver. As the premiere showed, the cut-scenes still look like an expert imitation of cinema rather than a serious rival to it. You're likely to admire the way they've overcome technical difficulties more than the end result. But only the truly complacent could imagine that the contest is over.

- INDEPENDENT