We wandered out on Saturday to get the Girlie a desk. Years 11 and 12, as they call sixth and seventh form over here, are pretty important and she’s got a lot of work to do heading into her HSC (Higher School Certificate).
We hit Paramatta Rd, without a lot of luck, and then headed over to the Ikea shop near Moore Park. Having had to set up a house pretty much from scratch I owe Ikea big-time. Need a kitchen? They’ve got one in a box – all the essentials – just walk in and pick it up.
Anyway, we were in the mall and stopped for a milkshake outside a Harvey Norman computer centre. They had one of those electric signs saying we could buy a Playstation II and one game for $369. And one of the games you could buy is The Getaway.
“Wanna buy a Playstation?” I suggest.
“Can we?” says Girlie sheepishlike.
So we do. We buy the one thing that is most likely to keep Girlie from her work and me from doing anything serious about writing. Then we race into Ikea, bought the first kitset desk we could find and motored home at a million miles an hour to get to the Third Place ASAP.
But you really have to see The Getaway to believe it. It marries two previously distinct games engines, as far as I can see, so you can be in a shootout scene, run outside, hijack a car and hit the streets of London. Then you can drive around for a while, check out Soho and Covent Garden, race through Chinatown and along the Embankment, go back and kill a few more hoodlums.
The mood of the game is dark. London gangland. There’s lots of “fuck this” and “fucking wanker”. Chinese are called gooks. West Indians, “Yardies”, steal cars. There’s someone strung up being tortured with electric prods. In short it’s like a game version of The Professionals, or The Sweeney, Softly Softly (showing my age here) or, goddammit, Z-Cars.
Don’t buy it for your 10-year olds. But I can’t help thinking that it marks a new era in games, where they really start to move into the realm of film and fiction. The credits acknowledge, rightly, the scripting and production, just like a movie.
This new genre still has a way to go. To be truly new the scripting has to be less obvious, more “treelike”, and the tech needs to incorporate a third type of game.
Imagine a game like The Getaway where you really have to solve problems, make decisions and each decision you make leads to a new branch in the game. Every game you play then becomes unique. To do that you need more capacity but also need to marry the technology behind “mystery” type games, not sure what their technical title is. The kind of game where you sit with people and hold scripted conversations to solve a mystery.
So then you have extensive mobility through time and space as in The Getaway and a game script that almost disappears as you determine the sets of paths to follow.
Anyway the latest Girlie kitchen atrocity: I wandered in the other day to find her putting instant coffee in the percolator.
“Dad is this coffee better than that other stuff?”