The games people play

State of Emergency is the world's first riot-simulation game. Let that sink in for a moment. This is a game in which people run around screaming and looting stores while gangs and police officers beat people to death or shoot them. And your goal is to kill the police, smash windows and blow up cars.

You may not like the idea, but it sure does get your attention.

While Emergency has a back story involving an oppressive corporate-controlled government, the game isn't about motivation. It's about mindless violence.

The streets are littered with axes, stun guns, machine guns, flamethrowers and rocket launchers, or you can just pick up a park bench and throw it at someone. You get points for wanton destruction (every window you break increases your score) and you are occasionally assigned a task like blowing up corporate headquarters or killing the corporate "genetically modified enforcer."

Shoot one cop and 20 more will come after you, at which point it is best to run down the street until you find a fully loaded Uzi. If you run out of ammunition, you can punch and kick your opponents.

Emergency is most impressive for the technology that makes such bedlam possible. This is a game in which dozens of people are onscreen at any one time, running through the streets screaming. Hit a civilian and he or she will cower, hands over head, whimpering. Hit someone carrying a television set and you can steal it from him. Shoot a gang member and you're in for a fight. As you run up and down a shopping mall's escalator or blow up cars in a parking garage, the game continually generates a feeling of chaos and disaster.

The game has a "story" mode in which you join the underground and are assigned a series of tasks -- killing someone, stealing and delivering an item, protecting a member of the underground -- but there is no real plot, and these tasks became tedious. The game is more entertaining in "kaos" mode, in which you simply wreak havoc, throwing firebombs at oil trucks and shooting out store windows.

As it turns out, Emergency is more interesting in concept than in play. The game quickly becomes repetitive as you continually grab guns and shoot people. State of Emergency would be more interesting if the rioting were put in some context.

A real riot is usually an outpouring of rage, as people smash and destroy their own neighborhoods out of frustration and a sense of impotence. Imagine a game in which you watch a news report that outrages a neighborhood, see the first window smashed, hear gunfire in the distance and then watch in horror as insanity takes hold and people take to the streets. The game would have more depth if you had a real purpose, like escaping the neighborhood alive or protecting your local grocery store. When someone at Vis had the idea for a riot-simulation game, I'm sure everyone said, wow, cool idea. But a cool idea should be the foundation of a game, not the game itself, and Emergency is a one-trick pony.

Lone troublemaker

Unlike real rioters, most of the people in Emergency are pretty harmless. You are the only person in the game who breaks anything or blows anything up, and even the police and the gangs will generally leave you alone if you do not provoke them. In a real riot, people may start smashing and looting because everyone else is doing it, but in Emergency you are the game's lone troublemaker, a sociopathic hooligan who will keep rioting until the city is burned to the ground. And when it's all over and the city is in ruins, you'll look around and see that everyone except you has stolen a stereo system and gone home.