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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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.
The skate punks of Sega's JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future are also concerned with the evils of corporate encroachment in government, but they are not quite angry enough to smash windows. Their weapon is the humble spray paint can, with which they plan to bring down the bad guys by covering walls with graffiti. That should show them.
Like its precursor, Jet Grind Radio, JSRF uses something called cel shading, which allows a game to render figures that look hand-drawn. Characters are stylish and hip, sparks shoot out from their skates, and if you get up enough speed, the skater becomes a blur.
With its distinctive look and a catchy set of technopop songs on the soundtrack, JSFR is the MTV video of games; if you get bored playing it, you can get up and dance to it for a while.
JSRF has a faster pace than its predecessor. The most awkward part of the previous game was its graffiti system, in which the player had to move the control stick in a specific set of patterns to spray a tag. Apparently I wasn't the only one who found this more trouble than it was worth, because in JSRF all you have to do is find a marked spot for graffiti and press the right trigger on the game controller. The trick is not writing the graffiti, but simply finding where to put it; you must seek out rival gang graffiti and cover it over.
As with real graffiti artists, your rivals manage to paint graffiti in some very hard-to-reach places. Accomplishing that is made easier by the game's disdain for the laws of physics. In JSRF you can skate straight up a telephone pole and along the wires, then leap 6m into the air and descend so slowly that the skates might as well have little wings attached.
Besides covering over graffiti, skaters must occasionally race other skaters or do battle with the local police, who are beholden to corporate interests. Graffiti turns out to be an effective weapon against the police; knock an officer down and paint him and he will vanish, doubtless mortified by the ruining of his uniform.
If you find yourself in a country run by an evil corporation, neither State of Emergency nor JSRF is likely to give you any good ideas on how to fight your oppressors. Catchy dance music, colorful graffiti and window-smashing are unlikely to topple such a government. History suggests that you would have more luck with a mix of armed struggle, protest and negotiation, although passive resistance also has had some success.
Perhaps someday a game will emerge in which the player must form a revolutionary cell and carry out a series of complicated missions to overthrow an oppressive government. But if you find yourself leading the rebels, make sure to tell them to take off their skates, turn off their radios and put down their flamethrowers. Only then can the revolution begin.
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