Celebrities in videogames…

Celebrity culture spreads like a virus, infecting everything it touches. It’s been called a modern evil, and Lewis Anderson agrees…

BEING A fan of skateboarding and the myriad skateboarding games that have been available over the past few years, I thought the Skate 3 demo might be worth a look. So I downloaded it and booted it up. Expecting pretty much more of the same as the previous two Skate games, imagine my pleasant surprise when confronted by Jason Lee.

Some of you might know him better as the endearing yet karma-fearing Earl from My Name is Earl, but in Skate 3 he gives his image, voice and moustache to the character of Coach Frank. Presumably he’s just meant to be a friendly face that guides you through the opening moments of the game, and his vocal tones are oddly reassuring.

Celebrity endorsement

But it strikes me as slightly odd. There’s some sense in him being there, as – believe it or not – Jason Lee was actually a professional skater back in the day. So there’s a kind of logic behind his inclusion, even though he’s most likely not been near a skateboard in years. But logical or not, it’s still strange and makes me ponder. Do we really need celebrities in videogames?

Of course, some types of game utterly rely on famous types and need to feature them. It’s almost comical to look back at older sports games and see teamsheets full of players that never existed and never will. Simulating reality, and allowing the player to live out whatever sporting fantasy they’ve dreamt up, is the whole point in the genre – so including genuine sportsmen is key.

And, in a similar vein, relative unknowns having their own videogame series can cause them to become celebrities in their own right. Tony Hawk is the prime example: 1999 saw the release of his first video game and his resulting transformation into a household name. Prior to that he was merely a key figure in the skateboarding world, but having teenage boys the world over play with him (ho-ho…) guaranteed his ascendency into the mainstream.

Don’t you know who I am?

But then there’s a different kind of implementation, a much less refined approach: the wanton bludgeoning in of celebs into average videogames that stinks of crude marketing. Think Jack Black in Brütal Legend, and all the famous faces in The Sims: Superstar.

The best example, though, is a game released more than a decade ago: Activision’s Apocalypse. It still irks me to this day. Apocalypse (pictured right) was a run-of-the-mill shooter in which you fought through – you guessed it – an apocalypse. As though recognising how mediocre the game was, the producers brainstormed for weeks and weeks before coming up with an idea both brilliant and beautiful in its simplicity: make the player character Bruce Willis.

Yes, that’s Bruce Willis the famous action hero. For no reason whatsoever. With no movie tie-in to justify using the actor in the game, it just looked like a desperate bid for more sales. In fact, the game was released about the same time as the film Armageddon, and possibly looked to take advantage of misinformed customers by having a title with a similar doomsday theme. A devious marketing tactic, but that’s another story.

To me, seeing celebrities in-game will always be bizarre. There’s something noticeably eerie about in-game versions of people who have forged their careers in reality. Although Heavy Rain showed just how far virtual characters have come, there’s still something not quite right: the Uncanny Valley effect. If you try to mimic reality, you had better watch out. People are pretty damn good at noticing when things are wrong. Even if it’s the most subtle of aberrations, it’s still an aberration.

Unless the animation is really, really good, virtual people just can’t move their bodies in a way that seems natural. They stare wildly into the distance and speak with faces that don’t match up to their emotions, things that can be easily ignored when the character isn’t meant to be a real person, but which become glaringly obvious when the character is meant to be someone who you’ve seen walk and talk in the real world.

But with every aspect of our lives seemingly being infected by celebrity culture, it’s no surprise that videogames should follow suit. Who knows – if we’re lucky we might one day get to play Katie Price: The Revenge of Peter André. That said, I’m not sure if ‘lucky’ is the right word.

By Phill Cameron

For the first few hours of Brütal Legend, you are living out the metal fantasy that anyone who even approaches the music has; you’re thrown into a world of metal and heroism, tasked with overthrowing a hilariously vain leader while making friends with the metal legends that you so idolise.

Ozzy is your friend, Lemmy is your friend, Rob Halford, the list… well, the list pretty much ends there. But beyond Motorhead, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, what more do you want? You don’t really get much more seminal than that. Add in a fun melee/magic system that can be turned into combos filled with pyrotechnic flourish, which slowly ties in to a surprisingly deep pseudo-RTS game in a similar vein to Sacrifice, and you’ve got the makings of something really quite impressive.

It works on the obvious resource of fans, who, when harnessed through building merchandise booths above them, allow you to fuel your stage and build units. These stage battles then devolve into moving from one fan pyre to the next, tearing down whatever your opponent has built before constructing a merch booth to boost your resource and build more units. It all culminates in taking down the opponent’s stage with the horde you’ve accumulated, by which point those excellent words, ‘BRUTAL VICTORY’, grace the screen.

To keep it from getting boring, you’re able to fly around the battlefield, swooping down to dispense aid when your troops need help, using a combination of axe attacks that do mostly single target damage, and guitar attacks, which shift towards hitting more than one enemy. There is a lock-on system, but it’s mostly superfluous, only really useful when you need to take out a single powerful opponent one-on-one, rather than in a big brawl.

Coupled with this is the ability to double-team with any unit in your control. Headbangers can be pulled into a mosh pit. You can jump on a Roadie’s speakers and create a feedback wave, damaging everything around you. Some of these are almost unfairly powerful, but at the same time they usually hinder the other abilities of your unit, meaning it’s a bit of give and take. Learning what to use and when is much of where the skill in muliplayer lies.

//Battle of the bands
Essentially an extended version of the single-player stage battles, the multiplayer portion of Brütal Legend has you playing with up to three other players against four on the other side. You’re all tied to one faction, be it Ironheade (Eddie Riggs’ side, the goodies), Black Tears (emos, the baddies) or The Tainted Coil (bondage/demons, the really-baddies), and each plays out in a significantly different style. You have different units, different double-team moves and an entire radial menu filled with a range of solos that are wildly different from those you mess around with in single-player. While you’re given a quick tutorial, it’s easy to get suddenly overwhelmed when you don’t stick to the side you’ve played before, which makes the inclusion of a practice mode extremely welcome.

Much like any strategy game, the skills you gain in the single-player portion are just a warm up for multiplayer. Every little mistake that would be forgiven in the main narrative of the game is suddenly a huge fuck-up, meaning that you get into the often frustrating trap of being forced onto the back foot and pressed into an inevitable defeat. There’s an obvious depth that, while it doesn’t personally appeal, is definitely the sort of thing I can see becoming successful, and if the communities stay active, it could easily blossom.

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