The Getaway PS2

[iscariot]

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBHSC69aGA5.jpg

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBRRCQ9aGA5.jpg

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBATCn.aGA5.jpg


http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PICS/HBEBCm6aakO.jpg


http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PICS/HBABCi6aakO.jpg


http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBZQCy9aGA5.jpg

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBNRCM9aGA5.jpg


http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBSSCf.aGA5.jpg

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBWSCj.aGA5.jpg



Heh, not quite up to par as those early fake renders, but I dont think anybody expected that kind of quality. Even so, it looks pretty darn good imo. Gonna be tough to match up to GTA's game.

[Vince]

I love the movie HEAT - So, this games been perhaps my most anticipated game ever since preliminary details were released. And it reminds me of the movie (alot more than GTA3), which is pretty cool... I love the shootouts in the croded streets.

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PB2G/PICS/HBRRCQ9aGA5.jpg

http://a660.g.akamai.net/7/660/5745/0005/images.blick.icpro.de/PICS/HBABCi6aakO.jpg

I agree, I think it looks pretty F-in awsome considering thats really London and not a tailer made world with visability and culling as a chief goal in the level. In motion it could look really great, hopefully they'll support more than just Interlaced output.

[aneep]

agreed
looks real good
hopefully the gameplay will worth the wait of the long development

Q
this is the game in the facial animation article at Gamasutra right?

-aneep-

[Vince]

this is the game in the facial animation article at Gamasutra right?

Yep, Soho was suppose to be on the cutting edge in animation, both individual and groups (I've heard upto 5) of mocap. Hopefully it won't suck.

[iscariot]

heh Vince, yea I almost forgot that they mapped out the whole city for this game. Wonder ho accuarate they got it...

[Tagrineth]

1. same old, same old... not-quite-detailed textures, majour aliasing...

2. Why are two screenshots bigger than the rest? :o

[iscariot]

...aliasing? interesting

[Grall]

Tag,

The two shots are larger because they've not been SHRUNK DOWN as much as the others. None of them are in native PS2 resolution.

As for aliasing... Yeah, and so what? Will it make the game any less fun? :)

[iscariot]

what aliasing though...where? Just curious cause I dont see any :oops:

[Tagrineth]

I see aliasing, then again I'm annoyingly sensitive to it :\

I'll also be verrrrry surprised if that game uses AA of any kind with that many textures... too many textures per frame + AA on PS2 = dead frame rate.

[V3]

I see aliasing, then again I'm annoyingly sensitive to it :\

Wow, you can actually see aliasing in these tiny pics ? I could hardly see anything. Is this game a remote clone of GTA3 ?

[phat]

I see aliasing, then again I'm annoyingly sensitive to it :\

In these scaled-down pics? Whatever... :roll:

Phat.

[iscariot]

Can't say for sure V3. I think its been in develpment even before GTA3 but Im sure they're going to borrow more elements than before since they've seen ho sucessful it was. I guess we'll know in a couple weeks.

[Vince]

heh Vince, yea I almost forgot that they mapped out the whole city for this game. Wonder ho accuarate they got it...

"By its nature this precludes any over-riding claim of realism. "Our models are realistic in one sense but you are unlikely to find a building you're looking for because most of them are built out of a library," cautions Coates. "Overall, I would say we are 60 percent realistic. For example, there are loads of roads missing. The map doesn't compare well to the AtoZ. If it did we would be working here forever and would end up with a very dull game." So while potential London cabbies may be disappointed, gamers should have a lot to look forward to."

Awsome read Iscariot...

http://www.cgimag.com/games/getaway.shtml

http://www.cgimag.com/games/images/getaway1.jpg

Which looks like this picture on The Getaway's Home page.

http://www.thegetaway.co.uk/images/image1.gif


May 21st this thing goes live... E3 will be interesting indeed.

[iscariot]

interesting thanks Vince. Altho the linear timed missions leave me more skeptical.

[Goldni]

Have u guys tried Burnout? It's got 60fps and very nice visuals. And is alot of fun racing with traffic and everything..

[iscariot]

yea, it was good for a rental. Got bored with it after a day or so

[Vince]

Iscarot;

http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/ps2/getaway/3.jpg

Not to shabby for a game that runs @ 60fps :)


Getaway
If Team Soho fails to completely realize its ambitions for The Getaway, one will hardly be able to fault them for it. After taking a good long look at the game, it becomes clear why it's spent close to three years in development so far. The finished product is intended to be: 1. a free-ranging car-chase sim with the ability to swipe any vehicle on the road; 2. a third-person action-shooter with stealth elements, smart AI, and a variety of tasks; 3. a realistic representation of some 20 square miles of modern London; 4. an authentic British crime movie in the Get Carter tradition, done in realtime 3D; and 5. a testbed for new motion-capture systems and other technology besides. That, as they say, is a pretty tall order. But it also looks as if the SCEE studio is up to the task of making it all work -- from what we've seen, the pieces are ready to fall into place for the game's release at the end of this year.
Up to this point, we knew the basic story behind The Getaway, and we knew that it was a pretty sharp-looking driving game. That was not the half of it, of course, especially as far as the story is concerned. Inspired by Get Carter, Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday, and other greats of the British crime tradition, its aim is to tell a hard-boiled story with no compromise at all. The language and violence are R-rated from the beginning, and the dialogue is thick with authentic accents, to the point where some American gamers may be asking for subtitles. That's a key aspect of the flavor that makes this game different from, say, Grand Theft Auto -- it has a specific feel, unlike GTA's criminal melange.

The game stars Mark Hammond, a former bank robber gone straight after a stretch in prison. Two months out, he's settled down with his wife and son, and he has a steady job managing a nightclub. Sadly, other forces believe he ought to have greater ambitions in mind. His wife is murdered and his son is kidnapped, all at the instigation of East End crime boss Charlie Jolson. After a few years of semi-retirement, Charlie has a grand scheme to take over the entire London underworld, and Mark is the cat's-paw he plans to use.

Mark's half of the story (yes, just half) is a series of suicidal missions against every other criminal organization in London: the tony Soho vice lords, the Chinese Triads, the Yardie crack dealers and gun runners, and the Cockney thugs that have risen to power in Charlie's place. Some tasks are simple smash-and-grab attacks -- his first mission is to turn an old friend's restaurant into "the Towering f---ing Inferno" -- but later challenges require stealth and brains. Three or four missions in, Mark is forced to infiltrate a police station, find a weapon inside, murder a detective, and escape unharmed. Just a trifle ambitious, yes?

Similarly ambitious is the plot construction that develops later in the game. Some ways into Mark's story, a new playable character arrives, a cop named Frank Carter. Carter has spent his entire career bent on bringing Jolson down, and he believes Mark can help him do it. Frank first appears here and there during some of Mark's missions, gradually becoming a more significant character. Eventually, just before Mark's story reaches its climax, the story skips back a ways for the Frank missions, some of which show a different side of events that occurred earlier in Mark's missions. Once players complete both characters' stories, the dual climax occurs in the final mission.

"All of London"

It's worth noting, however, that there's an awful lot of fun to be had with The Getaway before the first mission even begins. Driver 3 may raise the ante, of course, but for now, this is the biggest and best-looking rendition of a real-life city ever made for a videogame. Approximately 20 square miles of modern London, from Hyde Park to the East End on both sides of the Thames, along with about 66 miles of roads, comprise the exterior section of the game world, all of which is accessible at any time. The streets and buildings are built in 3D using the British Ordnance Survey maps as a template, and textures are added based on reams of photographic reference. Landmarks large and small appear in the game, from Nelson's Column down to tiny nightclubs, with dozens of licensed facades and logos. The sense of scale is startlingly accurate. And yes, you do have to drive on the left side of the road, which is probably going to take some getting used to for American gamers.

As in Driver 2 or Grand Theft Auto, Mark can steal any car on the road at any time, providing he's willing to accept the occasional nasty consequences. All of the 70-some licensed cars (from more than 30 different makes) bear the same handling characteristics as their real-life counterparts, and it's easy to feel the difference in performance when you drive them. London's famous black cabs are slow and handle terribly. The Seat Ibiza does a little better in the corners, but it's not much for a drag race. The Alfa Romeo 156, Mark's starter car, is nice and average, a good introductory ride. Retro enthusiasts might enjoy the UK-only Ford Capri, back to reprise its famous performances from the 1970s.

For real downtown warfare, though, you'll want to up the sticker price a little. The BMW 5-series offers a potent blend of power and handling ability, the Aston Martin DB6 is unstoppable down the straights, and the Range Rover or Bentley Continental will come out on top in any crash. Well, that's not completely true. The only truly unstoppable car is the double-decker bus, but it's not much for a high-speed chase. All of the cars will take damage in crashes, showing realtime deformation of their exteriors. Apparently, this wasn't a problem with any licensors. The only company that objected to possible inclusion was Czech automaker Skoda, whose representatives preferred not to see their trademarks involved in any criminal activity (however virtual).

Of course, not every car is available in every area. Different parts of town are populated according to their socioeconomic status, so there aren't many Astons and Bentleys cruising the industrial neighborhoods in Brixton. Rich areas have more expensive cars, smaller models populate poorer neighborhoods, downtown is packed with buses and cabs, and big melting-pot areas like Soho have a little bit of everything. Once the game is complete, the mix of traffic and pedestrains should reflect the character of each area just as much as the buildings around them. On top of that, the developers claim that the portal-based loading and level of detail system will let the game run at a perfect 60fps framerate.

What the driving sections of the game could use is a few more navigation aids. In an effort to keep the GUI almost completely uncluttered, the only indicator that appears over the gameplay view is a small pointer dot, which moves around the outside edge of the screen to show the way to the next mission. There's no map at all, which seems like a bit too much effort in the direction of realism. It wouldn't be necessary to put a map in the GUI, but a map sub-screen, one that players could access after pausing the game, would be helpful for planning a route or picking out missed turns. In particular, that would help in the promised Tourist Mode -- added at the instigation of SCE's Japanese producers, it lets players drive around the city, snap pictures, and save them to a memory card.

"The gun, he means!"

When the action moves off the streets, the third-person control mechanics resemble Winback, the Koei 3D shooter. The selection of weapons is simpler, in keeping with the realistic theme of the game -- single and twin pistols, shotguns both standard and sawn-off -- but the controls are definitely familiar. The key maneuver for getting the drop on opponents is the familiar wall-flatten, which leads into a quick jumpout shot, and back behind the corner to dodge enemy fire. The Getaway adds more new controls to the mix, though -- for example, you can hop into a doorway, squeeze off a few shots, and then duck against the wall on the opposite side.

Also, as in Metal Gear, it's possible to grab an opponent by the neck and hold him hostage with a gun to his head. This leads to possibilities both obvious and subtle. It's easiest to just use a hostage as a shield, but if you grab the right bad guy, he can become a useful lever as well. The enemy AI is programmed with an understanding of each NPC's relative importance, so minor thugs will surrender if you have their boss hostage. On the other hand, a high-ranking opponent could care less if you shoot some peon in the head, so it's important to be aware of how strong a lever you're holding.

Like so much of the game, though, The Getaway's 3D combat system has a lot of potential that's waiting to come together. At present, the camera is often a serious hindrance to getting around. The early action sequences have the somewhat "scripted" feel of Winback -- i.e., it's easy to complete them if you follow the planned best path through all the enemy and camera triggers, but getting on a different route leads to camera errors and frequent blindside attacks. Camera direction and enemy placement need to be tuned to allow freer movement around the areas. The camera system needs especially precise tuning, because the indoor environments often lead you into very cramped spaces, like a loading dock full of tight passages between stacked-up shipping containers.
The environments look very good, though, and like most everything else in the game, they're based on real-life reference. Some of the pieces had to be drawn together from different sources -- a Triad gambling den in the game was based on inspiration from a couple of different casinos and abandoned buildings -- but the finished products have plenty of detail in their architecture and backgrounds. The rickety sections of slum buildings have plenty of bent starcases, peeling wallpaper, old radiators, and anachronistic light fixtures, while better-kept areas like Charlie's office have the appropriate expensive appointments and knick-knacks.

Character design and animation in the action sequences shows a similar attention to detail. There's a wide array of different reaction and death animation for the bad guys, including proper interaction with the environment -- corpses slump against walls and over railings without clipping through them. Mark himself shows the effect of damage realistically as well. To keep the combat GUI as clear as the driving mode's, there's no energy meter to indicate how close he is to death. Instead, he limps or holds a hurt limb to gradually indicate more and more damage. Looking more closely at each model shows individually mapped faces, more than 200 in all, most of which are based on scans from real actors (including the author of this article).

"Culture, genius, sophistication..."

All of this talk about gameplay detail unfortunately obscures The Getaway's cinematic ambitions, but those are what could be its strongest point, even if everything else runs like clockwork. This game is already a technical achievement in videogame storytelling, and it looks like its story and characters are worth the expense of all the nuts and bolts behind them. Sony has shown us only a fraction of the whole so far, but it's a very interesting fraction.

The Getaway draws all of its cinema sequences with the in-game engine, although cutscenes use different character models with higher polygon counts and more detailed textures. The animations are the interesting part, however. Nearly every cutscene is based on motion-capture data from the same actors who provide the dialogue and the physical likeness of their characters. Team Soho is one of the first, if not the first, organizations to use a new magnetic motion-capture system for this purpose. Traditional motion-capture systems kit out actors in suits that are picked up by optical sensors. Thus, it's hard to get accurate data from more than one actor at a time, or in a set with too many props -- anything that gets in the way of a sensor blocks that data point. The magnetic system, on the other hand, can capture as many as five people at once, all reacting to each other, and they can use all the props they like, providing none of them contain any metal.

The result is perfectly-captured physical acting, at least as far as the raw motion data is concerned. That still has to be translated by the animators and the 3D engine, which has its limitations when it comes to collision detection, but so far it looks excellent in the few cinemas we've seen. The synchronization between the characters' dialogue and their body language is very good, and the actors are able to play off each other effectively. It's also very funny to watch the capture sessions in action. The game's first cinema begins with four thugs arguing in a parked car, a scene which was captured by four actors in sensor suits sitting inside a wood-frame prop car.

The Getaway also uses some interesting new techniques for facial animation, particularly as it relates to spoken dialogue. Each model's face includes 28 "bones" that work together to articulate its movements, which are in turn directed by software that translated the phonemes in the dialogue into the corresponding animations. This provides a fairly accurate rough that can be further tuned by hand. Textures are supplied by a detailed scan of the actor's face, scaled up or down from the high-detail original in accordance with the demands of a particular scene.

At least as cool as the technology, though, is the flavor of the game, as raw as the movies that inspired it. The accents are all appropriate, to the point of incomprehensibility at times -- the Cockney slang is thick, and the Yardie patois even more so. This also may be the first video game to have decently-delivered profanity. After all, there's been plenty of cursing in stuff like the early Grand Theft Autos, but Mark's "I'll do more than an injury, I'll f---ing kill you!" is the first time I've heard a game character cuss like they mean it.

Of course, that's only a minor aspect of the dialogue's quality, never mind how large it looms in the curiously limited world of videogames. In the larger sense, it's well-written and well-performed. Mark is the appropriate hero for the setting, blending feeling with the ruthlessness he's forced to revive. Charlie has the potential to chew the scenery a bit much, but he dials down the evil when necessary, and he has a touch of the pride that showed through in Bob Hoskins' anti-hero from The Long Good Friday. Frank Carter is a mix of obsession and the no-nonsense edge portrayed by his fellow Flying Squad cops from The Sweeney (a reference most Americans will probably miss), and the other supporting lead, a hitter named Yasmin, serves as the sort of devil on Mark's other shoulder. She's a little like the call girl Cathy Tyson played in Mona Lisa, if she were to move out of the vice clubs and into a role as the gang boss' hatchetman. Her exterior is hard as a rock, but there's some sense of decency left that leads her to eventually take Mark's side.

"Tell me all you know!"

At this point, The Getaway consists of some very impressive pieces. Gluing them all together is what needs to be done over the rest of this year. If Team Soho can deliver as promised, tightening up the 3D engine. the camera system, and some of the collision detection problems in the cutscenes, this will be a genre-breaker for the holiday season. And if you can't get the hang of driving down the "wrong" side of the road, well, that's your own lookout.

[Vince]

GameSpay play it aswell.... interesting read

http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/ps2/getaway/

[Vince]

Check this out, then tell me the animation isn't the best you've ever seen in a game... I know I support the PS2, but I admit great graphics where ever they are(alot on the box, but anyways)... and this is amazing.

The Graphics themselves are great, the animation though is what suspends belief.


ftp://ftp.xengamers.com/pub/movies/sn-get1.mpg

[iscariot]

heh, thanks for the links Vince. It definitely sounds fun and looks great. 60 fps second seems a little too ambitious tho, if need be, I'd rather have a constant 30 rather than choppy 60. If they can achieve constant 60 for a game like this, than color me impressed.


heres some more movies btw


http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_0521_1.mov


http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_0521_2.mov


http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_0521_3.mov

[Vince]

http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_15_big.jpg
http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_14_big.jpg
http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_06_big.jpg
http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_04_big.jpg
http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_03_big.jpg
http://nl.playstation.com/e3//images/the_getaway/the_getaway_20_big.jpg


http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway1.jpg
http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway2.jpg
http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway3.jpg
http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway4.jpg
http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway8.jpg
http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/getaway14.jpg

[iscariot]

edit- see below

[iscariot]

http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_03.mov


http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_02.mov

http://ps2movies.ign.com/ps2/video/getaway_01.mov

[Tagrineth]

I'm mostly surprised about the vibrant textures... especially in the second picture from the top in that post.

Oh, and can I get a 56k warning here? LOL...

[iscariot]

some more gameplay movies

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway03.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway02.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway01.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway04.mpg

[iscariot]

yay more screens

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160211fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160213fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160217fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160221fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160227fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160209fotostory.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/getaway/160215fotostory.jpg

[Tiberius]

some more gameplay movies

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway03.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway02.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway01.mpg

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway04.mpg


not working :(

[Dr.Doom]

If Getaway lives up to its hype,it will be number one on the selling charts for along time 8)

[iscariot]

sorry, the movies used to work when originally posted. They took them down once but put them back up again later. The quality isnt even that great but they do show some gameplay clips, unlike the flashy trailers that show bits and pieces here and there

[Berserk]

Some new high res screens. I'm sorry for the big size of them. :-?

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen001.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen002.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen003.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen004.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen005.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen006.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen007.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen008.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen009.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen011.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen010.jpg
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2002/vgnews/081402/getaway_screen012.jpg

[Dr.Doom]

The pics look amazing :o

[Glonk]

Since when could the PS2 output 1024x768?

[iscariot]

heh, nice job Berserk but IGN's are a bit smaller I believe ;)


anyway, just saw these posted on ga

http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway4.mpg


http://media.cex.co.uk/games/getaway/getaway1.mpg

they should work :oops:

[PC-Engine]

Looks like there's some framrate issues. Also whats up with all that flickering in that driving clip?

[CosmoKramer]

Is this what you PS2 owners have to put up with? Looks like Max Payne with more polygons and a lot worse texturing.

[iscariot]

Looks like there's some framrate issues. Also whats up with all that flickering in that driving clip?

yea the e3 demo had framerate dips. And yea, the video capture is pretty flickery. Rather have direct feed but...

[Berserk]

Is this what you PS2 owners have to put up with? Looks like Max Payne with more polygons and a lot worse texturing.

Yes but you get to drive all across London and it's going to be more fun anyway. And it does look very good for the PS2 IMO. 8)

[wazoo]

Is this what you PS2 owners have to put up with? Looks like Max Payne with more polygons and a lot worse texturing.

You are very agressive. And comparing Max Payne with Gateway is very difficult, since we hardly know about the gameplay. The game may be a failure but at least it will try to have a better gameplay than MP (something not very difficult IMO).

[JacksBleedingEyes]

Let me get this straight a couple of polygons and some dodgy textures impress you. I look at that game and i see nothing. A game is art, ICO was art MGS2 was art. That game looks like a POS. Screw the polys look at the scenery does a cloudy English day really turn u on that much.

[Plasmatics]

MGS2 as art = :lol:

Anyway, I think the game looks great, particularly for a PS2 offering. The animation is nice, but nothing compared to Zelda GCN, IMO.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, I'll be happy if it reaches Max Payne level. I'm worried that "realism" is going to detract from this game in a big way. They're not including a map with the game because they felt in GTA3 that it took away from the experience. :|

[iscariot]

british preview:

Front Cover
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/PSWCover6.jpg

DVD Case Back Cover
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/BackDVD.jpg

Page 1
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW1.jpg

Page 2
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW2.jpg

Page 3
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW3.jpg

Page 4
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW4.jpg

Page 5
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW5.jpg

Page 6
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW6.jpg

Page 7
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW7.jpg

Page 8
http://www.btinternet.com/~stu18/TheGetawayPSW8.jpg

[iscariot]

Well it's finally official, the game has gone G0ld, and with that, here are the latest impressions of an almost final build.

http://www.totalvideogames.com/?section=Read%20Previews&id=495&gameid=262&format=000006




Reportedly one of the most expensive videogames ever created and having been in development for the previous three years, you can understand why SEEE wanted to get The Getaway out in time for the lucrative Christmas market.

Billed as GTA in London, we recently received preview code and have been putting the game through its paces; can it live up to GTA3, is the hype surrounding the quality of the cinematics to be believed, can The Getaway recoup its massive development costs???

Anyone who has followed our previous coverage on this title will know that players take the role of ex-crim Mark Hammond. Forced back into the game by gang leader Charlie Jolson when his wife gets murdered and son is kidnapped; Mark finds himself set up for the murder and blackmailed to undertake a series of jobs for the notorious crime boss and king of the London underworld in order to see his son again.

To be fair The Getaway is more like Headhunter then GTA3, instead of presenting the gamer with a free-flowing adventure where their choices have a direct consequence on the progress of the game; The Getaway is a tightly-nit experience with a strong storyline and distinctive missions that follow one after the other. Although this type of gaming structure isn’t as appealing for long-term play, The Getaway presents a cinematic experience that is unrivalled in the videogames industry. The moment you see the first cut-scene, you’ll find yourself scraping your jaw from the floor; never before have we seen a computer game look so realistic, everything from the perfectly crafted motion-capture animation to the attention to the smallest details such as proper volumetric fog to recreate cigarette smoke will astound you. The Getaway is the first time that actual actors have been digitally recreated for inclusion in the game, providing both the motion capture and voice-acting to ensure the overall look is as accomplished as could possible be hoped for. Having watched the introduction, you’ll also realise that this is one of the most adult orientated titles created; copious amounts of violence and swearing decorate the intro, however it’s not just in there to boost sales, it plays a crucial part to setting the atmosphere of a classic London gangster film throughout the game.

The first mission saw us having to visit our old haunts in SoHo; to prove your allegiance to your new boos you’ll have to torch your old friends nightclub, killing your old mates in the process. Of course you’ve got to get there first, which is quite a task considering that Team SoHo have recreated over 40Km of inner London to splendid detail. We were amazed when both Metropolis Street Racer and Project Gotham gave us digital representations of famous cities, however The Getaway takes it all one-step further. Once again it’s the attention to detail that stands out; a huge amount of famous shops from Burger King to The Link populate the pavements of Oxford Street, whilst the East End looks as dirty and seedy as you’d expect. Driving through London is a tricky affair as the developers have managed to cram the streets full of traffic and pedestrians, perfectly recreating the congested nature of London. Again the attention to detail is marvellous; civilian traffic acts the way it should, stopping for red lights, getting out of the way for Ambulances and Police Cars; we witnessed one crash scene and were amazed to see the police waving the traffic through the narrow gap.

The actual driving is a great mixture of arcade physics and authentic realism, each of the games 50+ cars all handle and respond differently, however the best aspect is the portrayal of loosing control at high speeds; whip around a corner at 50MPH and you can expect to be slip-sliding all over the place, fortunately you never seem to lose total control, it’s been designed to heighten the adrenaline levels but still keep it fun by ensuring you’re not crashing all the time. Of course crashes are inevitable, and despite featuring a whole selection of licensed cars, they all feature a great damage system that sees bodywork crumple, tyres blow out and windows crack then shatter to pieces. As with GTA3, if it all goes wrong you can jump out of the car and hijack another; everything from Citroen’s to London’s famous Red Buses can be stolen to help you through the adventure.

A very neat touch that heightens the cinematic nature of the game is the complete removal of any type of HUD or icons on the screen, instead your blinkers will tell you which way to go, whilst your health is depicted by increasingly dark patches of blood appearing on your character. Of course you’ll not find any health pick-ups throughout the game, so to increase your health all you’ve got to do is wait against a wall and your character will rest against it and begin to replenish his health, very neat!!!

The typical mission structure usually revolves around driving to the scene, getting out to complete the mission objective and then hot-tailing out of there before the cops arrive. The on-foot sections again take a little while to get used to, but once you get used to Mark’s full repertoire of moves you’ll be shooting people off from distances, crouching up and peering around walls like a certain Solid Snake and grabbing hold of hostages to use as human shields. The on foot sections put GTA3 to shame, 22 indoor locations have been wonderfully recreated, usually for you to destroy in some possible way. Mark becomes a fluid character to control after a short while, you’re given two targeting options which really help during the heated gun fight scenes; R1 pulls the camera just over the characters shoulder giving you the ability to manually target, whilst taps of R2 target enemy characters in a similar fashion to Z-Targeting; it works wonderfully and makes the aiming system of GTA3 and even Vice City look woefully inadequate. Other moves allow you to cling up against a wall to remain hidden, here you can peer round corners and use the two types of targeting, or simply whip your gun around the corner without peering around yourself, thus reducing the risk of getting yourself shot at the cost of reduced accuracy. You can roll around to dodge bullets or roll into a wall and assume the cling position, duck behind objects and whip your gun above it in a similar fashion to whipping it around the corner. By pressing X when you’re near to another character, you’ll take them hostage to use as a human shield, by whipping out your gun you can put it to their heads or shoot other characters that pose a threat. The controls during these sections are everything we could have hoped for resulting in a perfect mixture of HeadHunter, MGS2 and GTA3 that gives you more freedom then in any of these titles.

The only stumbling block between The Getaway achieving success and all it set out to do – not simply a GTA clone set in London – is a lack of coherence; we’ve encountered a number of vital gameplay bugs (some critical), whilst the game doesn’t gel fully at present suffering from a lack of continuity when transferring between cut-scenes and in-game action. This did break up the flow, something that does have an impact on such a cinematic game, however we’re hoping to find that the final version amends these errors.


There’s so much to say about The Getaway, but we had better save some for the review; for instance when you’ve finished the game with Mark, you can take control of Frank Carter, a ruthless copper who you’ll come across half way through Mark’s adventure. This design allows you to see both sides of the coin, exhibiting a style of game design more akin to a film then a videogame.

The Getaway is certainly different to what we were expecting, playing nothing like the GTA3 clone that we believed it would. Despite the surprise, The Getaway impressed us with its amazing visuals (arguably better then anything else on the PS2), it’s strong cinematic nature (which really does feel like the next Guy Ritchie flick), its intense action sequences and attention to detail.

We’ll have a review soon, so make sure to stick with TVG for all the latest information on The Getaway.

[Vince]

Well it's finally official, the game has gone G0ld, and with that, here are the latest impressions of an almost final build

Yeah, it's about bloody time.. heh

Proof: Launch Party/Rave Pictures

http://residentadvisor.com.au/photos/uk021114getaway/DSC05681.jpg
http://residentadvisor.com.au/photos/uk021114getaway/DSC05707.jpg
http://residentadvisor.com.au/photos/uk021114getaway/DSC05715.jpg

This game seems to be like R&C - everybody bad mouths it at first, then it comes from nowhere and recieves praise when it launches - lets hope it really is the real deal.

[iscariot]

tonites ign update:


November 20, 2002 - In being one of Sony's most ambitious and awaited games of the year, The Getaway is in a very precarious position. It's one of the few to have made the transition from SCEE's earliest game lineups to the US, and having slipped from fall 2002 to January 2003 Team Soho has enjoyed immense amounts of money and time to make this game right.
I had high hopes for it when I first saw the game earlier this year, and even now it takes a while to sit back and count up all the frankly amazing things that Team Soho has created here. There is the jaw-dropping virtual city, dwarfing Driver or the Grand Theft Auto games with its size and level of detail. There is the compelling story, a straightforward revenge tale lifted up by a sympathetic hero and a genuinely hateful villain. There is the perfectly natural and laudably frequent use of the word "f---" which could have been handled in a terribly overdone fashion. And there is the pure joy of ripping off a Lexus SC430 and cruising past the verdant scenery of Hyde Park.

Arrayed against all these fine points are imprecise controls, unpredictable camera direction, repetitive mission design, cast-iron level scripting, and some kind of malevolent god standing on high and commanding "thou shalt not implement a graphical user interface." At present, I'm not particularly pleased with this commandment. It's on that account that I have to constantly stare at my turn signals when driving, instead of the lovely city around me.

Welcome Back

Before this devolves from coherent preview into a laundry list, it couldn't hurt to provide some background information for those new to the game. The Getaway is a blend of 3D action (like a slowed-down Max Payne) and urban car-chasing (a la Driver). It is set in an accurate re-creation of the city of London, from east to west and including both sides of the Thames.

Our hero is Mark Hammond, a former bank robber gone straight after a stretch in prison. Two months out of the slam, his stable life as a nightclub manager is torn to pieces -- his wife is murdered, and his son is held hostage. Behind it all is Charlie Jolson, once boss of the London underworld, who has a grand scheme to take over the city's now-fragmented rackets. With Mark as his disposable cat's paw, he's going to burn down every rival gang in town and take over as ruler of the ashes.

The story plays out through a series of cinematics, which advance the plot in between the car chases and shootouts. Though younger fans of games and film may come in suspecting something along the lines of Snatch or Guy Ritchie's other efforts, that's not quite the tone The Getaway's creators are going for. Instead, it hearkens back to older films -- Get Carter, more than anything else, and other classics of the deadpan British crime genre. The story is pitched straight and level, with no humor except a few moments of the blackest sort, while the dialogue is both solidly authentic and dead raw.

At The Movies

At present, the game's cinematic presentation is first-rate. The plot is simple enough, and you can tell it was conceived primarily as a means of stringing several disparate mission designs together, but the characters and the dialogue give it life. Upon reflection, I can't necessarily judge the authenticity of the dialogue, since I've never spent any substantial time in the company of cutthroat East End thugs, but I can say that it sounds pretty cool to my untrained American ears, flowing naturally despite a very un-PlayStation-like level of profanity and vulgarity. It's possible that there are more instances of the f-word in The Getaway than in every videogame ever made put together. The lip-synching, furthermore, is nearly perfect, down to that funny way people suck their lower lip under their front teeth before saying...well, you know.

As detailed in our previews around E3 time, the cinemas employ motion-capture for all the physical acting, allowing the actors in a scene to be captured at the same time. The quality of the cinemas has improved substantially since E3 -- the graphics are high-res now, and the collision detection is miles better -- so it's easier to see what the motion-capture techniques have done to make the game look better. The cinemas in something like Metal Gear probably still look more impressive, with more precise and fluid animation, but if you watch that game carefully, you don't see a lot of close physical interaction between characters. Each shot tends to isolate one character at a time. The Getaway puts its characters in close proximity, and if you pay close attention, it's possible to pick out the nuances of body English that comes through as a consequence. The opening cinema, with four characters in a crowded car, is an impressive showpiece for the technique upon close examination.

What's as impressive as the quality of the animation, both in the cinematic sequences and the game itself, is the tone it helps carry. Like Get Carter, this is a violent game, but the violence is not flashy, graphic, or exciting. It's ugly, harsh, and oddly low-key -- the dull thud of a pistol-whip stands in stark contrast to the cartoon carnage of so many other games.

Out On The Town

Eventually, however, it's time to stop watching and start driving. The Getaway is, if nothing else, a hell of a tourism simulator. Available from the start of the game is a "free roaming" mode, where it drops you in a nice little Lotus-alike roadster with the freedom to wander around town. Seeing the sights is a kick, and the option is always available to swipe another car or get in a mix-up with the police, if gawking at the Tower of London doesn't prove exciting enough.

It's hard to overstate how good this virtual city looks. Turn in any direction from anywhere on the street and it's possible to see some impressive new bit of detail, whether it's an obscure licensed storefront, a building site surrounded by containers and tower cranes, that massive IMAX theater in the traffic circle north of the Thames, or a drop-dead gorgeous Bentley driving your way. The amount of texture detail is amazing, considering what we've grown used to on PS2. Though there's a little bit of draw-in and occasional mip-mapping errors, the illusion of realism holds up surprisingly well, thanks to substantial variation in the population of the streets. Unlike the E3 demo, which tended to have a lot of cloned cars filling particular areas of the streets, the current version has more than enough different people and vehicles on the street.

The cars themselves are very well-modeled in all respects. A decent level of texture and model detail is aided by realistic environment mapping and window transparency, so the cars reflect the environment around them appropriately. What's much more fun for a driving buff, however, is all the different handling styles available. The game starts off with something nice and vanilla, an Alfa Romeo 156, and tosses Mark in a Range Rover for the second mission -- in other words, it's easy to get a little disheartened by the rides in the early going. A good eye, however, reveals some killer rides for the taking.

The Getaway lets you swipe anything on the road, just like GTA. See that Lexus SC430? Grab it. See that TVR Tuscan? Grab it. See that '70s-vintage Jaguar? Grab it. See that Bentley? It's all yours. The Citroen Saxo? Don't know why, but whatever floats your boat. The Nissan Skyline GT-R? Yep, you can get those in England, and there are plenty in this game to steal. Be careful, though -- those tend to be the favored rides of AK-packing Triad enforcers.

The more powerful cars in this game are a kick to drive. The differences in power and drivetrain type make a measurable difference in handling, so the Skyline is good for plenty of grip, while something like the TVRs can slide all over the map. However, it's not necessarily a good idea to grab the fastest thing in sight -- remember The Italian Job, after all. Something slower and more nimble can be better suited to avoiding the cops and navigating through the crowded streets. Like any old-world city, London has some ridiculously narrow roads.

Seeking Direction

The Getaway isn't just a pleasant Sunday drive, though. The in-game driving sequences, despite the inherent fun of the handling, tend to wear thin after a while -- at least in this preview build we have. While there are a couple of sequences which require Mark to run another vehicle off the road, the majority of the street-based missions consist purely of driving from point A to point B. When the cops get involved, a good chase can be powerfully exhilarating -- it's great to find that proper groove in a fast car down a crowded street -- but farther into the game, as the driving sequences grow longer and longer, the appeal fades and frustration sets in.

In large part, this is due to the game's navigation system. As always, the no-GUI commandment applies, so all cues have to come from sources in the game world. The system they've come up with is rather ingenious at first glance -- it uses the car's turn signals. A left blinker means take the next left, a right blinker means take the next right, and blinking hazard lights mean that the goal has been reached. After the novelty wears off, however, a few difficulties begin to arise.

The directions given only point toward the next immediate move. The game does not explicitly state where to go or how to get there, so even a player with an encyclopedic knowledge of London geography is still forced to drive as if they were playing Simon-Says. There is no in-game map (to our knowledge this far), and hence no way to plan a route in advance or work out an alternate route if the police or a wrong turn block the most direct route. Why is there no map? What constraint of realism or immersion forbids that? To a degree, I can see why there's no big fat arrow pointing the way in the middle of the screen, but a map in the pause menu surely couldn't hurt -- who doesn't keep a map in the glove box of their car?

There's one more real kicker as far as the turn-signal issue. The Getaway has a complex damage model to represent both cosmetic and internal damage to the cars. Body panels scrape, crumple, and detach all over the car; windows shatter and fall out; steam and smoke rise from damaged radiators and engines; tires flatten and bare rims kick up sparks. The effect of damage on performance is effectively conveyed, too, so frame damage or flat tires causes a car to pull to one side, and engine damage progressively develops after driving too long on a broken radiator. Eventually, the engine will explode and cook Mark, so smoke is a sign that you need to swipe a new car.

Back to turn-signals, though. A bad rear-end collision, the kind that happens very frequently when the cops are on Mark's tail, will break the brake lights and turn signals. Busted turn signals mean no navigational assistance whatsoever until you steal a new car.

Take This Shooter

Driving is only one-half of The Getaway, as we learned earlier this year. Points A and B are usually the location of a hellacious firefight, which must be survived through stealth, quick thinking, and the judicious application of human shields. Mark is ostensibly a nice guy, but that doesn't stop the body count from mounting well up into the triple digits.

The closest cousin to The Getaway's action sequences, though it may sound like an odd comparison, is probably Winback, the Koei third-person shooting game. Both have heavily scripted action sequences, and both also rely heavily on a jump-out maneuver. The best way to sneak up on enemies in The Getaway is to press up against a wall, sidle over to a corner (which pushes the camera around so it's possible to see what's around the corner), and then hop out to shoot at whatever bad guys lie beyond. Jumping out to shoot and jumping back into cover is easy enough, so getting the drop on the enemies this way is by far the best tactic in the game.

However, it's not always so simple as that. Your word for the day is "script." This half of The Getaway operates according to an ironclad script, which dictates enemy placement, enemy behavior, trap locations, and thus the actions necessary to get the player safely from one end of the level to the other. The script is always the same every trip through each shootout (as well as the one or two stealth-based missions), and so success is not necessarily based on quick reflexes or careful surveying of the situation so much as it is a matter of learning the script. Trial and error is the method, as it was in Max Payne to a degree. The camera is a significant issue here, because it rotates relatively slowly as Mark moves around. It's definitely possible to be shot by an enemy before the camera swings around to show where they are.

The automatic aiming system is a frequent source of trouble at present, because it is an absolute requirement in firefights. There is no option to simply hit the square button and fire at the nearest available target, a la GTA -- the player must zero in on a target with the R1 auto-aim before firing. R2 enables a free-look mode where it's possible to fire at any available target, but that isn't a viable option for a shootout due to the amount of time required to tick the analog stick over to the desired aiming point.

This would be an only minor limitation if the auto-aim always worked as desired. However, it still has some problems as yet. First, it interjects an extra button input between seeing a target and opening fire. The AI bad guys are not so constrained, which means that enemies frequently get a shot off while Mark is taking aim. He usually gets the last laugh, since the bad guys like to sit back and think for a bit before popping off a second shot, but that damage mounts up through five or ten opponents. Furthermore, the auto-aim has a nasty tendency to pick the exactly wrong target in a tight moment. Given the choice between a shotgun-toting bastard five feet to the right and some club-waving bobby ten yards to the left, it seems to prefer picking the more distant target, as opposed to the vastly more dangerous one. This is an issue that I very much hope will see some tweaking before the final version is released.

To be filed in the curiosities drawer along with the lack of an in-game map is The Getaway's curious method of restoring its hero's health. Of course, there are no power-ups of any sort, since those would apparently break the realism of the game. Instead, to get health back, you maneuver Mark up against a wall -- he'll lean against it and gradually gain some health back. His level of injury is subjectively represented by limping animations and bloodstains on his suit, which disappear slowly until he's back in fighting form.

Again, I can understand the desire to create an interface devoid of unrealistic elements. But I'm not sure this feature accomplishes that goal so well. For one thing, stretches of sitting around doing nothing tend to break the rhythm of an action sequence just as much as noshing a green herb or a roast chicken would. For another, how is it necessarily so realistic? Wounded people don't get better when standing still -- they bleed out, go into shock, and die.

As far as this preview version goes, The Getaway could also use some tuning as far as the behavior of the supporting cast. A couple of missions team Mark with an AI-controlled partner, and their level of smarts leaves something to be desired. Two commandments need to be implemented to guide their behavior. In the interior shootout missions, they need to avoid danger at all costs -- they should not stand around shooting while surrounded by poisonous gas. While on the street, they need to get in the car at all costs -- they should not stand around shooting while Mark is in a car waiting to take off.

To Be Continued

With some tuning, The Getaway could be much improved. The camera and aiming control has come a long way since E3, so I hope to see it continue to get better, and the AI just needs some sharper pathfinding routines (especially that get-in-the-car commandment). I sincerely wish that there were an in-game map, if only just in the pause menu. It would improve the tourism aspect of the game immensely, in addition to adding more depth to the car chases. In that situation, the turn signals would be a supplement to navigation rather than the only guide available.

I'll keep a good thought as we work further into the game, then, because so much of it is so good -- the graphics, the story, the pure fun of driving. It has some of the sharpest presentation of any game around, too, with a perfectly clean interface, progressive-scan support, a 16:9 aspect-ratio option, and superb stereo sound (there's no Dolby Pro Logic II, but the basic surround is still excellent). Look forward to more substantial media updates on the later missions in the game over the course of the rest of the year.

-- David Smith

[PC-Engine]

Where can I find info about the framerate?

[LogisticX]

Being an Insider, I had the opportunity of getting a response from Dave Smith regarding framerate on the messageboards.

During on foot missions, the game moves at a smooth 60 fps....in car, there are hiccups here and there but he said that its nothing major that interfers with gameplay.

[Sindre]

The movies at ign are free to all now. I've got them all :D It looks fantastic. I really can't wait to explore London. Never been there before.

[Ozymandis]

Progressive scan support? Hmmm. I need to buy at least one 480p game for my Ps2, just for the novelty of it :lol:

[PC-Engine]

Progressive scan support? Hmmm. I need to buy at least one 480p game for my Ps2, just for the novelty of it :lol:

Yeah I hear there's only about 5 games that support progressive scan out of a library of 400 games?

[archie4oz]

Off the top of my head...

Tekken 4
SOCOM
Burnout 2
Robotech
Bounty Hunter

Although I'm sure there's more. It'll probably start becoming more common now that the progressive scan libraries are available...

[Johnny Awesome]

Hands on impressions from Press Start magazine:

"Ok everyone who's read Press Start knows we were looking forward to The Getaway. It's Sony's attempt at blurring the line between videogame and movie, and is certainly R18... and it's been hyped as their game of the year for a long time.

Set in London, with every part of the city you drive around exactly like it is in real life, from the graphics, the game certainly seemed to live up to the hype.

Today I got my copy, and...

Yikes. Talk about difficulty. Restart after restart after restart on the first car chase... but zipping between traffic was exciting, so that's ok. But then I had to get out and move on foot. Oh dear.

Firstly the camera is appalling. Not just terrible, but appalling. Many a death was caused by the fact my character walks around the corner, but the camera doesn't follow him till 1 or 2 seconds after. That's a second or so my guy didn't have.

Gun fights are interesting and taking a hostage is a nice touch. There seems to be lots of different ways to approach each part of the mission too, but I have to admit I restarted at least 20 times at just the start of this mission.

The guy walking like an old Resident Evil zombie doesn't help, and is certainly annoying. Lara Croft or Solid Snake he is not, no matter how many sneaky positions he has. Plus aiming at the bad guys is very difficult indeed, meaning I almost hit as much as the bad guys. Quickly my character weakens and soon the final shot for the guy I couldn't see, or the fact I pressed down instead of up when trying to aim the gun finishes me off yet again.

First impressions: Very realistic, but must have the biggest learning curve I've seen in many, many, many years. Not too good at all."

[zurich]

Wow, I cant believe such a high profile title could slip with SCEE's quality control like that..

[london-boy]

well it seems that these games are THE ONLY ONES to support Prog Scan here in Europe. i mean for any platform, be it ps2, xbox, gc or anything... :roll:

funny isn't it.... :lol:

[alexsok]

Frankly, I didn't like the game at all...

[iscariot]

wow, nice post johnny! Comments that good finally enticed you to contribute to the thread eh? :D

some more credible review sites...

http://www.irishplayer.com/reviews/thegetaway.html

http://www.eurogamer.net/content/r_thegetaway_ps2

http://www.gamesdomain.com/playstation2/reviews/The_Getaway.html


sounds decent but unpolished. Hopefully, the technical obstacles will be vastly subdued for the sequal so they can put more effort into it's gameplay and the sorts...

[Vince]

Wow, Johnney, thanks for posting such an indepth and exciting review. Since when did reviewers start writing their pieces on the toilot?

Due to your blatenent attempt to find the worst possible review, doesn't matter that the game has flaws, just how you went about doing it, I must award you with:

http://www.lamer.net/wave-finger.gif haha



Firstly the camera is appalling. Not just terrible, but appalling. Many a death was caused by the fact my character walks around the corner, but the camera doesn't follow him till 1 or 2 seconds after. That's a second or so my guy didn't have.

Um, the idea isn't to just walk around corners with guns blazing. Try that in real life and of course you'll die.

The game gives you the option to swing around a corner Snake-style and take aim, while risking damage - or you can just poke your gun out the corner and shoot blindly, risk no damage, but have low accuracy.

Plus aiming at the bad guys is very difficult indeed, meaning I almost hit as much as the bad guys.

IIRC- R1 is autoaim and R2 is manual aiming. What's the problem. From every other review on gameranking, they said that the autoaiming was near perfect. Infact, untill many a people on GA realised there was auto-aim, they thought the game sucked - and it seems to allow for the John Woo type battles.

Quickly my character weakens and soon the final shot for the guy I couldn't see, or the fact I pressed down instead of up when trying to aim the gun finishes me off yet again.

Auto-aim!!! What a tool.

First impressions: Very realistic, but must have the biggest learning curve I've seen in many, many, many years. Not too good at all."

First Impressions: Online Journalism has again taken a blow as this guy's piece has replicated and found itself on B3D. Lets kill this off before our children see stuff like this and we're forced to blush.

[zurich]

Vince,

isn't it possible at all that the game just isnt very good?

[Vince]

Isn't it possible at all that the game just isnt very good?

Of course. But, I object to finding a review like this (Which, if you've followed the game at all is blatenely wrong) and posting it like, "Ha! eat this." The review was short, not very relevent and didn't explain a fraction of the game. We're suppose to be of higher stanadards here - I think we can handle a longer review.

[zidane1strife]

During on foot missions, the game moves at a smooth 60 fps....in car, there are hiccups here and there but he said that its nothing major that interfers with gameplay.

If it really is 60fps... then WOW!!!! I mean GTA is below 30fps many times, and it has significantly less detail... If this game is running at 60fps and looking significantly better... it must be getting over 4X the h/w perf. that GTA is getting... simply amazing and i thought it's dev. wasn't too good.(This means that if GTA 4 gets better perf. than Vice city and still runs at 30fps... It will look even BETTER!!!)

This must be the work of the performance analyzer!!!

[wazoo]

the game is out in Europe and gamers are mixed, so you will find oth opinions but the team made some very radical gameplay decisions that may not well received at all.

Everything except gameplay is top notch, I'll get it cheaper.

[Johnny Awesome]

I knew some of you PS2 zealots would take it personally, but this guy is pretty reliable normally. Take a consensus of views and add your own. I'm not telling you guys to avoid the game, maybe everyone should relax a little.

[Vince]

I knew some of you PS2 zealots would take it personally

If you'd show up and post such a POS review of any game, on any system - someone would call you out on it. It's not being a zealot, it's not being an asshole. There's like 5 reviews last time I checked on Gamerankings with the average in the mid-80s.

All of those, only a few clicks away - offer reviews that are 10X longer, infinatly more detailed and get this... actually use the features of the game.

Why you'd post this is why I object. Same as I would if you posted a bad review of Halo or SMS or any game thats 3 paragraphs in length and can't even get simple button functions right.

Zealot? Did you forget to look in the mirror (or post history) to put some perspective on that comment before you talk?

[Phil]

Well, today I got my copy of the Getaway and honestly, after looking so much forward to it, I can't say if I feel like jumping for joy or simply crying. As some have already mentioned, the team took some radical decisions which *may* be well received or not. Personally, I love the idea that everything is so darn realistic. The first mission starts with that car chase and the first thing the player will notice is the realism involved while driving through London. Honestly, it's pretty incredible. The cars actually feel heavy, similar to Gran Turismo, which makes it very challenging, especially because the streets are so full of traffic and you'll find yourself dodging cars at a very fast pace. Adding to that, comes perhaps one of the most realistic crash physics as far as I can judge. Frontal collisions won't go well of course and if you smash the car up badly the tires tend to blow pretty quick, either pulling you right or left while driving depending on which tire you blew. While driving you will certainly notice the very detailed surroundings. Textures are very good, especially compared to the recently released GTA: Vice City which looks fugly in comparasment. Okay, may be wrong word, but different anyway. The cars seem to reflect surroundings in real-time - of course not just your car but every car on screen which is pretty amazing this game is running at unbelievable 60 fps. As for frame drops, haven't noticed many of those, but they are there but do not come in as an annoyance.

So, although very challenging, driving through London is certainly a blast. The thing that I find quite disappointing though is the part where you walk as Mark on foot. The animation reminds very much of GTA, as it is somewhat choppy and the camera can be very annoying. Also, controls seem to be fairly slow, so if you decide to suddenly change directions in walking, don't expect Mark to do the same in a split of a second. This makes it quite hard, especially when dodging enemies or searching for a place to hide. God, how I wish Naughty Dog would licence their engine from Jak & Daxter to other devs... :(

Anyway, so the thing is, this game is as realistic as it can get, which can be seen either good or bad. I personally prefer the realism, but at times, I find myself trying to play this like GTA which it is not ment to be. If you do, you'll die as it is way more realistic. One nice example is speeding. Speeding kills. Not only others, but sometimes even yourself. Well, cross out sometimes and replace it with the word "often" and don't forget it.

Wish I could write more about the gameplay itself, but have honestly not played enough yet to give a fair judgement. To say something though, this game is very story driven and if you may often have to repeat missions based errors or getting killed in the process. So, in that essence, yes, the learning curve is extremely tough and I am a bit frustrated at the moment with the game. I won't give up though, because I'm sure any player should be able to tackle this with enough training.

Oh and before I end this - the cut-scenes are AMAZING. Love the language and the direction. All done superb.

PS. Excuse the errors, but it's pretty late and I'm just about off to bed. ;)

[Gollum]

Sounds cool, can you give us a bit more feedback once you got some sleep? ;)

I saw a couple minutes of footage of The Getaway on TV this week and I was a bit disappointed. While London certainly looked deceivingly like the real thing (well AFAIK, I visited London like 5 times in last couple years so of course I only know a few areas of it) and textures were great, but I wasn't very convinced by the whole lighting thing going on, or rather what looked like a lack of lighting. Almost no shading or shadowing seemed to be present, and what also bothered the hell out of me were the animations they showed (of course they were talking about the brutality and stuff, but I was focusing on the other aspects, hehe). The walking and several other animations of Mark looked really stiff and weird sometimes (appeared to be walking like he just got kicked in the nuts actually, I guess that was supposed to be sneaking or something ;) ) and looked particluarly weak compared to the overall presentation. Other parts were looking amazing again so I figured "what the heck, you should see it in action instead of on video before judging it" so I'm asking you now as I currently know no one with the game. I've read a couple reviews but they were'nt able to really adress any of those questions (this is why I'm not asking you much about gameplay, this I think I figured out from the reviews). Cheers... :)

[Jogi]

During on foot missions, the game moves at a smooth 60 fps....in car, there are hiccups here and there but he said that its nothing major that interfers with gameplay.

If it really is 60fps... then WOW!!!! I mean GTA is below 30fps many times, and it has significantly less detail... If this game is running at 60fps and looking significantly better... it must be getting over 4X the h/w perf. that GTA is getting... simply amazing and i thought it's dev. wasn't too good.(This means that if GTA 4 gets better perf. than Vice city and still runs at 30fps... It will look even BETTER!!!)

This must be the work of the performance analyzer!!!

From what I have seen it is 30fps + some slowdown here and there. (25fps for PAL systems..)

[TTP]

Never seen more than 30 frames a second while playing the game.

The game is rubbish. Not from a techonolgy point of view, but as far as gameplay and overall game design goes, it feels almost amateurish. And there are at least three confirmed bugs in the retail version.

[zurich]

Man, I bet Team Soho are killing themselves over having spent so long on the project, only to have SCEE rush it out for Christmas.... :-?

Kind of like NA FFX and its atrocious lip-syncing and lack of DD cutscenes... (and it hit retail when? Dec 22nd?)

[wazoo]

Man, I bet Team Soho are killing themselves over having spent so long on the project, only to have SCEE rush it out for Christmas.... :-?


That is something I never understood. so much money for a team, which never proved anything in the past ??


Kind of like NA FFX and its atrocious lip-syncing and lack of DD cutscenes... (and it hit retail when? Dec 22nd?)


DD ??

[Ozymandis]

DD=Dolby Digital

Did the Japanese version of Final Fantasy X support Dolby Digital? I'm just curious. The Bouncer supported it.

[zurich]

Everything I've heard about it points to 'yes' (only in the CG cutscenes I believe).

This game is a joke compared to Shenmue.
SONY just sucks badly. :(

[Ug Lee]

I've played quite a lot of this game now since it came out here a few days ago, and my impressions are as follows -

Framerate can be inconsistent, both in-car and on foot. Generally though the in-car slowdown is the most annoying, as it can occur out of the blue when there's nothing happening on-screen that would lead to this slowdown. pfft! Framerate is best summed up like this - 60fps (I play in NTSC mode) will noticeable drops at times. GTA3/VC it is not, but it's there and it's easy to see when it is there.

Textures vary wildly, from above average to downright muddy and dull.

Car reflections are fake. The only thing it reflects with absolute accuracy are the street lights (the posts, actually), and like GT3 it looks to reflect the surrounding environment, but it doesn't. It looks effective though, and to the untrained eye it would be uber impressive, I'd imagine.

The character animation is awesome. When Hammond has been shot a few times, controlling him as he's limping around barely keeping hold of his gun is pretty cool.

However that's one gripe I have with the game - controls. They're very fiddly. Once you get the hang of it, it is a lot better, but getting the hang of it is the frustrating part.

With regards to any complaints about the camera not following fast enough, you need to let the analogue stick centre itself and instantly the camera will reset itself behind Hammond. You can't control it manually, so the best bet is to centre the stick with extreme regularity.

The cars are fun to drive around I must say, with a difference in speed/acceleration/handling noticeable in each. The collisions in the game are excellent, and it is very enjoyable trying to lose the cops or other gang members when you've had a few tyres shot out and the radiator is just about blown. :lol:

The voice acting IMO is top stuff. Doesn't come across as token Engrish ala Shenmue (which isn't that bad, but compared to Getaway it is), and the storyline is, to me, interesting and it's what keeps me going back to the game.

Difficulty is certainly up there, but it's more trial and error than anything else. Once you get certain enemy and vehicle patterns downpat, you'll fly through the missions....but only after failing a few times.


Pros - excellent storyline (for a videogame), very good voice acting, London looks good at times, combat is quite good. The auto-aiming feature is a breeze to handle, and manual aiming is tricky but gets better with practise. PAL version offers 50/60Hz, progressive scan and widescreen.

Cons - Can't select the view whilst driving. It's annoying because when you drive larger trucks you can only drive from an in-car perspective, but when you drive cars it's the outside or bust. No ability to look behind the car whilst driving, no ability to look left or right (which makes taking corners on busy roads at high speeds no more than leaps of faith), trial and error gameplay may put off a lot of people. And worst of all, the game can be downright cheap.

Take for example a vehicle mission where you are required to locate a repair van and run it off the road. OK then. So you locate the van and chase after it, and ram into it a few times. However the first few times I attempted this mission, I had a few collisions with other vehicles which made the chase longer than need be..but that's ok. Anyway I caught up to the van and ran it off the road....but then it came up saying I'd failed the mission because I didn't catch the van in time. What the hell?!??! Had to restart...ugh.

Same thing happened on a mission where I had to ram a police vehicle off the road...after a while the van just blew me off the road and my mission failed. Bugger that.

I'm currently on the last mission as Hammond, and so far I would say Getaway is a must-rent at the very least, but must-buy? Not quite. Still, it's better than I thought it to be.

Also any comparisons to Vice City are useless. The two games are worlds apart.

[wazoo]

Your review is quite good and still very in line from what I've read so far.

This game seems to be created for the Greatest Hits lineup from scratch (lime many Sony 1st partys games IMO).

25E will be a fine price for this game.

[Gubbi]

I saw The Get Away reviewed last night on telly (game review shows are getting popular here, with 3 different shows on 3 different channels).

From the live footage, framerate is definately not 60 fps (or 50 fps here in PAL-land). Looked like 25 or lower.

The reviewers loved the game never the less. Maybe one should get a PS2 :wink:

Cheers
Gubbi

[london-boy]

actually, in the driving sessions the game is pretty fast, i think its an unstable 60fps....

of course, my luck..... i just got a progressive scan TV and bought the game to see how much of a difference it would make.... well when i turn prog scan on it doesnt work :roll: :lol:

oh well.... will have to get a VGA box and simply connect it via the VGA connection in my new display..... :roll:

any news of a vga box here in europe?!?!?!

anyway, i bought the getaway and kingdom hearts together last saturday.... well im at 18 hours gameplay in kingdom hearts and only at the second mission in the getaway....... ha ha ha ha ha

kingdom hearts got me like nothing else for a long time!!!! i was in all day sat and sun just to play it!!! and the getaway was sitting there waiting for its turn :lol:

[Phil]

Okay, so I'm back with more impressions of the Getaway. :)

I saw a couple minutes of footage of The Getaway on TV this week and I was a bit disappointed. While London certainly looked deceivingly like the real thing (well AFAIK, I visited London like 5 times in last couple years so of course I only know a few areas of it) and textures were great, but I wasn't very convinced by the whole lighting thing going on, or rather what looked like a lack of lighting. Almost no shading or shadowing seemed to be present, and what also bothered the hell out of me were the animations they showed (of course they were talking about the brutality and stuff, but I was focusing on the other aspects, hehe).

I would have to agree about the lightning, as the game really doesn't have much of it while travelling through London. Inside buildings though, you will find dark spots and Mark does have a shade following him. All the other characters though don't have one, but a round blob.

As for animation, yep, it's very choppy indeed. But you'll get used to it and find it far less annoying during the game, as the game boosts so much other things that are really impressive.

While playing, I must say that the "get aways" are and look very impressive. In fact, I think one could film a chase sequence by camera and blur the whole thing a bit and have it mistaken for a movie. The cops are really fun, as they will come after you and try to cut you off. They won't try to hit you from front, but they will make a turn to the side, trying to block your way in the process. Again, this is where the realism will surely impress, as the crash model is very accurate. Also, cops tend to aim with the gun for the tires, so if you're just about to escape by car and there are cops standing around, expect to drive with shot tires. In the game, there are longer "get aways", as it requires quite talent to take the direction your indicators are showing. In these, cops will set up road blocks with spikes and everything so it can get really nasty.

The parts where Mark finds himself inside are also very enjoyable however. Aiming with the gun is actually very easy, as you'll only have to hold down the R1 button. What can get very annoying though is the camera as mentioned. What's really missing is the possibility to rotate the camera with the second stick. It would make things so much easier if you could. This might lead to frustration but doesn't have to, as with practise, you'll learn how to deal with those situations when the camera doesn't do what you want. On the other side though, you have some very cool parts like setting a place on fire and shooting objects around as in MGS2. The only difference is, not all objects are destructable, but that hardly makes the experience worse. Something that also impressed me was the detail when the SWAT team comes after you. While you don't have SWAT team behaviour like in MGS2, you do have characters coordinating themselves with the other ones and they'll throw stunn-grenades to hammer your sight. When the grenade explodes, you'll see some very cool glases shattering which just adds to the impressive detail.

As already mentioned, the cars are very realistic and have some weight to them. You'll find a lot of cars in London, ranging from Alpha's to the new Lexus cabrio and other vehicles. There's even a TVR (!!), but I wasn't able to drive that one yet. The framerate tends to drop a lot though and probably ranges from 60/50 fps (I believe the developers said so) down to quite low rates. It does get an annoyance but after you get sucked into the game and are on the escape from mafia and police cars, you tend to overlook that. It's there, but you'll get over it. As for the reflections on the cars: they do tend to reflect what's around you, but perhaps not just everything. For intance, when you drive under lamps or trees, the car will reflect exactly that. As far as I can tell though, it won't reflect other cars or characters, but that's just nitpicking. The reflections look heaps better than the fake ones featured in Ridge Racer V though.

The biggest disappointment I have with the game so far though are bugs. I have never experienced a game on PS2 with that many bugs so far. Nothing trival, but too many as of yet. At 2 times, the game completely crashed resulting me in reseting the console and redoing the mission. Another bug had a character following me (I won't mention who the helper is for spoiler reasons) and 'HE/SHE' got stuck in the ground. It looked quite funny though, as HE/SHE was in the road up to HIS/HER chest. Apart from that though the game does seem to run fine and it is possible to get through the game.

To sum this off, the game is very mission based and you won't have time for sight seeing most of the time. The story is very good though and apart from MGS2, this is as close to movie stuff as it gets. The cut-sequences are done very impressive and really reminds of british movies such as Get Carter and others. Another thing that is very cool is that upon finishing the game with Mark, you get to play as his police counterpart Carter who aims to bring Charlie (the gangster boss) to justice. I haven't gotten this far yet, but I can hardly wait. The game also seems to feature a reasonable length, as I have already spend overr 6 hours of the game and I'm not even half way through yet. Also, London is huge. It might be "only" 28 square kilometers but it's insanly big when driving through the game. Add that with heaps amount of traffic and it will take you a long time to get from one side to the other, especially if you've never been to London and have no idea which direction to go. Speaking of which, the game does ship with a map, but I never used it as it doesn't help and the indicators do a good job, although it can fustrate at times. I really do welcome the feature though and find it better than's GTA's map system. Makes the whole experience much more realistic. :)

Finally, do I recommend it? Hell yeah! It has bugs, it's got framerate issues, but what the game boosts really makes it worth. Team Soho have done a great job and after playing this game for a couple of hours, it really does live up to my hype and then some. It even exceeded it when I think about the realism and of how good those escapes look and feel.

Anyway, it's late again so I'll end this here. If you have any questions regarding the game, don't hesitate. Cheers. :)

[Sindre]

Thank you very much for your impressions man! :D I'll get my copy on Christmas Eve..... argh! Can't wait. Anyways, The Getaway has actually sold better than GTA:VC last week. Take a look at this:

1. The Getaway (SCEE)
2. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Take-Two Interactive)
3. James Bond 007: NightFire (Electronic Arts)
4. FIFA 2003 (Electronic Arts)
5. Lord Of The Rings – The Two Towers (Electronic Arts)
6. Harry Potter – Chamber of Secrets (Electronic Arts)
7. WWE Smackdown! Shut Your Mouth (THQ)
8. Pro Evolution Soccer 2 (Konami)
9. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 (Activision)
10. Spiderman (Activision)
11. Colin McRae Rally 3 (Codemasters)
12. WRC II Extreme (SCEE)
13. Ratchet & Clank (SCEE)
14. Grand Theft Auto 3 (Take-Two Interactive)
15. Simpsons Skateboarding (Electronic Arts)
16. Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (VU Interactive)
17. Lord Of The Rings – Fellowship of the Ring (VU Interactive)
18. Red Faction II (THQ)
19. Rocky (Rage)
20. Medal of Honor: Frontline (Electronic Arts)

[marconelly!]

and like GT3 it looks to reflect the surrounding environment, but it doesn't
Actually, GT3 does reflect the actual environment. Well, not all of it, but none of the games released that I know of reflects everything - they all use simplified geometry model when generating enviro maps.