Marc Ecko's Getting Up review

Whenever some new review code arrives, I ask myself some questions, purely out of habit. These might include:

“Ooh, wonder what this’ll be like…”
“Hmm, will it live up to the hype?”
“Dammit, another EA game?”

However, when Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure arrived, some new questions were asked. Namely, “Who’s Marc Ecko?”, and “Is this the worst title of a videogame ever”?

Who Do You Think You Are?

The answer to the first question is that he’s an American designer and entrepreneur, responsible for establishing the clothing brand Eckō Unltd. Quite why he’s teamed up with Atari to make a videogame is anyone’s guess, but the fact is he has, so let’s get down to business. You play as Trane, a young, amateur graffiti artist in the city of New Radius.

The city is under the control of an oppressive government, with security guards patrolling the streets, and freedom of speech and expression not looked kindly upon. Trane decides he’s had enough of this, and begins a protest campaign against the government by, erm, spraying graffiti everywhere. It doesn’t sound especially exciting, and you might or might not be surprised to hear that the rest of the game follows suit, and is equally boring and uninspiring.

When the main activity (I was going to use the word action, but that’s a bit strong) in a game is spray painting, you know you’ve got a problem. Admittedly, the Jet Set Radio series has proved that a very good videogame can be made out of the whole graffiti thing, but that was crazy-Japanese-futuristic spray painting, and was actually entertaining. A typical level in Contents Under Pressure goes like this: Trane’s walking along, and he sees some other dogs (that’s how the youth of New Radius seem to like to refer to each other) spraying graffiti on a wall.

Trane decides it would be a good idea to go and beat them up (yes, I don’t know why either) and then proceeds to spray his graffiti (or tag) over theirs. As you can see, it’s not exactly gripping stuff, and as such gets incredibly boring and repetitive. The game’s controls are clunky and loose, which makes getting around the levels harder than it should be, and this isn’t helped by a camera that swings around more than a monkey on crack. Once you’ve found someone to fight, you then have to sit through a minute or so of hammering triangle or square until their energy bar is depleted. Weapons can be picked up, and certain bits of the scenery will smash as you throw each other around, but these can’t disguise a clumsy and shallow fighting engine.

Stop It, I Can’t Take The Excitement Any More!

Now to the main objective of each level – the tagging. After finding the location that you have to tag, it’s simply a case of holding down R1 and moving the left analogue stick around, making sure you cover everywhere in paint. It’s possible to choose the size and style of your tag, but sadly not the colour or any other aspects of it. The first time you spray your tag somewhere, you might think “Mm, that’s pretty cool”, but believe me, it gets horribly tedious very quickly. Sometimes you’ll have to go that bit further to make a tag, like climbing onto a railway bridge, up the side of a building, or evading a security guard.

However, this doesn’t make the gameplay more appealing, and more often that not just leaves you feeling frustrated at the level being drawn out for even longer. That’s if these added challenges actually affect the difficulty of the level, by the way; in one instance, the security guard I had to ‘evade’ got stuck walking into a dustbin, and stayed there for the remainder of the level, completely out of sight of me vandalising his street. Instantly, the challenge of that level was taken away, and dumbfounded at the total ineptness of the AI.

There are cut scenes in between each level, featuring some impressive FMV and every obscenity you can think of, but they just feel like a way of meshing together some dodgy fights and some tagging into a storyline. This really doesn’t work, and while watching each FMV you’ll begin to question whether you really want to play through another level of the same crap.

Just Tell It Like It Is, Baby

You might be thinking by now, “is there anything good about this game?” The answer is yes, although it’s probably not what you’re hoping for (good gameplay? No chance). The game features a fully licensed soundtrack, featuring artists such as Kasabian, Bloc Party and Notorious B.I.G., and is mainly hip-hop orientated. These songs are accessed via your in-game iPod, and more songs can be unlocked as you progress through the game.

The menu system (yes, that’s the menu system) is pretty good as well, making good use of the subway/underground/city theme. Contents Under Pressure’s graphics, voice acting and music are all decent too, although nothing remarkable, and give a reasonable feel of the urban theme that the game’s trying to represent. The inclusion of some real graffiti artists is a nice touch, although how many people will actually recognise any of these names is another matter.

When it comes down to it, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure really fails to spark any excitement, innovation, or fun at all. Within the first couple of levels the gameplay becomes stale and repetitive, and stays this way throughout the game. There are some unlockables, but nothing worth putting yourself through the tedium of the entire game in order to access them. Apparently Contents Under Pressure has been banned in Australia for promoting illegal graffiti, although really it should be banned for an entirely different reason. When the menu system of a game is more entertaining than the actual gameplay, alarm bells should start ringing. Unless you’re some kind of sadist, you’ll want to avoid this at all costs.

Oh, and the answer to the second question? Yes, it is the worst videogame title ever. I’ve just decided.