Middle East Is "Hood Beyond The Hood," 50 Cent Game Director Says

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Middle East Is "Hood Beyond The Hood," 50 Cent Game Director Says


The upcoming 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand may be set in the Middle East but according to the developer there's no "geopolitical context" to it.

In an interview with Swordfish Studios [http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=186156/%E2%80%9Dtarget=]game director Julian Widdows described the setting as an "everyman's war zone," adding, "It's the hood beyond the hood."

"It's clearly a crime story," Widdows said. "The arch bad guy - we can't tell you who it is but it's a pretty high profile American actor - will be instantly recognizable. But he's an American. The first key bad guy that you encounter, who you're actually working for at this point, is an American. The guards you shoot in the third act are all Russian. And so it's an international crime syndicate which is operating in this everyman's war zone."

Widdows also claimed that Fiddy has had creative input on the game, although somehow not with the developer. "He took a look at it and he was like, 'You know, it looks really cool, I'd like something a little bit more.' The guy's a gamer, which in and of itself is actually an advantage because he came in with a very honest, very open opinion - 'As a gamer, I want more than just a core experience,'" Widdows said.

"And that's what drove the driving and flying," he continued. "The driving and flying are collaborative, it's not just a vanilla driving and flying experience. Just to give you a little hint on it, if you play as 50 Cent, you're the driver, but if you come in as a join-in player you're the gunner (you can never choose which one you are) - and there are separate achievements for each."

One thing that may come as a surprise is that the game will not contain the extreme levels of graphic violence seen in the earlier Swordfish release Cold Winter [http://www.mobygames.com/game/cold-winter], such as dismemberment of enemies. "We decided not to [include that]," Widdows explained. "Because it's a next-gen game, we realized that if we were to do limb removal with characters of the quality we're looking at, it was going to start to get pretty graphic. ... We felt that, if we were going to go for an arcade game like this, that was actually inappropriate. We didn't want to go to that level."

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is currently slated for release in fall 2008 for the here [http://www.xbox.com].


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Alphavillain

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Jan 19, 2008
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What is there to the Middle East of interest to Joe McWesterner BUT geopolitics?

And: "The guards you shoot in the third act are all Russian" -sheesh, those Russian never get a day off from being shot in games, do they?
 

Melaisis

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Dec 9, 2007
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Gotta give the PR some credit here. I mean, its obvious they want the game to appeal to people like us - who are the artsy-fartsy types which may consider buying such a title if it had more... depth. I mean, rest assured that this game has already been practically sold to the screaming masses of pre-teens who have had hip-hop stereotypes marketed to them since they were 5. Thus, it only makes sense that the publisher wishes to pursue people of more... intellectual value. Especially when it comes to what Metacritic will say.

But advertising to our sense of artistic merit by - as Root pointed out - specifying dubious, old-fashioned plot-devices in obsolete places? Please, get a real writer, Swordfish!