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[360] [PS3] 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

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[360] [PS3] 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

Unread postby alwaysbeawesome » 25 Oct 2011 09:49

"hip hop culture's peak, its crest, its finest moment"
*****

50 Cent: Blood on The Sand is 100%, without irony, one of the top ten games to be released this generation. It is objectively better than Gears of War, better than Modern Warfare. It's at least as good as Vanquish, with the finish too close to call.

BotS is the sort of "there's no fucking way it could work" concept that comes along all too rarely. Remember when the Internet soiled its collective diaper over the prospect of Samuel L Jackson taking lead role in a film containing snakes aboard aircraft? That's this. BotS is gaming's Snakes on a Plane, except it is good. Rather than start with a bland project and retroactively go back to try and gussy it up a bit once the thing went viral, BotS takes its premise, sticks to it, and runs it to the hoop.

50 Cent and G Unit play a concert in the Middle East. The promoter is unable to pay them. 50 Cent gets angry and violent, so the promoter offers 50 a diamond covered skull in exchange for his unbroken legs. Then the skull gets stolen. Are you a bad enough dude to get 50's skull back? You better be, motherfucker.

As a primer, please watch the following review by this cut-rate Ben Croshaw wannabe. Please watch it with the understanding that everything he mocks, in practice, makes this game that much more awesome.

50 Cent had a game before this one. It was called Bulletproof, and it was rubbish, partially because it was an awful 3rd person shooter and partially because it half expected us to take Mr. Cent seriously. BotS, on the other hand, not only realizes how ridiculous its protagonist is, but also how ridiculous the entire idealized hip-hop/rap lifestyle is. Consider a more recent game, the much-maligned Duke Nukem Forever. In DNF, Duke lives in a world that basically exists to cater to his every whim. He resides in his own skyscraper/casino, has burger franchises, merchandise, a museum, giant gold statues of himself holding up the world in an Atlas pose, an arena bearing his name, and literally every woman in the world wants to have sex with him. Every line that leaves his mouth is about how his balls are made of steel, how he fornicated with someone's mother, or threats of violence against those who stand in his way.

When you take all of the above into account, Duke Nukem is obvious parody. Anyone playing DNF will never expect to live the ridiculous life of Duke Nukem. However, if Duke Nukem were instead a hip hop persona, not only would it be played for serious, but Duke would go from being a ridiculous, over the top fantasy icon to being par for the course. It is very likely that a Duke Nukem rap persona would be the least ridiculous act in modern, mainstream hip hop. Duke would be too bland to sell any records.

Before we continue, presently observe Dylan Moran spitting truth.

Every major, mainstream hip hop artist is selling the dream of living in a world of excess where you are some sort of king who doles out dick and violence in equal measure. The flaw of the genre is not in the showmanship (certainly not!), but in the idea that we're supposed to take the self-actualized fantasy lives of these individuals seriously. I'm supposed to fear Ice Cube, a man who costars in family films with Steve Martin. I'm supposed to view Eminem as some kind of tortured poet instead of a ridiculously wealthy 40ish year old man who still has mommy and ex-wife issues. And in the case of Mr. Cent, I'm supposed to believe a man whose most notable accomplishment in life to date is purchasing stock in a Coca-Cola subsidiary qualifies as a gangster, a straight up G.

BotS works because it disabuses one of that notion, instead casting 50 Cent as the ridiculous, urban-flavored Duke Nukem that he is. BotS is a blaxploitation knockoff on Duke, a game where 50 wears the same pissed-off look on his face through the entire adventure as he murders half of the Middle East to get back his diamond skull. BotS is like someone took a greatest hits compilation from all those tacky No Limit album covers and recreated them inside the Unreal Engine. More than that, BotS is that part in Spike Lee's Inside Man where Denzel Washington asks a small child about the game he's playing, and the game is a silly ripoff of GTA where the player is given the on-screen prompt to "KILL DAT N***A."

BotS is "KILL DAT N***A," made into an actual game, and horror of horrors, it is amazing in every way a video game can be.

In case "50 Cent plays Duke Nukem shooting up the third world to get his bling back" wasn't enough to sell you on the game, let's talk about what makes it so compelling from a play perspective. Most shooters today - even those that are cleverly designed to appear as blockbuster action movies through use of scripted events - are more about hiding from bullets than about slinging bullets. Half of them are also at least a little ashamed to be video games instead of a Michael Bay film, or whatever it is games are supposed to be now that Gamez Is Art.

There's a scene in BotS where 50 Cent goes to a strip club to talk to a man about getting some bigger weapons. After rudely dismissing the first stripper to come and offer him a lapdance, 50 finds the owner. He's a fan. The following exchange happens, almost verbatim:

Owner: "I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN! CURTIS "50 CENT" JACKSON!"
50 Cent: "YO MAN THAT'S FOR PEOPLE CLOSE TO ME YOU DON'T GET TO CALL ME DAT."

The emotional peak of this game is when 50 Cent nearly rips a fan's head off for calling him by his given name. What a ridiculous person 50 Cent is. What a ridiculous, retarded thing hip hop machismo is. Ridiculous! Blood on the Sand is a ridiculous videogame with a ridiculous premise starring one of the world's most ridiculous human beings in the role of a ridiculous caricature of his own most ridiculous attributes. It accepts that. It owns that, and accomplishes the greatest of things with that.

See, BotS, knowing it is in fact a game, can do things like keep a running score and a running tally of the things you collect. This is the beauty of the piece - in BotS, there is no such thing as a clean, minimalist HUD. Fuck that, there are always numbers bouncing around and flashing on the screen. 50 Cent smashes open boxes and a truckload of bling attracts itself to him, as if by magnetic power. (Read: you don't have to run over each individual piece of bling and push a button, because the bling knows enough to come to 50 Cent. This is the sort of game design brilliance that gets overlooked all too often in favor of some bullshit metaphor that some conman charges $15 to download.) These gold bits all make a most satisfying "ching" noise when they hit Mr. Cent. 50 Cent also collects posters in each level. These posters are of 50 Cent.

50 Cent uses payphones to order new weapons, as if by sorcery, using the bling he has been collecting throughout the levels. 50 kills some stuff, manages to find a working payphone in a warzone, and magically orders a rocket launcher, or an AK. Do you see how easy this is, game designers? Are you seeing the possibility, the magic on display?

You get huge bonuses for killing things in quick succession, and depending on your score at the end of the level, you are granted a medal for your performance. These bonuses come about because you are always shooting something in BotS. Just when you think you've shot all that there is to shoot, here comes more things to shoot. Sometimes it's a few more guys. Sometimes it's a truck. Sometimes it's a fucking gunship helicopter. Regardless, you need to shoot it, and be sure to shoot everything as fast as you can, because you get MAJOR COMBOS for doing so.

There are some vehicle levels in BotS. They are inoffensive, which is the highest praise vehicle sections can be given in a shooter! It bears mentioning that you pick a member of G-Unit to follow you around the Middle East. If you have a friend around, you can play in co-op for a good time! If it's just you, then you'll have some dude from G-Unit running around with you shooting at (but not hitting) things and yelling stuff out like "UP ON DA ROOF, FIDDY!"

VERDICT

While Hollywood continues to try to drag its archaic, increasingly irrelevant collection of tropes and formuli and apply them rigidly to the most wonderful, lively medium of the day, BotS suggests (quite convincingly) that perhaps instead of trying to wring lackluster films from far superior products, the game industry ought to be focusing more on getting music acts partnered up with great games. Much has been written about the subject of piracy putting a once healthy industry on its own self-inflicted death bed, but in recent years, the industry has come to its senses and has taken (baby) steps to make itself relevant again: Rock Band was a great test case, why not expand? It's perhaps 20 years too late to be marketable, but what joyless soul amongst you would reject the chance to play a Wu-Tang first person shooter in which Ghostface and ODB go street on Shanghai?

Why can't Capcom or Namco sign whatever contracts would be necessary to get the top fifteen or twenty rockbands into a balls-awesome fighting game? Such a product would print money, while simultaneously introducing hair metal yokels to a game that isn't Larry The Cable Guy Fart Soundboard on their first-gen iPhones.

And for the love of god, why can't we get a playable acid trip in the form of something with mechanics along the lines of Super Gaga Galaxy, instead of whatever bubble Farmville bullshit she's currently cashing in on?

In any event, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is more than just a surprisingly effective shooter. It is one of this generation's unsung gems. It is like playing Vanquish to a non-stop playlist of 50 Cent tunes, something that works way better than you'd think, like lining up Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz, or the Children of Men soundtrack to the first Gears of War. More than that, BotS is hip hop culture's peak, its crest, its finest moment.

Never before has a pre rendered cutscene so accurately represented the finished product. Play this game!
alwaysbeawesome
Insomnia Staff
 
Joined: 24 Oct 2011 12:10

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