Streets of New York: Overview
In Streets of New York you play an ex-gangsta turned cop. The main plot is that you beat and shoot your way to the heads of three different organized crime groups in order to find the person who murdered your mentor. It’s a sandbox game, though, which means you only have to take on these missions when you feel like. There’s tons of other stuff to do in this game: you can race around in stolen cars to try to infiltrate an illegal drag racing circuit, you can bare-knuckle fight to try to infiltrate an underground fight ring, you can do various jobs for various semi-benign underworld figures, you can drive around taking calls on your radio and hunting down random criminals to clean up crime in a neighborhood, and more. You can even just walk down the street grabbing and frisking random people and arresting anyone you find carrying contraband. All of these side-quests and activities earn you either money or rank, which you can use to get better vehicles and weapons, which helps you complete the main plot. Buying True Crime is like buying 3 games: a driving game, a shooting game, and a martial arts game. You have to learn to be proficient in all three modes of play if you want to finish the game.
The exciting thing about Streets of New York is that they tried to recreate the entire borough of Manhattan. It’s not that every building is faithfully reproduced, but they tried to reproduce the character of each of the neighborhoods. Midtown has big stores and skyscrapers, Chinatown has Chinese signs, etc. It was fun to drive around sight-seeing (though I wish they had reproduced a few more famous landmarks). Yet you can only go into a tiny percentage of these buildings, and those you can go into use the same stock interiors over and over again until you’re sick of them. Every bank interior is the same, every office interior, fast food restaurant interior, seedy hotel interior, etc.
The Warriors: Overview
The Warriors is based on the 1979 movie about gang members fighting their way through New York. I’ve never seen such a faithful reproduction of a movie in a video game: the Warriors looks, feels and sounds like the movie. The Warriors is not a sandbox game, it’s solely mission based: you progress from area to area, with a specific goal in each area. You can also mug people, rob cars or rob stores to get cash (you need cash to buy ‘flash,’ the generic drug that boosts your hit points), but every time you commit crime you risk having the cops come after you (not fun). Which character you command changes depending on the level, but you are always in charge of a small group of other Warriors. This can be useful (e.g. when you have them help you fight) or a pain in the ass (e.g. when you have to run around trying to free them from handcuffs or revive them so you can get them to the exit of this area and complete the level). It’s basically a brawling and running game. You might pick up a knife or pipe or whatever, but it won’t last you long. Supposedly there are all kinds of great fighting combinations you can use, but for me the best I could learn to do is to run around hitting the punch button and occasionally trying to grab someone and slam them into a wall.
The Warriors is good at putting you in dire circumstances. You spend half the game running away from overwhelming enemy forces, hiding until they forget about you, and then following them and trying to pick them off one at a time. You spend most of the game desperate for cash, low on health, with half your party spread out around the level either unconscious or in handcuffs.
Getting Up: Overview
Getting Up is a graffiti game. You play a graffiti artist in the made up city of New Radius (which all the ads call “the futuristic city of New Radius” although it doesn’t seem very futuristic to me) which is ruled by a corrupt mayor and jackbooted thugs for cops. This too is a level based game. You enter a level, have to graffiti certain spots, and then leave to go to the next level. There are two main plots: the first is that you want to spread your name as a graffiti writer by getting your art up in various high-profile spots and thumb your nose at the corrupt and totalitarian city government. Fine, I can buy that. The second plot is about wanting to avenge your murdered father, and it seems tacked on and unnecessary (see Plot, below).
As far as game play, Getting Up is about sneaking (it’s often better to sneak past enemies than take them out, especially city cops armored in riot gear), fighting (most of the time you just have to take people out) and climbing (you have to figure out how to get to the various graffiti spots you want to hit, which often means a maze of climbing poles, edging along ledges, jumping to fire escapes, etc.). I found the fighting system simple but fun. Press one button to do a capoeira-style rolling evasion, press another button to punch or hit with whatever hand-weapon you’ve temporarily picked up.
Plot
I’ve learned not to have high hopes for a plot in a video game. The most I hope for is for the plot not to bore or annoy me too much. The Warriors wins hands down in that regard. The plot is clear and simple: your gang has been framed and the cops and every other gang in New York are after you, and you have to make it back to the safety of your home turf.
The plot of Streets of New York was fairly annoying, especially coupled with the gross unrealism I’ll complain about next. It seemed like just an excuse to have a cop character who acts like a stone cold thug with a license to kill and steal.
The Getting Up plot I have mixed feelings about. Do we really need an avenge-our-murdered-father plot to motivate us in this game? No, especially since most of what you do in the game is put up graffiti, which has little or nothing to do with revenge. On the other hand, the criticism of the city’s totalitarian government and vapid news media is probably the most sophisticated social commentary I’ve seen in a video game (which isn’t saying much, but at least it’s a start). And the cut scenes were well done enough that I actually wanted to see them.
Music
All three have an eclectic soundtrack, with some punk, some hip hop. All three had some really good songs. Streets of New York was the most bland; mostly just pop. The Warriors has a good retro feel to the music, which really goes well with the game’s 70s atmosphere. I enjoyed the Getting Up soundtrack most of all. They really dug deep, finding a lot of stuff that one wouldn’t think of as being in a video game soundtrack (e.g. Janes Addiction, Nina Simone). I’ve got to give Getting Up props for not simply going with whatever music was popular when they published the game and really searching for good, exciting music that matched the ‘respect your roots’ themes of the game.
Realism
I know this isn’t an important element for most players, but it was for me.
Streets of New York was the least realistic. First of all, the premise that you’re a cop doesn’t stop you from acting like a Grand Theft Auto character: you steal cars, run people over, drive around shooting everything in sight, mug and extort random shop owners, etc. If you can limit yourself to not killing more than 5 people per 5 minutes of play, you can do anything you want and nobody says a thing. If you’re about to go over your civilian kills limit, you just pull over and sit there for a minute, then you’re fine to go on with your rampage. Similarly, I found the fastest way to get any place was to steal (sorry, commandeer) a car, race down the wrong side of a street as fast as you can, trying to dodge the oncoming traffic but occasionally having head-on collisions, which will eventually make you have to leave your car and steal a new one. It also annoyed me that, for a city they put so much trouble into rendering, very little of it is interactive. No matter what they look like, the overwhelming majority of buildings are just huge solid blocks you can’t enter or climb on or damage. And there are very few types of people, so it’s not uncommon to see a group of five or six identical twins walking down the street at once.
Warriors and Getting Up score far better in realism, although that might just be because what you can do and where you can go is much more limited. You can have meaningful interactions with the environment, you can explore a good portion of your surroundings, and beating up on innocent people usually gets you in trouble. The climbing mechanics of Getting Up makes your environments much more interactive and interesting. You’re constantly looking for fences you can climb, dumpsters you can move and climb on top of, pipes you can shimmy up, etc.
Visual Style
All three get props for replicating the look of inner city environments. Streets of New York took on the greatest challenge, to replicate the look and feel of every neighborhood of a real city, and they did so with moderate success. The Warriors looks almost exactly like the movie, which I mean as a compliment. It looks like real decayed urban spaces. Getting Up also looks great; giving you the impression that the designers truly love urban spaces and wanted to give you with a Whitman’s Sampler of different types of urban spaces.
Mechanics
In the Warriors, the fighting system is fun and intuitive and usually not too hard. There are sub-systems (for spraying graffiti, for picking locks, for mugging people, for escaping from the police) which I found somewhat annoying. After the 10th time I failed at trying to spray a big W (for warriors) on the wall I started thinking “why did they do this too me?” I think they assumed that anything you do has to have some challenge to it, and I think that assumption was wrong. I want a game that tests my creativity, strategy and problem solving ability, not my ability to hit the X button at the exact right moment.
In Getting Up, none of the mechanics were too hard, but spraying graffiti (or marking stuff with markers, or putting up wheat paste postings), which you spend a large portion of the game doing, got to be boring and tedious. It’s not like the game allows you to be creative, you just sweep your character’s spray can over the space where the game tells you there should be graffiti and your multi-colored piece magically appears. If you spray on one spot for too long it will leave a drip, or if you’re not fast enough you loose your time bonus, both of which will cost you Rep Points (the sort of XP of the game). Again, this makes me wonder “why?” You could take the exact same mechanics and make a game about waxing and buffing floors (“Carl Jablowski’s Janitor: Avoid Eye and Skin Contact”), that’s how much fun it is.
I should also mention that Getting Up is really glitchy. You’re constantly getting stuck in walls or having to start levels over again because some bug won’t let you complete your mission. And the enemy AI is really bad. For instance, if there’s a trash-can-fire around, you just hide and wait and eventually the enemies will walk into it, catch on fire and die.
I can’t complain about the mechanics in Streets of New York, mostly because if you get bored with one thing (e.g. driving) you can switch to a different type of mission (e.g. shooting people). I’m actually kind of amazed that they managed to cram three completely different styles of play (fighting, shooting, driving) into one game and make them each fun. My only complaint (I know, I said I wouldn’t complain, but I lied) is that the boss fights were so long and tedious, compared to the fast paced nature of the rest of the game.
Racial Sterotypes
Streets of New York is the worst. Not only are you every black-male-thug stereotype, you’re also a corrupt cop. In the Warriors you’ve got a nice mixed race group of young men, led by a strong, wise black leader, yet your players are still just a bunch of thugs who rob people, beat people up and call each people queer as an insult (I know, I know, it’s historically accurate, but it bugged me nonetheless). As far as resisting racial stereotypes, Getting Up is the best. You’ve got a black male character who is neither a thug nor a corrupt cop. He’s an artist, an explorer and an intelligent person who respects the wisdom and advice of his graffiti-scene elders.
Overall
If it all comes down to how much I enjoyed the games, I’d have to say that all three were great and tie for best game. Streets of New York gives you the most game play, but it is also the most expensive. At the cheap prices you can buy Getting Up for on the internet, I’d say it probably gives you the most fun for your money. If urban action games are your thing, you probably won’t regret getting all three.
If you’re looking for something more than fun, some sort of sense of artistic integrity or that you’ve played something unique and interesting, I’d say Streets of New York is like eating at Hometown Buffet (you get a lot, although it’s not the best), the Warriors is like eating at an upscale steakhouse (finely crafted, they do one thing but they do it well) and Getting Up is like eating at a funky Rasta-Ethiopian restaurant on the bohemian side of town (you might not like everything you get, but you know you’ll get a unique experience).
