Platform: Playstation 2
Genre: Action
Publisher: Atari
Developer: The Collective
ESRB: M (Mature)
Released: Q1 2006

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Pros:

- Excellent voice acting

- Superb range of motion available in maps

- A ton of unlockable content – music, art, et cetera

Cons:

- Graffiti becomes tedious after a while

- Maps have invisible barriers that make the 3D world seem less than that

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" Gamewise? Think candy - I liked the game in small doses."

In Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, you control Trane – an up and coming artist of the streets, and his canvas is the world itself! Or at least any piece of concrete big enough to tag. Starting off as a relative unknown, Trane has to earn respect and name recognition. The best way to get those you ask? Well, by tagging every imaginable spot and kicking the crap out of any would-be opponents. The more difficult the site, the higher the kudos. Starting off beefing against the local gangs of the area, Trane will eventually develop to the point of surpassing the streets and making the government itself the target of his ire.

The world of Getting Up is definitely the tough streets. The decayed urban center of New Radius is the setting for this adventure, and the game developers did a pretty darn good job of developing the backgrounds and maps. Not just looking like the environments they try to emulate, the amount of interactive surfaces to climb, jumps off of, or just tag are impressive. There’s not a lot of wasted space on each map, but in that lies the problem – you have an amazing world to investigate but you can’t deviate from the game’s plot much and are practically dragged through each area by your nose. It’s like a vacation with a “scheduler” – we just got to the rest stop, I’ve allotted 1 minute for the restroom and 25 seconds for catching your legs… oops I just wasted 24 seconds reading the schedule aloud.

I found the experience similar to the side-scrollers of old – enter an area, defeat any enemies and then start painting. Since it is the tough streets and all, fighting is definitely a big part of the game. The VaNR (Vandals of New Radius) aren’t particularly big fans of Trane

(after he decides to go over a couple of their tags), so it’s pretty much open season on those fools but authority figures aren’t lovers of street art either and they might jump you if they catch you at your specific brand of civil disobedience. If you get seen by either, you will probably need to fight through them using your feet and fists or any weapons that you find lying around (New Radius is a veritable treasure trove of blunt instruments). The combat system is simple – single buttons for basic attacks, patterns lead to combos, grappling, and so on. It takes about two or three tries to get the rhythm down then you’re cooking.

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Once the fighting is done, then comes the art!

You can use your intuition to find the best spots to work on in the area, find existing tags left by other artists (especially the legends), or just do some freeform painting. The actual painting is quite simple – once you have a work area, use the direction pad to select the piece you want to lay out and size it. As soon as you’ve selected the piece, use the right stick to go over the area while trying to avoid dripping paint on it and keeping enough pressure built up in your can. Just to keep you honest, the process is timed. So you earn rep by completing pieces in the allotted time, avoiding drips, and making the tag as large as possible. Each area also features some freeform challenges which will have you try and tag a number of sites in an allotted time or tag a specific object multiple times and so on and so forth. The process isn’t particularly difficult once you develop a good rhythm, although after completing the same piece 20 times… I was a little bored. Sure you will see some variants on the process, but I still felt like I was being trapped in mini-game hell. All of your efforts in making graffiti are not in vain though – the more you create and the better you are at the process earn you more rep which in turn unlocks more fighting moves and painting techniques.

Sound? Excellent. Voice acting is definitely top-notch – featuring celebrity voices across the board, it’s nice to not have any overacting in the cut scenes (Andy Dick as a butch female police commander was a happy surprise). Soundtrack? Also good. A lot of licensed music is available on this game, but to access most of it you have to unlock it by finding the hidden iPod icons scattered throughout the areas. Graphics? Pretty good. The characters are not too hard to look at, but I did have a couple of glitches throughout the game of characters disappearing or Trane suddenly becoming a white smear.

Gamewise? Think candy - I liked the game in small doses, but became bored after extended gaming sessions, especially when you are continually doing the same motions often. The game has an impressive map design, but I was just left cold with the lack of freedom to move around in it – why create a world if you can’t go anywhere? All in all, above average. Good package, but needs more fleshing out.

- Tazman

(April 9, 2006)

"Koala Bear Rapist? That guy's a real dick, and I won't even tell you what he does to koala bears."

- Captain Hero (Drawn Together)

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