The Getaway
The Getaway was apparently meant to be a release title for the PS2. It was coded at Sony’s Soho Studios in London. In fact it was released about three years later - quite late, but not surprisingly so, since they had mapped most of Central London’s streets into a computer game. They must have taken tens of thousands of digital stills - the Game looks amazingly detailed. (See TheRealGetaway) Of course not every street (or building) is there.
For some reason I didn’t buy the game on release - I suppose I had heard about it’s development for such a long time, that I didn’t want it to be a big disappointment - like all those films where they trail the life out of the good bits on TV (see ‘The Matrix - Reloaded’.)
Well - the other day I saw it for sale in an online shop sale for £20 - so I couldn’t pass it up.
It’s great fun.
(Another thing I like about this game is they included one of my favourite cars - the TVR Cebera.)
tom says:
I found the game to be really frustrating. The first thing I wanted to do was drive around the wonderful model of London, get myself acquainted with the (iritatingly different to GTA3) controlls and generally get a feel for things, unfortunately the game had other ideas, compelling me to take a short boring drive to a warehouse where I repeatedly lost lives because of poor camerawork and shitty animation untill I had learned where each bad guy was and how to kill him in the manner most friendly to the odd, rather to contextual, control mechanism. The dialogue is really corny and the acting unintentionally hilarious. I love the model of London but the fact that a free driving mode only becomes available after you’ve slugged your way ungracefully through thousands of identikit car chases and excruciating cut scenes is a mistake which really limited the games appeal for me (I gave up after about 6 hours play). Perhaps it’s just dissapointing when you look at it alongside GTA3 which, whilst less pretty, felt so much more real and even if the plot was pretty linear I always felt I had a great deal of freedom. I really hope they licenese the map to other people though as it is an incredible piece of work.
September 29th, 2003 at 10:31 am