Which brings us on to videogame references. Just as the game loves films, it loves games. Speaking of OutRun, some of the courses owe more than a little to the luxuriously wide, three-laned joy of the original Ferrari racing game. When you’re hanging off a car, you can hit a button to hide where the driver can’t shoot at you, then pop up again, Time Crisis style. The HUD, Chris freely admits, is inspired by the brightly coloured clarity of Virtua Cop, and a level which takes place on foot, as a third-person shooter, is also very reminiscent of the cut-scenes from those games. When you take a knock and find yourself hanging by one arm from a speeding vehicle, you’ve got to mash the d-pad to get back up, like in Track and Field. A speedboat level reminded us of Live and Let Die on our old C64. The whole game is built from the ground up, on a bespoke engine – no middleware involved – and feels great to play, with a typically arcadey style of driving. And yes, you can drift the car round the game’s numerous long, sweeping corners.
Another game that Mr. Whiteside clearly loves is Goldeneye. He’s based the level structure around it, emphasising the quality and replayability of the levels over quantity. In fact, we didn’t think that the number of levels in Pursuit Force was scant at all – there are 30 of them in total. Just as in Goldeneye, you can go back and tackle the levels again on harder difficulty settings, and are rewarded for quicker times with cheats, that you can then turn on and off each time you play.
With all these references we’ve mentioned, you might well be thinking that the game crosses the line between pastiche and plagiarism. Thing is, you’d be wrong. It all contributes to the game’s character, which is that of a thrills and spills arcade action title with its tongue firmly pushed into its cheek. And it’s the perfect game for the handheld platform, providing a quick dose of sweaty-palmed distraction on the way to work, between lessons or on a lunch break. The only PSP feature it doesn’t take advantage of is the machine’s wireless connectivity. Chris says they wanted simply to focus on making the game concerned only with the single player experience. It’s certainly the most unique action game that we’ve seen on the PSP - indeed on any platform for a while - and we hope to bring you a full review nearer the game’s final release in mid-November.
As for bigBIG Studios, we did ask Chris on the way out what’s next for them. Rather unsurprisingly, he declined to tell us, but was happy to point out that the company is exclusively signed to Sony as publishers. A PS3 project perhaps? Only time will tell, but we wish them all the best, as one of a new generation of small, independent UK developers – one of our favourite sorts of companies.
