Midway's Controversial NARC Update Ups Drug Intake

Thanks to IGN PS2 for its hands-on preview of Midway's PS2/Xbox action title NARC, an update of the classic '80s anti-drug arcade title of the same name. This game, which Game Informer notes has been "built on VIS Entertainment's State of Emergency engine", takes the "good cop/bad cop" gameplay concept to an extreme, as GameSpot explains: "You'll actually be able to use the illegal drugs you confiscate throughout the game. In fact, they'll actually give you short-term benefits." The drugs include "pot, speed, LSD, crack, and the newly invented Liquid Soul", and effects vary - for example, IGN notes: "Smoking marijuana in NARC slows time down and makes the screen blur, but also gives incredible focus", and GameSpot mentions: "Dropping acid fills the screen with crazy colors, but it also gives innocent citizens large jester heads while giving criminals large devil heads, for easy identification." But GI also cautions: "By taking one of the addictive drugs... the controller vibrations will get longer and longer until the player will literally have to fight to keep the shakes at bay."

Comments

Holy crap

[Mukaikubo]

Anyone want to take bets on how long it is before a drug death gets blamed on "Little Jimmy wanted to see who the Devil was in his homeroom"?

Sidescroller?

[magnum3065]

I see no sidescrollers. Yes, I've played the original, but haven't you learned from every other game series out there? Follow-ups to old 2D games rarely stay 2D, even when it suits the genre better. The new NARC is a 3rd person 3D game.

'fight to maintain controll'

[PktLoss]

I guess they must be planning on shipping a special controller with the game. I simply dont see how its possible for them to make the standard x-box controller impossible to handle with the vibrations. They simply are not severe enough to make them a considerable issue. Its annoying, thats it

Re:'fight to maintain controll'

[Anonymous Coward]

They could introduce a random jitter into the controller input. That might be what they meant by "shakes."

Trends

[Klatoo55]

This is part of a trend that I've seen grow over the past few years of games taking into account the moral and ethical aspects of a player's style of gaming. The idea of having a player's environment be changed in accordance with his in-game morality is really pretty interesting. Past examples of this are in Resident Evil:Zero, Black & White, and many of the MMORPG's out there.

Weird...

[Thedalek]

So I'm the only one who, after reading the article, thought this version would probably come under just as much fire from drug activists as it will from the conservative right?

The game certainly depicts drug use in a negative light, and will probably make them a bit more dramatic by the final release. I predict that they'll come up with some stronger deterrants to Marijuana and LSD.

Of course, I wish they'd include N20...

Our screwed-up impressions about "drugs"

[Loundry]

In this game, you play a cop whose job is to kill people who would dare sell or use something that you fully intend to use.

I think it's a sign of our times. We have heard government propaganda about "drugs" for decades, but, in the day of the Internet, facts about drugs are freely available. The government, not willing to admit that they were wrong (political suicide), has not abated their propaganda or their persecution of people who sell or use "drugs". Hence, we have people who believe that it is both acceptable to use drugs and acceptable that some people get punished and killed for doing it.

And this game caters to people who hold those beliefs.