There's a surprising moment in the opening scenes of Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony, as you're driving the title character to one of his struggling Liberty City nightclubs.
"Forget the banks," Gay Tony says. "We're the ones who needed a bailout!"
Shortly after, during an altercation with the club's bouncer, one of the game's comically eloquent drug-dealing thugs says: "Good luck getting a job in this economic climate, motherfucker!"
Cheap laughs, to be sure, but topical ones — something you rarely see in videogames. Gay Tony is the second of two episodic installments in the Grand Theft Auto series, made using the massive faux New York City of GTA IV. The series has always taken R-rated potshots at American pop culture, but producing smaller games created on tighter schedules has allowed Rockstar Games to breathe a different sort of life into Grand Theft Auto's twisted mirror world, making the action seem as if it's taking place right this minute.
"One of the reasons that Gay Tony is having problems is because the recession is keeping people out of nightclubs," said Mikel Reparaz, who reviewed the game for enthusiast site GamesRadar. "They're very smart in what they pick on, in that it's up-to-date, but not easily dated."
This type of timeliness is something we could use a lot more of in games. Unfortunately, videogames don't really have their South Park just yet. Yes, gamers get plenty of crude humor. But what the animated television show has become best known for in recent years is its lightning-quick reactions to events in the news.
A recent example: In mid-September, members of the activist group ACORN were caught on tape allegedly advising prostitutes on how to launder their ill-gotten earnings. Only a month later, South Park debuted "Butters' Bottom Bitch," in which one of the kids solicits help from ACORN in starting a grade-school prostitution ring.
South Park's just-in-time production process turned headlines into punchlines with remarkable speed.
Similarly, Rockstar nailed current economic problems as a ripe target for satire with The Lost and Damned, the February episode of GTA IV. (Gay Tony is downloadable from Xbox Live or available on an Xbox 360 disc called Episodes From Liberty City that bundles the new chapter with Lost and Damned.)
"You had to go rescue some corrupt CEOs from the FBI and take them to a waiting helicopter, which would take them to a country without extradition treaties," said Reparaz. "With everything that was going on at the time, that was one of the most uncomfortable things I ever had to do in a videogame."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqtCFXbEIf0Despite a teaser trailer (embedded right) that talks of swine flu and socialism, the games are still not quite as up-to-the-second as South Park.
Videogames' accelerating shift from discs to downloads should enable gamemakers to achieve similarly topical results, but it hasn't happened yet. The only publisher that has thrown itself feet-first into producing episodic games on a reliable schedule is Telltale Games. But with cartoonish titles like Sam & Max and Monkey Island, Telltale is telling standalone stories rather than reacting to the news.
The closest thing to South Park-style relevance in videogames is the work of companies like AddictingGames, a San Francisco-based developer that fills its web portal with time-waster Flash games churned out in a matter of weeks to capitalize on news stories.
"If you want to make fun of something in politics or culture, games are now a great way to do it," AddictingGames VP Kate Connally told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year.
The company is known for such gems as Where's the Naughty Governor? As of this writing, AddictingGames' Where's Waldo?-style lampoon of cheating South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford et al has been played more than 700,000 times.
But regardless of the name of the gamemaker, these titles often aren't very much fun to play. And there's the rub: Is it possible to create a game on an episodic timeline that has enjoyable gameplay alongside the topical humor?
Making fun games is hard. Gay Tony even has its issues. While outrunning the cops in a high-speed chase is still exhilarating, all the things that were somewhat forgivable when GTA IV debuted in early 2008 — unforgiving mission checkpoints, janky gun controls — are just plain annoying in late 2009.
And yet Grand Theft Auto's later episodes couldn't exist if Rockstar had to design a whole new game. Gay Tony and Lost and Damned are only possible because of the work already done to complete the massive open city of GTA IV, which was four years and millions of dollars in the making. (Not to mention the fact that Microsoft subsidized the Xbox-exclusive episodes to the tune of $50 million.)
If another game developer could straddle the line somewhere between Rockstar's quality design and the speedy humor of AddictingGames' time-killers, we could have a South Park of games.
And having that kind of flexibility would be great in this lousy economic climate. (Zing.)
Image courtesy Rockstar Games
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