ECTS 2003: Beyond Good & Evil
A veritable gaming Pick 'n' Mix.
At one stage while I was playing Beyond Good & Evil, a couple of chaps looking over my shoulder started to chuckle and remonstrated that it’s a pretty inappropriate name for the game – given that all they had seen of it in those few fleeting moments was a hovercraft kart racer set in a Venice-style fantasy town.
Make your mind up...
But while it’s true to say that the ECTS was oddly split between third-person and racing sections, it did a good job of emphasising the diversity of activities on offer. In fact, the four demo levels were totally inconsistent with one another – we imagine the final game will do a better job of introducing them.
However they were both easy to pick up and pretty playable. After finding her massive pay-as-you-go electronic shield was out of credit, the first area saw playable character Jade fighting a series of unlikely pod-like alien enemies which dropped in via meteorite and captured a group of children. She does this by slashing at them in a three-stroke attack using the X button, dodging their slashes where needed with square, and manoeuvring around with the left analogue stick – curiously in this section, the camera is always fixed to the nearside wall. Even more curiously, we never felt we needed to move it.
Once Jade dispatches these nasties, she is quickly grabbed from beneath the ground by a plant-like alien, only to be rescued at the last possible moment by the flying feet of her heroic pig chum (we’re not making this up). From here, she has to take on this “boss plant” (if you like), which attacks with a probing laser and by spawning other pod enemies. To defeat him, Jade slashes away at his eye until he erects up a barrier of spikes, and then charges an attack with X to sweep away his defences and open him up to attack once more.
Next!
With this demo out of the way, and having acquired the first of various gems we seemed to be collecting (a Mario-esque stars substitute), we were expecting something of a repeat through the next few levels. Nope. Firing up the next one, we found ourselves sitting in a hovercraft atop the chopping waves of an expansive fishing cove, with a massive worm-like dragon swishing back and forth past our laser sights. Our job, the pig informed us, was to get rid of it.
To do this, we had to bring our little propeller blades to life and accelerate around the bay using R2, dodging fishing boats and rocky outcroppings, firing off volleys of ammunition from our cannon and gradually wittling down the enemy’s bomb-dropping tail until all that remained was a head. With a few quick shots, the head let out a screech of pain and arced into the air and splashed down, spraying water and plumes of smoke into the atmosphere on impact, leaving a pearly gem in its wake.
Having briefly caught the third demo as we turned up at the stands, we thought we’d bypass that for now and return to it after we’d had a look at the other as-yet unexplored fourth section. Surprise, surprise, it was another deviation from whatever it was we were expecting – a couple of races; three laps round a mountain range and three more round a Venice-like mixture of watery canals and whitewashed streets in a field of six racers...
Ah, another tangent
To say that these races were “a bit throwaway” might be to miss the point, as they seem to be yet another task geared at unlocking a gemstone, but by this stage it was becoming clear that Michel Ancel’s latest is a kind of Jak & Daxter/Rayman hybrid, with all manner of different gameplay styles used to obtain gems on a long quest to stop some aliens. We haven’t glanced at the fact sheet lately so don’t get too upset if we’re wrong, but that’s certainly the impression the demo conveys.
Back to the that third section though, and it was even more familiar to us when we played it because we’ve actually seen it featured in BG&E trailers. In it, Jade is on some sort of reconnaissance mission with a camera, sneaking through tunnels and exchanging rebellious vows with an incarcerated look-alike of Disney’s Hercules, before sidling past some guards, along a ledge over a chasm, half-inching some more gems and launching herself into jumping forward rolls to clamber over searing hot pipes. And with the last of these, a door snaps open and a bunch of Centurion-looking enemies give chase.
And this is by far the most interesting section of the BG&E demo – a skyline chase away from a bunch of laser-firing guards and a spaceship, up and down over some suspiciously Matrix-esque slanting rooftops and over several huge jumps, all the while the environment around her is being torn to shreds by ordnance. Although it’s a pretty simple matter of running into the camera with the left analogue stick, tapping the tumble button at the right obstacle and watching as the camera slips to a suitable vantage point for each of Jade’s scripted jumps – including a final one into the outstretched hand of Hercules, who promptly tells her that one should never split up the team.
Mostly “good”, then
All in all, it’s an interesting game. It looks surprisingly nice for a PS2 title, although perhaps its exclusivity has given the developer a chance to pay it their full attention. It’s nowhere near as sharply detailed and yet smoothly executed as Naughty Dog or Insomniac’s offerings, but it has a style somewhere between those games and Rayman 3. Characters are pint-sized little chaps and chapettes – Jade, for example, has Lara-like facial features, a white T-shirt exposing her midriff, with a little bag strap running down her front and baggy trousers, but is quite basic in detail. Enemies and environments, likewise, are quite imaginative but basically textured, much like Rayman 3, however the use of strongly contrasting colours once again gives the game a very fantastical look – and one of which we’re quite fond.
The code we were seeing was allegedly 90 per cent complete, and it certainly felt solid enough to play, but obviously this was a purpose-built demo version for the show and not a proper copy of the game – something we’ll be trying to obtain from Ubi Soft once we escape the boisterous atmosphere of ECTS and return to civilisation.