Duty Calls: First Person Shopper
The games industry has never been bigger. Video games are advertised during the World Cup and the Superbowl, and on giant billboards at other major televised events. The biggest releases are given red carpet treatment, with minor celebrities escorted to launch events to be interviewed by MrPointyhead from Xbox Live and Ortis off The Gadget Show.
Meanwhile, real celebrities – and Hollywood stars at that – are lending their vocal talents to games with increasing regularity. As the profile and budget of video games increases, so the line between games and other media blurs. Rockstar’s forthcoming L.A. Noire will soon introduce a new level of performance capture to games, allowing them to ensnare the subtle nuance of an actor’s every expression. The worlds of film, television and video games are intersecting, and between CG cut scenes and CG special effects it can be difficult them apart.
So it’s refreshing when the publishers of a high profile release decide not to take a more traditional route when it comes to advertising, and instead trail-blaze a path unique to the media they deal in. Because as gamers we’re not here just for visuals, animation, or full orchestral scores – we’re here to play in and interact with a world that responds to us, and only video games can provide us with that. Since we interact with games like this, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with the adverts for them?
Enter Duty Calls, the interactive advertisement for Bulletstorm.
When Duty Calls..
I hesitate to call Duty Calls a game. It certainly looks like a game and it plays like one right up until you stop thinking of it as the first person shooter it appears to be. Stop shooting every enemy as he appears and you’ll notice that, beyond a couple scripted sequences, the bad guys never fight back.
Of course, that’s all part of the joke. “This is a parody” says the text at the bottom of the title screen. “It is not associated with Activision or the Call of Duty Games.”
If the title hasn’t clued you in, the game itself will: Duty Calls is a parodic clone of the Call of Duty franchise. It opens with a meandering satellite grid search, and plunges you into A.N. Other warzone, replete with burnt out cars, stacks of tires, and corrugated iron as far as the eye can see. Soldiers in nondescript uniforms leap from behind crates to yell “I AM AN ENEMY!” and stand still, awaiting their inevitable demise. Kill one and you’ll be treated to a basso fanfare as you gain an experience level. “Master Sergeant Shooter Person!” the voice-over shrieks, and the rank names become ever more ludicrous as you progress through the game, as does the phallus-like stack of medals that mounts up beside them.
Duty Calls as its tongue so far in it's cheek its practically choking on it.
Though the game’s obviously not intended to be taken seriously – an actor intones the word ‘Boring’ every time you shoot your gun for heaven’s sake – there’s a surprising amount of polish here. Take a screenshot at any point in the game and you could easily pass it off as coming from a Call of Duty title – or you could, as long as your picture doesn’t come from the end of the game, when little American flags spring from your thumbs and shower fireworks over the final boss while he weeps “USA is dominate!”
From jam-filled death screens to slow-motion executions, there are more than enough gags throughout the game’s short length to satisfy anyone who’s ever sneered at a Call of Duty title. This is where Duty Calls falls down – it’s already preaching to the converted. It might end with a nice little trailer showing off the game it’s advertising, but for all that, it’s unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already know about Bulletstorm to purchase the game.
But maybe that isn’t the point. Maybe Duty Calls was designed to grab headlines and draw attention to itself, rather than be an advert in and of itself. Earlier today I heard a Radio One news report about lag problems in Call of Duty: Black Ops. I was shocked a news item so minor would be given precedence over every other item on the broadcast except the civil unrest in Egypt. But apparently I’m out of touch with just how big a deal the Call of Duty games are. If a prominent dev team can make something that makes fun of the franchise, maybe they don’t need anyone to actually play it. As enjoyable as Duty Calls is, maybe it makes more of a statement simply by existing.
Sadly, I won’t be playing Bulletstorm when it’s released at the end of February. In a cruel twist Duty Calls runs perfectly on my PC, but the game it was designed to sell will not.
- Campfire Burning
I might have liked this more had its sense of humour not been so paralysing simplistic and unimaginatively snide. Also, if you’re going to market your game by taking the piss out of a more established one, you really need to hope and pray yours doesn’t bomb (ie BLUR).
I think there’s a vast difference between the marketing for Blur and Bulletstorm. Bulletstorm’s supposed to be an OTT answer to the percieved stagnation of the shooter genre, the same way Serious Sam and Duke 3D were in their day. The ad campaign for Blur was just tacked on to the product, and didn’t reflect the nature of the game at all. There wasn’t an audience of gamers complaning about Mario Kart being ‘kiddie’ and wishing there was something that did the same thing in a less cartoony manner, whereas there are lots of people complaining about the dominance of Call of Duty, and all the games trying to immitate it.
You’re right about Duty Calls not being particularly witty, but it IS cheeky where Blurs adverts were malicious. And again it’s in keeping with Bulletorm – I mean, when you finish the demo it calls you ‘dick-tits’. It assumes anyone interested in playing the game is already in on the joke.