It’s been a cult movie staple for over 15 years but, from Friday, you’ll be able to interact with Mr Pink, Mr White, Nice Guy Eddie and the rest of Quentin Tarantino’s be-suited robbers as Eidos launches Reservoir Dogs, the game.
Attendees of the EIEF were treated to a special preview on Tuesday by members of the Volatile Games development team.
Dressed appropriately in black suits, Ben Fisher and Ian Pestridge delivered a presentation that was every bit as slick and sharp as they game they have designed.
Fisher conceded that Reservoir Dogs was perhaps not an obvious choice of movie for a game version. It is dialogue heavy, there’s a lot of characterisation and only a few main locations. On the other hand there are excellent elements on which to build a good gaming experience; a heist, tons of gunplay, dramatic escapes and multiple different points of view.
So, what’s it like?
From the start Reservoir Dogs is a smart, hip game. From its snappy animated menus to its sleek black, white and red colour scheme, the whole look and feel of the menus echoes the retro stylings of the movie.
Each level is preceded by a recreation of a classic scene. A total of 15 minutes of movie time was recreated digitally, complete with the razor-sharp dialogue for which Tarantino became famous. The recreations set the tone beautifully before players are thrown into a variety of violent situations from which they must escape to progress to the next level.
We said the graphics were realistic but so is the dialogue and each level is accompanied by excerpts, with each character having over 200 lines.
The team demonstrated Level 1, a ‘shoot-em-up’ with Mr Blue’s escape from the heist. In superbly realistically rendered animation, the player must exit the scene of the failed heist as cops close in. So far, so standard ‘shoot-em-up’, but there is a twist. The development team has included different styles of play so you can choose to just go bananas and shoot everybody (the psycho approach) or you can negotiate, barter or just intimidate your way out of the situation (the professional approach). This addition adds variety and depth to the gaming experience; in fact Ben Fisher reckoned it’s possible to complete the entire game without firing a single bullet. The game rates your style at the end of each level and cleverly adjusts to respond to your approach, allowing you to invent your own reservoir dog.
So what about variety?
The game remains faithful to the Tarantino ‘universe’ but it would have been very linear and predictable if they had just followed the movie. Instead they have taken elements from the movie and developed additional material. Thus players can engage in the escape from the heist, take part in car chases and go to places only mentioned in passing in the movie. The team has created individual timelines for all the characters for the whole 24 hours of the movie and players can chop around, moving back and forwards in time, from one event to another.
The new material has been thoroughly researched to fit with the look and feel of the original. As Fisher pointed out, Tarantino has never directed a car chase so they were careful to draw inspiration from the sort of 70’s movies (like Vanishing Point) that would have influenced him.
This approach includes the music. Eidos licensed all the original music from the film but more was required to fit the length of the game. Some was written in-house and additional tracks were licensed including some stupendously funky 70’s driving music to accompany the car chase.
And what about that ear cutting scene?
Reservoir Dogs the game would hardly have been complete without the single most (in)famous scene from the film, the ear cutting scene. Sure enough, it is in there and, yes, you can cut off the cop’s ear (though it’s not obligatory, especially if you are playing pro style). However, Fisher was quick to point out, the team chose to carry this out in the style of the movie so the camera cuts away as the event happens allowing your imagination to do the work, just like Tarantino did.
End credits
There’s no doubt, Eidos and the Volatile Games team have gone to a lot of trouble to craft a game that’s true to the spirit of the original movie. They have lovingly recreated the atmosphere and the music but have had the imagination to extend the world beyond that in the movie to provide a rich and varied gaming experience. The multi-style mode of playing adds further depth and dimension making the game play differently every time. The whole package is as imaginative and witty as the original, play it and you’re bound to be spouting Tarantino-esque dialog for months to come.
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Reservoir Dogs (PS2)
Reservoir Dogs (Xbox)
Reservoir Dogs (PC DVD)
Pre/order: Amazon US
Reservoir Dogs (PS2)
Reservoir Dogs (Xbox)
Current trailer
How fantastic is this? A couple of turbo-code monkeys have written a Commodore 64 (C64) emulator that runs within Flash on a Web browser.
MAME was a huge revelation when it first arrived, letting users load up the ROM sets from old arcade machine and play them as if it was on the original hardware.
All of the emulators are a clear demonstration that the power of hardware has increased tremendously.
Inanimate Alice is a story about a games developer called Alice created by Kate Pullinger, Ian Harper & Chris Joseph. The story tells of her childhood and how she created and played games as she grew up in different countries around the world. Inanimate Alice a multi part episodic, interactive game which is available online at 
In a question and answer session the trio revealed that the project is aimed at the widest possible audience (especially non-gamers) but is currently most popular amongst 16-35 year old females.
The second day of EIEF got underway with seminar on media convergence with the first speaker being Rosanna Sun of 
Each different media (movie, games etc) has different production schedules and sharing ‘assets’ amongst them became an enormous scheduling problem. Visual fx shots are typically done last in movies, for games they needed to be ready 6 months prior to launch. This meant some sequences had to be literally re-directed from movie sequences.
During Q&A
Trolltech may not be well known, but they make a software product called Qt (pronounced “cutie”) which is used by many. It’s a package that allows developers to write code that works across several platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOS X) so only one set of API’s (Applications Programming Interfaces) need to be learnt.
Trolltech Greenphone
Applications, new kernels and versions of Qt and Qtopia can be loaded on to the Greenphone through the mini USB connection.
When we saw the 
There’s thirteen different skin designs currently available with any RSS or Atom feed simply turned in to a Widget.
Wedging its foot firmly into the territory currently ruled by rival application World Mate, Fizz Traveller for Pocket PC is a mobile travel companion, compatible with Windows Mobile 2003/2005 and Smartphone editions.
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Sadly, you couldn’t zoom into the map so it wasn’t the greatest of travel aids.
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Here’s the third in Mike’s three part review of why the Palm Treo rocks his boat.
Word!
It’s the same story with SMS, with the built in text messaging interface on the Palm remaining streets ahead of its Pocket PC rivals, with the superb auto-threading conversations making it easy to keep track of text conversations. It really is a delight to use.
“A wide music industry grouping representing the independent record industry, composers and songwriters, musicians and performers, music managers, music publishers and their collecting societies hosted a crucial round table meeting yesterday, chaired by the Smith Institute, to debate the creation of a progressive and innovative copyright framework that is fit for purpose in the digital age.”
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These issues don’t just apply to the music industry and they’re gaining traction from other content industries and internationally.
Bulldog have just pulled out of the retail market and have decided to concentrate on the wholesale side and compete with BT Wholesale. Though part of this is that their parent Cable and Wireless (C&W) are trying to consolidate to fewer larger customers (i.e. broadband suppliers who then have lots of customers), part of the problem with having retail customers is you have to constantly upgrade your network to meet their growing bandwidth needs, and this gets very expensive very quickly.
This model is coming to the UK, BT’s broadband hub service is their first foray into an IP connected world, BT Vision (IPTV) is coming.