Interviews// Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice - Lead Designer, Chris Whiteside

The tank's also pretty cool, which is a four-stage mission. Firstly you have to stop this bunch of warlords destroying a facility to deploy nuclear weapons. You stop them doing that, then the Russian gets angry and takes off in his tank [indicates on screen while playing]… So you get to see these superb looking vehicles and then you get to jump on them and drive them! Check out the graphics on that. Awesome! [grins widely].

We’re also very proud of the PSP engines we’ve got.


SPOnG: You’ve built on the engine from the first game…

Chris Whiteside: Yeah, yeah, we’ve optimised it loads… LOOK! Did you see her jump there… Ashley jumps on the vehicle and places explosives, and you need to encourage her to keep doing this, as this is one of the unique things she does to assist you in the game. And look, here’s one of the first bosses in the game… its very old school… very Indiana Jones… anyways [grins and puts down PSP]


SPOnG: Has the difficulty in the game changed much since the first game?

Chris Whiteside: Yeah totally. The first game, or at least the European version, was very challenging. One of the biggest reasons for this was that we had no checkpoints in the game. So if you can imagine you do like a nine-minute mission and you die in the last mile, that could be pretty frustrating. So the first change we made was to make every phase in the mission a checkpoint, so you just go back to the last point if you get killed. And we’ve also got three difficulty settings, we’ve massively improved the vehicle handling and we’ve changed the width of the roads. So in terms of difficulty, every area we could sort out: we have.


SPOnG: That’s good to hear, as the difficulty in the European version of the first game was perhaps one of the main criticisms most reviewers focused on.

Chris Whiteside: Obviously after the game had come out in Europe and we looked at the reviews and the feedback from gamers it was clear that we had an issue with that. So we changed the US version of the game and tried to deal with most of those problems. In this new version, one of the things we wanted to do was to introduce meaningful difficulty levels in the game.

“Easy, normal and hard” don’t tend to mean so much, we think. They're almost archaic in terms of modern videogames. You have casual gamers coming to the game and thinking “what does 'easy' mean?” So invariably they pick the wrong setting and they feel uncomfortable with the product.

So, instead we communicate better to them. We say “you play games 2-4 hours a week”, or “you play games frequently”, or “you play games all the time” so they understand better from the off what bracket they are in. It makes for a much more accessible game.

Secondly, we found that when people were playing on the tracks [in the first game], because the tracks weren’t wide enough, they were unable to employ a strategy, because there was so little room to manoeuvre around other vehicles. Also players were so focused on the action that they would come to a corner and smash straight into a wall… All that is gone in this version.


SPOnG: Great. Look forward to playing some more of it. Thanks for your time Chris.

Chris Whiteside: No worries.