- Theme:
- Light
- Dark
 |
Sony PlayStation
 Click to enlarge |
Aeon Flux
Platform: PlayStation
Publisher: Viacom New Media
Developer: Cryo Interactive Entertainment
The Basics
If William S. Burroughs had ever decided to try his hand at penning Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" strip, the end result would have likely been much like Aeon Flux - the hyper-surreal-ultra-violent animated feature that debuted in '91 as a series of shorts in MTV's Liquid Television, before landing its own show in '95.
 Click to enlarge |
Nonlinear almost to the point of defying the description "storyline," the Aeon Flux television show revolved around its self-named lead: a lanky, black leather-clad super-spy who played both sides of an ambiguous societal conflict. A loose adaptation of the TV episode, "The Demiurge," the video game would have pit the character against her sometimes lover/sometimes enemy, Trevor Goodchild. Always up to some kind of mischief, Trevor's would then have introduced the entire planet to the power of The Demiurge - a creature that is, in series creator Peter Chung's own words, "some kind of divine being who's neither good nor bad...just all-powerful." Those who encountered the entity would have had a sort of revelation within its gaze and as a result, would have turned into blue-skinned zombie-like followers. Never really one to conform, Aeon not wanting to be "saved," might have endeavored to rid the world of The Demiurge's power. The game's story would have been told through a series of ALIAS-rendered cutscenes between the levels, as well as through hints provided by characters she encountered. While that may be all well and good, you would still have been left with the question: How do you kill an unkillable being? Well, let's just say the game's goal effectively altered the old Eastern saying "If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him" to "If you meet the Buddha on the road, place him on top of a large missile and blast him into space."
 Click to enlarge |
One quite interesting element almost adapted from the TV program was Aeon's ability to clone herself (and therefore have multiple lives, explaining the video game convention of being able to die and then keep on playing). However, in order to be cloned, you had to preserve fluid samples of Aeon while she was alive. So not only would you have to find the mechanism that allowed you to create a duplicate, but you would also have to make sure you're carrying a fluid sample with you at the time. This would've acted as a fairly good example of the puzzle-solving aspects of the game, keeping it from being just a simple 3D shooter - though admittedly, Aeon's various fighting moves and two different modes of shooting (accurate and strafe) would've essentially prevented that from happening.
 Click to enlarge |
Fans of the animated feature at one point were glad to know that not only were Aeon Flux's main characters planned within the title, some of the lesser-seen characters in the series would have returned as well. "It sort of tells alternative stories [to the program]," says Chung, "recombining characters from different episodes in ways that they didn't interact in the show. Part of the reason for that was that some of the characters seemed to have far more potential than they were given in the shows, so we wanted to give them a second chance. Along the way, there were a lot of subplots and incidental things that allow [these] characters to have cameo appearances."
Even with all this going for it, we questioned whether the game could have held up as an accurate adaptation of the series. The creator thought so. He even flew to France to direct the game's motion capture shoot, ensuring that the characters in the game would have moved exactly as strangely and spider-like as they do in the TV program. "I couldn't have expected it to be any closer," Chung commented, "in terms of a 3D-modeled, computer-generated rendition of the Aeon Flux world."
WHAT HAPPENED?
Viacom was dissolved when Spelling Entertainment realized it had two video game divisions. Spelling folded Viacom into Virgin, which then canceled all working and planned Viacom titles - Aeon Flux being one of them.
Meanwhile, Cryo reworked the game into a title called PAX Corps, which was released in Europe to poor reviews. No US publisher has signed on to bring the game here.
Also worth mentioning is the fact the GT Interactive has acquired the rights to the Aeon Flux license, though no game has been announced to date.
| « Previous Page | Next: Show me more » |
