E3 06: Jackass: The Game Impressions

LOS ANGELES--Today we met with Red Mile Entertainment for a first look at Jackass: The Game, which is still quite early in development at the Wellington, New Zealand-based Sidhe Interactive, but we were still able to get a good sense of where they are headed with the game. The gameplay in Jackass is all about re-creating the ridiculous and often life-threatening stunts that are the crux of the Jackass TV show experience, and we were shown a few different examples of the 40-plus stunts that Sidhe hopes to include in the final version of the game.

First off was San Fran Trash Can, where we saw Steve-O get stuffed into an aluminum trash can and then rolled down a very steep San Francisco hill. The player was tasked with avoiding cross-traffic and generally maintaining control of the trash can. The gameplay in place for this stunt is pretty simple at this point, though Sidhe is talking about including multiple objectives, like causing the man in the can incredible levels of pain, or having you take out all of the mailboxes along the hill.

The next stunt we saw was Bumper Madness, where four players attack each other in bumper cars perched atop a tall building. Your objective is to knock the other players off and avoid getting knocked off yourself. We were then shown Golf Rally, which put Johnny Knoxville into a golf cart on a mini-golf course and had him knocking over a series of flags before time ran out while he indiscriminately wrecked all of the windmills and garden gnomes that populated the course. We were told about a mode called foxhunt, where the other Jackasses would be dressed in fox costumes and the player in the golf cart would have to run them down.

Of course, it wouldn't be Jackass without the intoxicating blend of poor decision-making and shopping carts, and to this end, Jackass: The Game will deliver. The mode we saw was a simple four-player race down a hill that was similar to the course we saw in San Fran Trash Can, though a series of hairpin turns helped mix things up. Though we didn't get any hands-on time with the game, all of the stunts on display seemed quite simple, emphasizing a pick-up-and-play quality. Along with the regular stunts, Jackass: The Game promises to give the pint-sized Wee Man his own set of minigames called Wee Games, such as the fully self-explanatory Whac a Wee Man.

Jackass: The Game isn't just a random selection of minigames, though, and the MTV story mode will give it some structure by putting you in the role of the show's director after Jeff Tremaine, the actual show director and often unwitting straight man to the crew's pranks, becomes incapacitated. We were shown a cutscene from this mode where Johnny Knoxville places a mouse trap right next to a sleeping crewmember's cell phone, then scampers off and calls the cell phone. Of course, the sleeping crewmember blindly reaches for the wrong thing, with painful and hilarious results. The whole sequence was framed in a way that felt very true to the sort of handheld style of the Jackass show, complete with night vision and shaky cam effects.

Adding to the game's authenticity is the involvement of the Jackass crew. A bunch of the crew members, including Johnny Knoxville, provide their voices and likenesses for the game. In fact, during the gameplay, a large head-and-shoulders version of the Jackass being played appeared in the lower left corner of the screen, showing cuts and bruises as the stunts progressed.

Red Mile and Sidhe seem quite focused on being faithful to the perverted fun that made Jackass such a watchable and cringe-inducing show in the first place, and we're curious to see how the game develops. Jackass: The Game is slated to hit the PC and consoles in the fourth quarter of 2006.