Marc Ecko's Getting Up Hands-On

Marc Ecko, graffiti artist extraordinaire and impresario of the burgeoning "urban fusion" design movement, has already made a fortune in clothing, magazines, and fashion accessories. Now he's out to make his mark on the gaming landscape with Marc Ecko's Getting Up, a hip urban adventure that celebrates the pro-democracy aspects of graffiti tagging--a practice some sticks-in-the-mud persist in calling vandalism. Sorrent's scored the rights to the mobile version of this multiplatform game, and it recently let us take a sneak peek at a pre-alpha version of it.

Sorrent's crafting Marc Ecko's Getting Up into a facile 2D platform game that virtually anyone should be able to pick up and play. The game's protagonist, Trane, is a heady young man with a spring in his step and a totalitarian government to tear down. This sad organization's existence seems to be predicated upon its ruthless suppression of individual initiative and spontaneity, which is in turn manifested by the cityscape's complete lack of coloration. There's only one way to break the enforcer's grip: Trane must pick up enough spray cans to paint a polychromatic swath across town, thereby sending the dogmatically dreary despots packing.

This broad symbolic gesture will be matched by a simple, yet time-honored, gameplay dynamic. In the service of freedom, Trane is capable of great feats of athleticism. For instance, he can sprint and leap like an Olympian, and he can temporarily grab onto walls for evasive or height-seeking purposes. Trane's wall-climbing skill is a video game convention, of course, and once he's stuck to a wall, he'll start to slide down gradually. So bouncing up shafts or climbing a single surface takes a bit of timing.

Trane has no other offensive or defensive capabilities, however, so you'll have to be careful to avoid the government pawns that are out to collar you. This may not be so tough when you're simply collecting cans, which are scattered all over the level, but you'll also encounter occasional "boss tags" that you need to pass through several times to complete. According to a Sorrent representative, these tags will be heavily guarded, so you'll need to use some guile to rack up the necessary number of hits. There were no enemies present in our pre-alpha version of the game, so we can't yet say how difficult all this will be.

Our preview time with Trane reminded us a lot of another athletic 2D hero: Sonic the Hedgehog. Getting Up's pacing and gameplay is somewhat similar to that of the famed Sega Genesis platformer. Basically, if you substitute paint cans for rings, you'll have a rough idea of what the game plays like. At the same time, Marc Ecko's Getting Up has its own stylistic flourishes. Most notably in the LG VX7000 version, Trane leaves a "motion blur" trail of images if he gets going fast enough, and the paint cans explode in a burst of color when you grab them, complete with some minor particle effects. Sorrent promised it would further optimize these effects, as well as the game's general performance, before its release. Higher-end versions of the final game will also include an MP3 soundtrack composed by famous hip-hop DJ RJD2. We were able to listen to a sample track in the preview and found the artist's funky electroscratch stylings to be thoroughly ill.

We like what we've seen from Marc Ecko's Getting Up, which admittedly isn't very much yet. Though the infrastructure is promising, Sorrent will need to make sure the enemy and level designs are sufficiently clever to maintain interest in the game. We'll find out whether it's done its homework on or around Getting Up's cross-console release date of September 13. We'll try to get an additional hands-on preview of a later build of the game before then, too.