Men in Black Returns

A forthcoming third-person action-adventure title based on the film Men in Black promises to be more than the average movie licensing effort, says its new LA-based publisher The Design League.

"We didn't want to rest on the laurels of the movie," said Yoni Koenig of Chronic Entertainment, the game's developer, in a preview showing on Friday at GameSpot's offices. "It is a real game, with real gameplay." In Men in Black, the player becomes a polygonal version of Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, or Linda Fiorentino, and sets off on numerous missions to save Earth from hostile aliens. The adventures are entirely new, not based on events in the movie.

The game begins at headquarters, where the player is debriefed on one of three major missions (each with four sub-missions), and armed with gadgets. A shooting gallery lets the player practice with the same cool weaponry used in the movie, such as the easily-underestimated Noisy Cricket, the Series 4 De-Atomizer, the Reverberating Carbonizer and the Pulsar Arm Cannon - which "may have brought down the first Russian SkyLab in the late 1970s."

As in the movie, there are light touches of humor throughout the game - in the shooting gallery a gentle voice rates your progress with lines such as "Oh dear, oh dear" and "Watch for civilians!"

Men in Black's underlying plot is to uncover and stop a trade war that threatens life on Earth with the spore of a rare and deadly Amazonian flower. To save the day, the player must solve puzzles, blast - and punch and kick - aliens such as the amphibious Manitobans, brutish Coyames, and gluttonous Chubbies, in environments including an Amazonia mine and an arctic base reminiscent of the one in John Carpenter's The Thing. The player moves through more than 200 game environments, each rendered by hand using a proprietary 3-D engine.

The game's combat sequences will appeal to twitch fans (there are some 15 key commands for hand-to-hand fighting), and puzzle elements will register with the adventure crowd.

Men in Black is set for a September release on PC, and a December release on PlayStation. The street price is estimated at US$55.