Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice: Interview

How movies and forum posters helped make the Pursuit Force sequel a better game.

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Something Europeans will be pleased to see added to the series is a checkpoint system, which saves your state during missions. This was actually introduced for the US version of the PSP original, following complaints after the European launch.

There are new difficulty levels too - the naming of which Bigbig has spent much time pondering. There's no Easy, Normal or Difficult here. Whiteside calls that tested nomenclature "archaic".

Rather the team has opted for more descriptive terms - Casual, Hardcore - that say more about the player than about an arbitrary scale. "We want to make the game as accessible as possible. We want to grey the lines between this tribal kind of rivalry," says Whiteside.

The tracks, too, have been revamped. Comments from disgruntled owners of the first game prompted a moratorium on hard-turns. In Extreme Justice they sweep. "It allows for an easier drive, but it also allows for the player to be more strategic and focussed on the action around him. Because the roads are so wide now you get that Burnout effect of being able to take an apex of a corner and slide for about 200 metres around it."

Given that the PSP and PlayStation 2 games are, for the most part, identical, it seems that Extreme Justice might have been a vehicle for cross-platform play. "We looked into save swapping between PSP and PS2," admits Whiteside, but he says the team would not allow anything to distract them from their design document.

"At the start of the project we had our X, which is the main vision we're trying to accomplish. If along the way certain things come up and we think we can implement them, then fine. But if something takes up time and it's going to take too long to implement and be detrimental to things we spent a lot of time on, then that's something we have to look at to do in the future."

That future is wide-open, says Whiteside. A follow-up could, like action movies themselves, jump in any direction, say with the disbanding of Pursuit Force, taking the series underground.

"We embrace cliches. We don't take ourselves too seriously, so in terms of taking the universe somewhere, the sky's the limit. You think of an idea and we can do it."

But there's nothing definite yet - or at least nothing the team is willing to go on the record about. Not even a console. Sony owns the Pursuit Force name, almost guaranteeing the series will land on the PlayStation 3. But all Whiteside will say on the matter is that the team is looking at "a next-generation console".

For the moment, there are "no plans" for another version. Wherever it eventually lands, look for something unexpected.

"Basically Pursuit Force is action movies," Whiteside says. "There are plenty of avenues we can take it down."

Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice will be out for PSP and PlayStation 2 this September.

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