Rebranded follow-up Gun Runner appears to feature Vin Diesel.
Now-defunct studio Midway was once developing a sequel to John Woo's Stranglehold, newly-released footage shows.
The rebranded follow-up, provisionally titled Gun Runner, would have seen the return of Chow Yun Fat's Inspector Tequila. The footage also shows a new character that looks suspiciously like Vin Diesel.
Diesel's involvement would make sense - Midway presumably still held the rights to his image following its Vin Diesel-fronted driving game Wheelman.
As I recall, the demos for Stranglehold and BioShock came out fairly close to one another. I certainly played them both on the same day. It was weird. It was like videogames' past had decided to pick a fight with its possible future.
Former Midway boss David Zucker believes the troubled publisher has nothing to fear thanks to its considerable investment in next-gen console technology.
Every now and then, someone pops out of the woodwork to complain that the games industry isn't innovative any more. This is clearly nonsense. Certainly, publishers might have an ongoing love affair with barely distinguishable sequels and a herd mentality that makes sheep look strong-willed, but consider this - year after year, the industry invents new and previously unheard-of ways to make you part with your cash. If that's not innovation, what is?
Download Content (DLC) is a new arrival in the exciting field of wallet-stripping, and the Xbox 360 is on the vanguard. Many Xbox 360 games have content available for download sometime after launch, allowing you to hand over a few measly Microsoft points for access to new maps, models, missions and the likes. It's a great idea in theory, obviously - who doesn't want to extend the life of their favourite game a bit? In practice, though, there's some suspicion about it. Nobody wants to find themselves paying extra money for content that should have been in the game in the first place.
Hence these DLC roundup features, where we'll be looking at the bits and bobs that have made their way onto Xbox Live - and, soon, PSN - in the past few months, and checking out what's worth whipping your card out for, and what deserves to sit, dusty and unloved, in the digital dustbins out the back of the Marketplace.
After a joyous yuletide spent playing Naughty Dog's supreme Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, it's back to the frontlines of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 console war for this reporter, with the latest battery of cross-platform confrontations. You know the score by now: impartial criticism on each multi-format release is the name of the game, the aim being to supplement the original Eurogamer reviews with additional commentary relevant to each version of the game, with gameplay the primary concern.
As is the norm with our face-off comparison features, each game feature is supplemented with a range of ultra-clean screengrabs losslessly extracted from the HDMI ports of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Elite. A Digital Foundry HD capture station is used to acquire every last pixel output by the consoles at full 24-bit precision, with the unit calibrated to full-range RGB and both systems set up likewise. As 1080p performance is so variable on PlayStation 3, we've included screenshots of this video mode in action where applicable and how the results compare to the Xbox 360's in-built GPU scaler on the same titles.
So... the games then. A colossal array of wares to get through in what is the biggest face-off feature yet; 12 titles that between them rate a 'not bad at all' 7.5/10 when their Eurogamer review scores are taken as an average.
Midway has announced that both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners can expect to download a map pack for John Woo's Stranglehold in the near future. Providing they bought Stranglehold and want some downloadable content in any event.
Stranglehold was never going to be a run of the mill shoot 'em up - this is extreme gun porn, with two hundred money shots before the first level is through.
With no pretensions to be anything other than a high-fiving celebration of John Woo's brand of explosive gunplay and balletic action, it hits the mark over and over and over again. From the first chapter to the crazy multiple climax of the seventh, this is a game determined to have you gurning joyously at the batshit craziness of it all. It might well be one of the most simple and hilariously repetitive games ever, but you can't help admire how Woo's demented cinematic vision has been so effortlessly translated into one of the rawest action videogames ever made. How we managed to avoid using the word intense in that paragraph, we'll never know. Whoops.
In this videogaming sequel to Woo's seminal 1991 movie Hard Boiled, you take on the role of the seemingly invincible Inspector Tequila, a renegade cop played by Chow Yun Fat who's not afraid to do things his own way. And when we say 'his own way', we don't just mean that he's a bit chippy to his boss and doesn't follow orders. What we actually mean is that he'll slaughter 1500 henchmen on the way to the otherwise noble goal of trying to save family members.
Stranglehold has backed casually toward the counter of retail and slipped its bottom gently along it - which is a meaningless way of saying it's now due out in mid-September.
Have you ever considered the plight of the humble fruit-seller? No, of course you bloody haven't. It's below your radar, isn't it? You walk right past these brave guys and girls, courageously hawking their Vitamin C-laden wares outside tube and train stations around the nation, without ever giving a thought to the dangers they face.
Midway's CEO David Zucker has told GamesIndustry.biz that he's still concerned about sales of the PlayStation 3, but thinks the recently announced USD 100 price cut will certainly help the console in the short term.
A Most Wanted list you say? Cripes, whatever next: a Tips and Cheats pamphlet to go with Eurogamer's promotional Pacman Beach Ball cover mount? Still, it's the summer, there are precious few games around and, with an awful lot of new titles coming up towards the end of the year you might quite reasonably want to know which ones to keep an eye on.
Guns are an integral part of life in the US, children take them to school and parents use them to solve arguments. But not everyone has what it takes to blow holes in things, as Eurogamer TV found out, so in Episode 15 we decided to pop into Midway to see John Woo action game Stranglehold for a lesson or two.
It has, with all due respect, been a crap decade for John Woo. We have no doubt that the legendary director probably still commands a healthy sheaf of greenbacks for turning up behind the clapperboard - but seriously, Paycheck? Windtalkers? Mission Impossible II? Hardly the kind of cinematic output that commands reverence.
Ever since his movies exploded onto our screens in the early '90s John Woo has inadvertently had a massive influence on videogames. Without the balletic cinematic vision of slo-mo ultra violence in flicks like Hard Boiled, games such as Max Payne would have been very different indeed. But it's almost three years since the second Payne title was released, and with developer Remedy having moved on to work on the Twin Peaks-inspired Alan Wake (and Take-Two strangely silent on what became of Max Payne 3), the baton has been handed to other developers to pick up where they left off.
