Games featuring police as the main character are now a common genre for any system. Sometimes they are good and go bad or sometimes they are bad who try and redeem themselves. Jack Slate is more of the latter, a cop who finds that the city he protects might have more bad guys then good guys. Namco, not yet Bandai, showed in 2002 that Slate might just be the man for the job. The game was Dead to Rights, tracing his fall and eventual climb back up.
Slate gets a call for assistance at a construction site. Once there, he finds his father murdered. Through an elaborate scheme, Slate finds himself kicked off the force and imprisoned on trumped up charges. Escaping , he begins to investigate why he father was murdered and why he was sent to prison. The answers will take him all over Grant City, from the lowest people on the street to the very height of power.
Two things set Dead apart from other games. The first was the refinement of the bullet time system. This slowed down the action so you could take your shot at the right moment. It had been featured prominently in Max Payne the year before, but Dead used it in a much more proper setting. The developers of the game were influenced by a style of movie fighting called gun fu. In their hands, shooting a gun became a martial art, a style that would fit in any John Woo movie. Since the slowing down of time happened in these movies, Dead’s use of it made more sense. Using it gave you an edge over your enemies.
The second was a character who you could use to take down foes. This was Shadow, a K-9 unit loyal to only Slate. Shadow was ridiculous over powered, in fact he could kill any enemies with one hit. He brought back the weapon to Slate. The developers realized that he might make the game to easy, and gave him a bar that needed to be filled before he could attack. Some sections actually had you play as Shadow as you went places Slate could never go.
Dead to Rights always was compared to Max Payne. The main reason why I think Dead was better was that we saw what had happened to Slate. Max had his life taken away in a cut scene that immediately shifted time to two years later. We are with Slate as he loses everything and we want him to get it back. Adding the best support character in gaming up until that point made Dead more fun and a true redemption story.
