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Apple.com
January 2003
You Spy: Become a Double Agent in Alias: Underground
By Brad Cook
”Every time there’s a new release, you get another piece of this puzzle. By the end of the whole game you’ve accomplished the entire thing, and all these little things add up at the end.”
J.J. Abrams, producer/writer/director of the hit TV show Alias (as well as its resident Mac aficionado), says this about Alias Underground, the free game available for download from the ABC web site.
“It’s the computer gaming equivalent of Dickens’ writing, where every month he would put out a new chapter in a story.”
We say “him/her” because two missions star agent Michael Vaughn, a CIA agent who oversees Sydney’s assignments. In the Turkish embassy counter-mission, you control him as he infiltrates the building and tries to replace a document with a fake without setting off any alarms — and before Sydney arrives. You’ll have to discover his other mission on your own.
"I wouldn't have the bad guys in a movie use Macs. They would use PCs. Macs are far too nice a computer to have a master criminal plotting something on them." -- J.J. Abrams, producer/writer/director, Alias
The Perfect Source for a Game
Alias Underground stars Sydney Bristow, who, as in the TV show, works as a double agent for the organization SD-6. She thought the agency was part of the CIA when it recruited her, but she soon discovered that it really worked against the United States. Soon she joined the CIA with the intent of helping them foil SD-6’s plans, and she learned that her father, Jack Bristow, also claims ties to both groups.
The game offers ten missions — including a training exercise — during which she carries out her CIA and SD-6 directives while collecting Rambaldi artifacts along the way. At the end of the final mission, she solves the mystery behind the ancient items, which offer clues to the secrets hidden in the writings of Milo Giacomo Rambaldi, an artist/prophet/alchemist who was a consultant to Pope Alexander in 1492. Those secrets could easily tip the balance of power between the CIA and SD-6.
Fans of the show will appreciate the way the developers at Dream Mechanics faithfully recreated its environments down to the littlest details. “The ability to walk around and exist in one of our sets as a 3D environment was kind of uncanny because I knew the set well,” says Abrams. “So to do it on a computer was wild.”
In fact, that’s much of the fun of Alias Underground: exploring its environments and discovering what secrets they hold. Every mission features objectives that you don’t have to complete, but they’ll earn you bonus points if you figure them out.
Serial Storytelling
While it’s common to tell stories one episode at a time on TV (and during the old days at the movies, when serials were popular), this technique isn’t used very often in the videogame industry, which favors large games released far apart rather than smaller efforts published at shorter intervals.
Jesse Alexander, a co-producer and a writer on the show who worked with Abrams and the Dream Mechanics team on the game’s story, agrees. “[The game] allows players to experience a selection of Sydney Bristow’s most difficult and dramatic missions,” he explains.
He points to the mission Raid on SD-6, which was based on a season one episode called “The Box,” as an example of this. It requires you to guide Sydney through SD-6 headquarters to rescue her friends, who have been kidnapped by terrorists, and deactivate three bombs planted throughout the building. “When I wrote this episode,” says Alexander, “I was inspired by all of the videogames I’d played over the years, so it was only fitting that we turned it into a game.”
Anyone Can Join the Fun
If you’ve never watched the show, though, don’t worry: Alexander and Abrams both note that you can enjoy the game without having seen a single episode.
The training mission, which you must play first, immerses you in the world of Alias while showing you how the controls work. Like in the Tomb Raider games, you view the main character from a third-person perspective as you move him/her through the game, interact with the environment, and take out the bad guys with a few well-placed kicks and punches.
“We could have waited and released the whole game at once,” Abrams says, “but we thought ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to release it a chunk at a time and get people involved as it goes?’”
So what are you waiting for? The CIA needs your help to defeat SD-6 and restore the balance of power.
http://abc.abcnews.go.com/primetime/alias/underground/index.html
© Apple.com 2003
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