BLACK was a 2006 first-person shooter by Criterion, who were well known for games such as Burnout and their flagship engine RenderWare was used across many different 6th gen games, including AAA titles such as Grand Theft Auto, Persona and even Call of Duty. Criterion's own games had focused on a maniacal over-the-top style of gameplay; Burnout was all about wreaking havoc on everything in sight. After the success of the Burnout games, Criterion decided to take this exaggerated gameplay philosophy and apply it to a proper action game.
Meet BLACK.
BLACK was designed with one goal in mind, to "do for shooting what Burnout did for racing - tear it apart."
BLACK pushed the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox to their limits and as an end-of-life title for the flagship era of the PS2 (or, indeed, one of the last big titles on Xbox) the game was comparable across both platforms and tailored for each. There is plenty of destruction, a lot of explosions, ridiculous weapons and beautiful visuals, all in one Hollywood movie-style package. A recipe for success, if ever there was one.
I'm going to cover what exactly BLACK did that made it so special - and in some cases, some things that even games today don't do often or at all.
DESTRUCTION
Destruction, with a capital D, was a core component of BLACK. Explosive barrels, gas containers and other combustable objects were generously placed around the environment. To complement this, ammo was abundant and most weapons had almost comical magazine sizes, with many at least doubling their real-life counterparts in terms of clip size. Small explosives could be shot and cause large-scale eruptions that tear down buildings, sending enemies flying in the process.
Destruction in BLACK seldom felt forced. The game often encouraged it quite openly, but it never felt like the only way to tackle a problem. In the places it was encouraged, destruction was immensely satisfying. It felt organic; BLACK allowed you to do quite a lot with destruction, from tearing apart signposts to destroying buildings to shattering glass.
Speaking of shattering glass, this brings me to another important aspect of BLACK's destruction; physically based weapons. Weapons in BLACK have a physical length and moving the muzzle towards glass will shatter it. Shorter weapons will only break glass at a very close proximity, whereas a sniper will break the glass without a sweat from a foot away.
VISUALS
For 2006, BLACK is simply a beautiful game. These marketing shots, rendered at 16x the original game resolution (2560x1920, to be precise) are a great representation of the game at its best. Coincidentally, the Xbox One X also renders BLACK at this exact resolution.
But while it's tempting to dismiss promotional shots as airbrushed pictures which featured upgrades or improvements you wouldn't see in the original game, BLACK's pictures are actually using the exact same code if you are astute enough to spot the drawbacks you see on a real console. A few distinct things to note are:
- The text on the silencer, even at 2560x1920, is illegible - which shows they made no attempt to use higher-quality assets or improved texture filtering.
- The wooden flakes flying out of the destroyed boxes are low resolution and hold up badly upon close inspection -- another example that further shows the fact that they're using original assets.
- Upon zooming in on the explosion's orange area or the ceiling lights, you will notice a stippling effect. BLACK, on PS2 at least, (citation needed for XBOX) utilised a lower bit depth frame buffer (I suspect 16 bpp, so 65,535 colours allowed in total - compared to 24bpp, which allows for 16.7 million colours, used in some other PS2 games where memory was not so much of a commodity) to conserve memory, and this stippling effect is caused by the fact that it's struggling to make smooth shaded colours with 65,000 colours.
If they were really trying to enhance the game above what was possible on retail code, these discrepancies wouldn't be visible. This is really what BLACK looks like at a higher resolution, otherwise unmodified.
BLACK uses a lot of gorgeous pre-baked lighting in this photo; pay attention to the rays of light spilling into the scene. These are not dynamic and it would be a waste of computing time to make these real time, so they are pre-calculated instead. This doesn't detract from the effect at all, however. Also note the sheer level of environmental destruction on display - meshes are being blown off pillars and flying in all sorts of different directions. Alpha effects, with particles emerging from the destruction, also populate the scene.
In this photo, there's also a lot to take in. There is a significant amount of alpha effects yet again; note the sparks from gunfire spraying everywhere, the translucent fire and smoke billowing from walls that are being indirectly blown to chunks. It's also worth appreciating just how incredible BLACK's weapon models look; the textures are very sharp and clean, and many weapons (such as the MP5 above) employ a subtle but nice reflection effect, especially visible at the end of the gun. It's not quite as aggressive as, say, Perfect Dark's reflective mapping, but the subtle shimmer from the barrel of many of your weapons is one of many fine details that often go unappreciated if you aren't paying attention.
Bullet casings shoot off everywhere as you fire as well. In some cases, such as the AK-47, they actually eject the wrong way -- but many of these decisions were intentional so the casings were more eye-catching to exaggerate the action.
BLACK revolves around firing the weapon, but its presentation is no slouch and a nice depth of field effect is used to blur your surroundings as your character focuses on reloading. Unfortunately, not everyone knew this could be removed by pressing any of the face buttons while reloading (except O for melee).
On that note, upon close inspection, many weapons in BLACK are exaggerated. Not a single weapon gets away without at least one completely useless rail mount, as the Internet Movie Firearms Database wiki page for BLACK mocks to no end. This was, again, intentional; when describing their vision for the game, BLACK's developers said that other games do not make their weapons look or sound interesting. I'll cover their sound effects below, but the gun models speak for themselves; pistols have useless, under-barrel mounts, the shotgun has a useless side mount and the AK47 is riddled with useless ridges with what must be the intention to mount attachments as well. In other words, guns have been redesigned with the intention of looking interesting more than technically correct.
SOUND
BLACK's sound design was nothing short of terrific. The game was nominated for Best Audio at the 2006 BAFTA video game awards,, and won Best Art & Sound tied with Burnout Revenge at the 2006 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. The game's hyperbolic nature was taken to the next level in its sound design, from musical composition to gun samples. The game's sound design for weapons is unique, and was referred to as a "choir" of guns by the designers. Rather than having a single sound for weapons that is randomly pitch-shifted for variety and varied according to range, each enemy weapon in a given area is assigned a "voice" with different pitch, so each sound is distinct from the others. Movie sound effects are often used instead of sampling real weapons, often from specific action movies or TV shows - such as Die Hard's MP5 sound sample and Jack Bauer's pistol from 24. For example, if there are three enemies firing, one would be assigned a low voice, another a middle voice, and the third a high voice. This allows all the weapons being fired in any particular scene to harmonise and deliver a distinct sound.
In regards to the soundtrack, BLACK features a fully orchestrated score composed primarily by Chris Tilton. However, the game's reprising main theme was co-written alongside Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino. The soundtrack's quieter sections often revolve around violins to create a heightened sense of tension, but during the "loud" gunfights or climactic end-of-level shootouts, the entire orchestra kicks in with emphatic brass instruments puncturing the soundscape.
With a combination of the game's unique weapon sampling technique and the orchestrated soundtrack, the only thing that they could have possibly done better was add surround sound support -- and they did. On the PS2, it used Dolby Pro Logic II to generate a 5.1 surround signal, whereas the Xbox used its hardware 5.1 decoding to use true surround sound. The PS2's method of 5.1 is interesting, as it uses the Dolby Pro Logic solution; essentially, four channels of sound are mixed down into an ordinary stereo (two channel) soundtrack. From there, the game "unfolds" that downsampled mix into four channels again, and creates the fifth "centre" channel by placing it equally in the middle of the left and right channels.
While the PS2 is capable of 5.1 surround sound decoding, it uses precious CPU time (it has a dedicated MPEG-2 video decoder, but nothing for audio). Hence, it works for DVDs, but was scarcely used in real games.
GAMEPLAY
BLACK's gameplay is blissfully over the top and does a great job of comically recreating Hollywood action movies. Guns have absurd magazine capacities - the M4/M16 in real life holds 30 bullets, but in BLACK holds 90 to name one example - and to compensate for that, enemies fire equally distressing amounts of bullets at the player. Fortunately, both you and (unfortunately) your adversaries are really rather resilient. That means that no matter whether you have 16 or 60 rounds in a clip, it won't be much use if you empty them straight at your enemy's body. The skill - and much of the satisfaction from BLACK - comes from headshots. Indeed, upon hitting an enemy's head with a bullet, their helmets will be shot off with a resounding "clink" letting you know that he's not getting back up from that injury. Oftentimes, headshots are further rewarded; if you catch an unsuspecting guard with a headshot when he is near a railing, he will manage to fall over the railing in incredibly dramatic fashion, for example.
Because BLACK is primarily about shooting guns, that's always the primary focus. Except for when you can't shoot any more. BLACK features a few interesting mechanics with reloading. The depth of field effect provides focus on the reload (because as much as I like to say I can multitask, I can't change a magazine and dance around enemies while tracking their movements) and, more interestingly, you reload faster when you are under fire. Another minute but welcome touch. Reload animations are also exaggerated with generous checks of the weapon's slide in most cases.
Even outside of reloading, when you drops below two bars of health, the screen fades to black and white and the sound of the character's heartbeat become the overwhelming noise, drowning out surrounding gunfire. The large and small controller motors also rumble distinctly, giving the impression of a heartbeat. This effect dissipates when you recover to two bars again, but the game does not regenerate your health past that point.
In summary, there is never a moment where BLACK is trying to not be excessive. Luckily for us, it's the good kind of excessive. Some games try to be "over the top" in an attempt to mask a complete lack of substance, but not BLACK. BLACK's overenthusiastic developers only made it more fun for us.
Now let's be clear; BLACK is not a perfect game, and is not without its niggles and omissions. But for what it is, BLACK gets a hell of a lot right even by today's standards.
