Dust Off The Cobwebs: State of Emergency

I was in my mum's attic recently and came across my old PlayStation 1 and 2 consoles, plus a bunch of the games I had for them. There were a lot of memories of the games themselves, especially ones I hadn't thought about in such a long time.

One of the games I came across and remember fondly is State of Emergency.

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The Game

I remember having hours of fun with this back in the day.

The game was made by Rockstar and launched on 12/02/02 in North America, and then 10 days later it was released in the EU. It's crazy to think it's nearly 21 years old.

I can't remember a whole lot about the game's story, but upon looking up some videos and trailers of the game, it all flooded back to me. It's pretty tongue-in-cheek to a certain extent. The narrator kind of eggs you on to cause as much damage to the location as possible, and in an attempt to rack up a high score you'll blow up cars, damage buildings, and attack the police/ gangs which all aid in your overall score.

The intro explains the premise of the actual story of the game, but to be honest, I don't remember much about the story. I do remember there being missions in each location that you could carry out in the midst of all the chaos, but I think the missions themselves were just setting targets for you to destroy, rather than being an actual storyline. But, I could be wrong.

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Here's the intro to the game + the start menu which shows some gameplay and plays the State of Emergency song, which I'm assuming was commissioned for the game itself.

During the intro, we're told about people being on food vouchers, and that "Friday is double ration day" - throughout history, rulers have used food as a way to quell civil disobedience.

Listening to the words used in the intro, we're told so much about the background of this game in such a short space of time and I'm sure it fly's by so fast that it could easily go right over people's heads.

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The Gameplay

It's classed as a Beat Em' Up style game and it always felt very much like an arcade game, especially with the addition of a score you'd rack up and a timer that would count down to the end of the mission. In the true fashion of these types of games, if your score was below the threshold required you'd lose and have to start again, and if it was above the threshold you could continue on to the next level.

There were multiple levels in the game, and off the top of my head, I can remember a mall, a street with a bunch of shops on it, and a kind of Chinatown area.

Each area would have its own unique gangs, and those gangs would sometimes be the people you would do missions for if I remember correctly. Essentially though, the gangs and police were your main target in a way, and you could get on the wrong side of all of them, but they would also fight each other during each mission.

I'd love to break out my PlayStation now and load it up to have a proper go of it, rather than watching other people's videos on YouTube as I try to remember things about it off the top of my head.

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The Setting

So, after doing a bit of digging I found out about the plot of the game and the background of why there is a huge nationwide riot going on.

In 2023, the United States government was weakened by an economic crisis. In response, the American Trade Organization, most commonly known as "The Corporation", builds a para-militaristic force and overthrows the government, taking over the United States of America and establishing a corporatised totalitarian police state. Years later, in 2035, an underground resistance named "Freedom" began a campaign of resistance and soon sparked a national riot. The Corporation declares a state of emergency. The game takes place in Capital City. The player joins Freedom in an attempt to overthrow The Corporation; they must play as one of a selection of five characters, who each have their own unique backgrounds.
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You know, if I'm honest, this situation doesn't seem too far-fetched, and here we are in 2023 so we're right on schedule for the events the game predicted to come true.

I was looking into the Cyberpunk 2077 backstory and lore of that game, and it's very similar in ways to the background of State of Emergency. I think it may just be the Cyberpunk/ Dystopian genre in general, but massive corporations hoarding all of the money and resources to then replace the government and create their own branches of law enforcement to be used as privately funded para-militaries is a theme or idea that a lot of fiction based around this genre seem to use.

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My Plans In Regards To My Old Consoles/ Games

I've been looking into some equipment I'm going to need in order to just play the old PS1 and PS2, and a the top of the list is a HDMI to SCART adaptor - because modern TVs and Monitors don't have the SCART connectors anymore.

But, I also looked into going one stage further, and rather than just play and enjoy these games, I want to live stream them on my Twitch account, and use some of the gameplay to create a playthrough of sorts, and potentially even some Reviews/ Retrospectives.

I found that there's another piece of equipment that is relatively inexpensive that I can use to do just that.

This Capture Card, is only 15 Euros on Amazon and will allow me to stream/ capture footage.

I just need to plug it into the console of my choice, then run a HDMI cable from it to my computer or laptop, run OBS, find the video source, and boom, I'm in business.

It's going to be so fun to go back to some of the classic games I've got lying around and have a chance to play them again. As well as that, there are a bunch of games I never had a chance to play but always wanted to, so I think it'll be cool being able to search around for some old copies I can pick up.

Thinking back on it, it's been about a year since the last time I streamed on Twitch, or uploaded a video to my YouTube channel, so it'll be nice to do that again while also scratching a nostalgia itch.