Scarface hands-on: The Wiimote chainsaw

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...and four other reasons it was worth porting Scarface to the Wii

#2 You can give people the"yank-yank" sign
You know, the one you do out the car window when someone's just cut you off? Make loose fist, move hand up and down in a fast motion? That's the one. Well, Blind Rage mode - the vicious post-slaughter taunting that Tony spits out when he's built up his Balls meter - is now initiated with hand signals.

After laying the chainsaw smackdown on a victim, motioning to flip the bird at the bloody corpse causes Tony to utter one of his ever-imaginative swears. As we said before, it's all hideously tasteless, but entirely in keeping with Tony Montana's psychopath persona. As Jason Bone, lead combat designer on the game explained it casually to us, "Using the'wanking'signal gets you into a blind rage." Whatever you say, Jason, whatever you say.

#3 It's the most visually polished version
That's right. And that's not just press release shit, we've seen it with our own eyes. Lighting and shadows are noticeably improved, as are textures and draw-distance. On top of that the game runs at a higher, more consistent rate than it did on PS2 or Xbox and there are more pedestrians on screen at once - but no, you can't kill them, you're still held by Tony's strict moral code of not murdering innocents.

The nunchuk is used to move Tony, while the Wiimote moves the target around the screen. Wherever you aim, your gun points and adjusts the camera where necessary. Radical realizes that each player will have a different preference for this type of control and has included four options from beginner to expert which gradually increase the sensitivity of the aiming: basically how much you can move the reticule before it causes the camera to rotate.

Far from being "experts," we still found the expert mode most satisfying as it moved the camera quicker in a gunfight, however, you can still use the B button to lock onto a target, something we used quite a lot, especially whenthe enemy was moving or above us. The team's aim is to make it as easy as possible to shoot. "Aiming the gun with the Wiimote is the closest you can get to killing a filthy cock-a-roach without getting of your couch," Bone tells us proudly.

#5 The driving model has been improved
Radical was keen to improve the driving over the PS2 and Xbox versions and have tweaked it to feel more arcadey than before. We noticed this most in the way we could powerslide around corners with ease and use the brake and accelerator at the same time, much like you can in Burnout.

So there you have it, a Wii version of a game, not originally designed for it, that has embraced the control system and incorporated it in a clever way that actually improves on the original. We never expected that. We're not imagining many people to rush out and buy it again for Wii if they already own it for PS2 or Xbox - the main game is, afterall, identical. But it's certainly looking like a decent purchase for any *adult* Wii owners who want to get involved with Tony's coke-fuelled anarchy for the first time.

And like we said, the chainsaw does pretty much rock...

gamesradar_george1
gamesradar_george1
I hate the 267.