Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

It probably won't do for graffiti what the Tony Hawk games did for skateboarding, but Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure has gotten a pretty bad rap lately. A game about a graffiti artist living in a police state where tagging is a capital crime, it's been called everything from a celebration of vandalism to a gang-recruitment tool. But regardless of what its critics say, Getting Up takes an interesting spin on the urban-crime genre and, if done right, could be a lot offun.

Playing like an inner-city Prince of Persia, Getting Up stars Trane, an unknown punk out to make a name for himself in the big city. To earn recognition, he'll need to leave his tags everywhere, and thatmeans sneaking his way into forbidden areas and doing a lot of leaping, climbing, tightrope-walking and hazard-dodging, allwhile not getting beaten or shot by police or unsavory urban elements.

Once he's gotten in (or on, in the case of speeding trains and subway cars), he'll have to find the best place to tag. (Sadly, this isdecided by Trane's automatic"intuition" rather than by you.)Once there, a chalk outline appears, and you can pick out adesign and fill it in via a simple minigame that lets you directly control Trane's arm. He's not the only one looking for prime graffiti spots, though, soin addition to dodging the city's trigger-happy cops, he'll have to throw down with rival taggers who are less than pleased to see him on their turf.