The Con’s Deborah Mars talks about bring the PSP title to life
By Michael Lafferty

“…it is not just about memorizing combo strings or button mashing”

You walk a fine line between the brutality of doling out punishment and taking it. There is a point, after all, to letting your foe land one to the side of your face, or nailing you in the solar plexus with enough force to knock you down. That point is to drive up the odds against you, but the slyness is that you have to make it look like you are not, indeed, doing that very thing. 

The game is called The Con, and it is on the SCEA list of pending titles for the PSP handheld. The game itself is a mix of personalized fighting styles, dropping cash on fights (betting to win OR lose), and a control interface that truly makes the combat experience a lot of fun.

Deborah Mars is a producer on the title. At a recent SCEA event to display the title, and allow a little hands-on gaming, she took time to talk about The Con.

“With The Con we took a very close look at the fighting genre as a whole,” she said. “And what we noticed is that there is the experience of fighting and the action there, but then there is this other action, which is putting the bet down, putting down some money and getting invested in the fight.

“When you go to the big fights in Vegas, there are the people who get there and want to watch the fight and watch the action, and there are other people there who are investing in it. They want a piece of the action, to see what their take-home money payday is going to be.” 

The dynamic of the fighting in the game is very good, but SCEA has gone a step beyond that in the customization that is possible within the game’s frame.

“Customization is a huge part of The Con,” Mars agreed. “It’s all about how you are able to work the con and have it be a real extension of you. We’ve got a custom combo editor that allows you to edit combo strings so each fighter is unique to the player. We’ve got a really cool, robust character customization which allows you to pretty much do everything – gender, body type, head, facial, all that type of stuff. The character customization is actually two-fold. There is kind of a basic editor and then there is this really robust, kind of full-feature editor, which lets you choose bone structure.”

That ability to change the bone structure of a character is one of the unique elements that is being introduced on the PSP with this title.

“It is,” Mars said, “it is tremendous. It really allows you to create the character you want to create and have it be an extension of yourself.”

Of course, The Con may well be redefining what is possible when it comes to the fighting genre on a handheld system.

“The fact that it is portable, that you can get the quick fix, or go into the long haul, go into story mode, and then the ability to actually put your own picture on a fighter (via EyeToy) and make it your own” are compelling aspects to the handheld abilities of The Con, Mars said.

Another element that The Con realizes is the ability for players to take their storyline characters into Ad Hoc WiFi competition with other gamers.

“We felt that one of the important things with gameplay is that you spend a lot of time with characters and one of the other reasons is in The Con we have this crew-style fighting, so it gives you the opportunity to experience more of the variety that we have in the game,” Mars said. “It’s not just about picking one character and one fighting style; you have other characters you are part of your crew and so you can experience different fighting styles with them. And your parameters for each fighter are different – one has more power, one has more strength, one has more speed, and so all of that … we didn’t want to cut the story mode off and being able to go head-to-head and fight your buddy and not being able to use of the characters or one of the items that you’ve won, that you’ve built your way up. We wanted to make sure that you could take that with you.”

The Con is, at the core, about fighting and fighting well – well enough to sucker the crowd into bumping up the odds against you, well enough to win, or well enough to lose without letting on that is what you are doing. But to actualize the combative nature of the game, a solid control system had to be in place. The game uses the D-pad to dodge left or right, lean in or out, and actually challenges players to think reactively during fights.

“We really felt like, in The Con, to make the way that you move an extension of who you are,” Mars said. “So it is not just about memorizing combo strings or button mashing, it really is how what you see and how you react, based on how you are reading your opponent’s movements. Just like if you go to a fight, it is a dance – it’s a dance between you and your opponent, and we wanted to try to create that in-game.”

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