Making a good Jackie Chan game seems like a no-brainer. The Hong Kong star turned international icon has always made movies with exciting martial arts sequences and, if games can do anything, they can do combat. Punching, kicking, wielding weapons: this seems par for the course. And there have been a few games bearing Chan’s name, though I’m 30 and the most recent came out when I was in fifth grade. But the things that make Jackie Chan an exciting star have much more in common with the gameplay that drives immersive sims than straightforward brawlers.
I’ve liked Jackie Chan since I was a little kid, but outside of Who Am I?, which I remember renting at the same time the animated series Jackie Chan Adventures was on TV, I didn’t discover his Hong Kong movies until much later. I’m still discovering them, and recently received the Criterion Collection box set Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar as a birthday gift. Though he was initially cast as a po-faced Bruce Lee imitator, this collection contains several of the early movies where the lighthearted persona that would define his stardom began to emerge.
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Chan’s genius is that he was a physical comedian in the mold of Buster Keatonbut with tremendous martial arts ability. In The General, Keaton famously stands on the front of a moving train, knocking obstacles off the tracks at the last second before the train passes over the spot. It’s a seemingly effortless blending of prop comedy and death-defying stunt work, and Chan incorporates the same action-comedy prowess into his fight scenes. A room that might seem boring to you and me contains a dozen weapons once you set Chan loose in it.
Maybe the best-known example of Chan’s ability to use everyday items as weapons is in the 1996 film, First Strike, when he picks up an aluminum ladder and uses it as an all-purpose offensive and defensive tool. It’s a breathtaking set piece, as Chan twirls the ladder around, flips it over his back, jumps through it, and much more in the span of less than a minute. He uses its legs as a shield, its top step as a spear, and its side as a blunt whacking instrument.
In Hong Kong, the film was released as Police Story 4: First Strike, but in America, its connection to the larger Police Story series was not acknowledged. It was advertised, instead, as Jackie Chan’s First Strike.
But the lead up to the ladder fight sees him using a half-dozen other objects in combat. He topples big plywood sheets to block enemies on either side. He swings through the bars of a tall metal scaffold. He throws chairs, uses a folding table as a pinwheeling shield, and chucks a costume Chinese dragon head as a projectile after using it to block a few punches. The beauty of a Jackie Chan fight scene is that any piece of the environment is fair game, and will be used in wildly inventive ways before it flies out of his hands as he moves onto the next thing.
There are games that have captured parts of this. Of the games bearing the star’s name, Jackie Chan Stuntmaster is the one that comes the closest, as players can pick up objects and use them as weapons and knock tables over onto enemies. Super Smash Bros. with items turned on captures some of the lightning in a bottle, as does a Yakuza street brawl where bicycles and trash cans are fair game as melee weapons. But, the feeling that Chan is improvising his use of each weapon — even though these fights have been carefully choreographed — is missing from most combat-heavy games.
Good immersive sims are the exception. In Dishonoredor Breath of the Wildor Hitmanplayers are encouraged to think through the full death-dealing potential of an item, and often rewarded for doing the strangest possible thing with it. A Chan game that channeled this energy — potentially with Super hot-style slow-motion — could get to the heart of the star’s work more than any brawler ever could.
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