Experience exhilarating third-person next-gen action as you continue the story of John Woo's influential action film, Hard Boiled, starring Chow Yun-Fat. In John Woo presents Stranglehold™, run into danger with a gun in each fist and take down the organized crime bosses who stepped over the line when they took your family.

Ensnared by a crime boss with a gripping secret, Inspector Tequila is forced to cross the line from sworn duty to bloody revenge. Engage your enemies with intense cinematic gun battles and cause massive environmental damage in real-time or revolutionary slow-motion Tequila Time.

• Signature cinematic action: Stranglehold allows you to play a John Woo-directed action blockbuster movie. Dual-wielding, stunt-laden gameplay combined with a massive destructible environment ensures that Stranglehold will be a true tour-de-force. The environmental interactivity and two-fisted gunplay all come online, bringing the experience to a whole new level.

• Amazing gunplay and stunts: Experience smooth flowing gameplay, such as running up railings, swinging on chandeliers, and leaping onto moving objects, all without interrupting intense gun battles.

• Blockbuster Hollywood talent: Featuring the cinematic flare of acclaimed action director John Woo, Stranglehold also benefits from Woo's direction on storyline, camera placement, and cutscenes. Starring international action star Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila, the game's cast is also comprised of other A-list Hollywood talent.

• Environments as weapons: Using the Massive D™ physics engine, bring the world down on your enemies. Carve your own realistic path of destruction through environments and maneuver through unique piles of debris which persist in the environment.

• Intense cinematic gun battles: Engage the enemy in Tequila Time™ by targeting and firing in real-time while the world dramatically slows and enjoy the exhilaration of running up railings, swinging on chandeliers, and leaping onto moving objects, all without complex controls.

• Unreal 3.0 and Havok: Using a modified version of the Unreal 3.0 engine integrated with the Havok physics system, Stranglehold breathes new life into game environments and characters with its stunning graphics. Incredible physics make it possible for everything in the world to be destructible and interactive, allowing for an ever-changing battleground depending on how players approach different situations.

GCM: Thank you for your time! Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the creative team, bringing Stranglehold to the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

BE: My name is Brian Eddy and I'm the Director and Executive Producer on Stranglehold. The Stranglehold team goes all the way back to the arcade days with Arctic Thunder, but more recently we created Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. The team has grown a lot over the years, from a small group of about 10 people, to 40 or so on Psi-Ops and finally to the 100 plus artists, programmers and designers that have put their heart and souls into making Stranglehold over the last couple of years.

GCM: What level of input (design tips, creative control, etc.) did John Woo have in the making of Stranglehold?

BE: In meetings with John Woo he almost always comes up with insights on what would make a particular move in the game more dramatic, or how Tequila could interact with something in the environment in a cooler way that we never would have thought of, or how to make a particular encounter or Mexican Standoff feel even more epic and cinematic. He simply has an amazing vision for what works well in movies and we will take that and integrate it into the game play.

GCM: Chow Yun-Fat tears up the screen in “Hard Boiled” or any other movie for that matter. What was it like to work with him in person for this game? Did he have any game design ideas, and what was it like in the motion-capture studio?

BE: While we didn’t actually film Chow Yun Fat in the Mo-cap studio, every time that we have worked with him he has also been extremely helpful and gracious. Early on he actually agreed to having a crew fly out to Hong Kong where he lives and do a full body 3D scan of him, but while they were there, Chow Yun Fat also allowed us to take a series of impromptu pictures showing off his different kind of facial posses so that when we do the cinematics in the game, not only will we have his voice acting for Tequila, but we will be able to match the character in game exactly to the way Chow Yun Fat’s facial expression in real life would be for each emotion.

GCM: Had Chow Yun-Fat played many video games before coming into this project and what was his reaction the first time he got to play as himself in Stranglehold?

BE: Stranglehold is the first video game that Chow Yun-Fat has ever appeared in. He was very enthusiastic to reprise his role from Woo’s classic “Hard Boiled.”

GCM: The latest list of voice actors to join this project reads like a Hollywood blockbuster. What was it like to work with all this amazing talent in the recording studio? Did you allow these actors to adlib any lines or come up with any one-liners of their own?

BE: It was amazing to work with such a complete line up of accomplished actors. Each and every one of them was extremely professional and treated their individual VO sessions as if they were recording for a major motion picture. Unfortunately with the storyline being as involved as it was there wasn’t much room for improv. But they would include an occasional grunt or groan for good measure.

GCM: For all those out there screaming “knockoff”, explain how Tequila Time differs from Bullet Time in Max Payne or any of the other slow-motion gameplay devices used in dozens of video games over the past few years.

BE: We borrowed the idea from the master John Woo himself, by integrating the same slow motion sequences found in his movies to make his action scenes much more dramatic. As mentioned in your question this technique has been heavily borrowed by a lot of other movies and games, including Max Payne, which showed that it could be made a very fun part of game play as well. Stranglehold is similar in the sense that they are slow motion sequences, but we’ve taken that dynamic and further tied it into game-play so that Tequila Time is not just a short term advantage, where the player can aim and fire in real-time while enemies are moving in slow motion, but also a long term advantage, where by doing cool moves and taking out enemies in a cinematic style gives the player style points that can be used to pull off special moves (Tequila Bombs) and to use in the unlock shop to open up cool videos, concept art, and multiplayer skins.

GCM: Once the novelty of Tequila Time and totally destructible environments wears off, what will keep “jaded” gamers playing until the end?

BE: It’s the stylized and cinematic action that will keep gamers coming back for more. Besides Tequila Time and destructible environments, Stranglehold features a series of special moves gamers can pull of once they have built up their style meter (by earning points for stylish and cinematic kills) including; precision aim, barrage and spin attack. It’s a ton of fun to reply levels to see what different ways you can approaches each situation and different stylized ways you can kill enemies and destroy the environment.

There is also a really fun Multiplayer mode that includes all the features in the single player game like Tequila time, the interactions, the destruction, and all of the Tequila bomb moves from the single player game. It’s just as fun and crazy as the single player game but with 5 of your friends. We also have an unlock shop with lots of cool video’s, concept art, and Multiplayer skins that you unlock by collecting style points.

GCM: Let’s talk multiplayer. What do you have in store for us as far as game modes and multiplayer level design?

BE: The multiplayer level design is based on two different multiplayer modes including “deathmatch” and “team deathmatch”. All of the game’s massive destruction, tequila time and special moves are featured in multiplayer. It’s a fast paced all action Multiplayer just like the single player game.

GCM: Were there any challenges in getting Tequila Time to work in a multiplayer setting, and just what is our perception of another player going to be when time is altered?

BE: We had a number of different ideas for how to handle Tequila Time in multiplayer, but after a lot of trail and error we came up with a solution that we were happy with. Basically when Tequila time is activated in multiplayer, time slows down for everyone for a very short time, but only the person that activated it is able to fire at their normal rate, which gives them a big advantage over everyone else who is firing at a slowed down rate. We thought that having Tequila Time slow motion happen to everyone might be strange, but it actually works well because everyone immediately understands that someone has activated Tequila Time, which is exciting because everyone also understands that they better take cover or they are going to find themselves at a respawn location waaay sooner than they would like.

GCM: Are there any significant differences in gameplay or content between the three announced formats (PS3, 360, PC)?

BE: We don’t anticipate the visual or gameplay experience being very different on either platform, so we think we will be able to satisfy PC, Xbox360 and PS3 owners with Stranglehold.

GCM: About how many and what kind of Achievements can we expect in Stranglehold? Any particular favorites or one that stands out as especially awesome or original?

BE: There are just under 50 achievements in the game ranging from the kind you would expect, like ones for completing each level in the game and completing the game on all the different difficulty levels, to others that are very Stranglehold specific, like using Barrage with every weapon or killing 50 enemies while interaction and riding on a roll cart, or doing $75,000,000 in Massive D property damage. But our favorite Achievement is probably "Hardboiled Killer", which you get by taking out 307 enemies in the game, because 307 is exactly the same body count as in the original John Woo Hard-Boiled movie that inspired the game.

GCM: Visually, Stranglehold is quite spectacular. Just how powerful is the game engine as far as polygons and textures when it comes to trashing these amazing levels?

BE: We're using UE3, which is the same technology as Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3, however due to the flexibility of the engine we made a whole host of modifications to support Stranglehold's dynamic environments. In large part due to the amount of Massive D. in the game, we've had to support literally thousands of times more fully lit dynamic objects than Gears did. The textures are also dynamically streamed so we can have unique textures per area, and we also employ a lot of procedural techniques to add variety and depth to the worlds. Of course, we had to do a lot of work on the tool side as well in order to allow the artists to create so much detail, and for them to rig the world for so much destruction, which was also a large part of what it took to make Stranglehold's world come alive.

GCM: Thanks for your time. Is there some special element or favorite part of Stranglehold, or perhaps some previously unknown secret you’d like to share with our readers before they get their hands on the final game?

BE: I guess how it really makes you feel like you are staring in a John Woo Hong Kong Action movie. This was only achieved by all the individual disciplines working together to create this vision. We are very proud of the look of the game. The artists did an amazing job creating stunning environments that players can completely destroy.

We are also very proud of the design of certain game-play features like Auto tequila time, Massive D, World interactions and the fact that pretty much anyone can pick up the controller and immediately start having fun. The programming that went into making the game is also very amazing.

We are doing things with the Unreal Engine that even Epic is surprised at and this along with endlessly iterating on all the game play features makes the game technically impressive and fun to play. This was only possible because all the different disciplines on the team, Art, Design, Programming, Animation, Concept Art, Cinematics, and Audio, where able to come together to make such a fun gaming experience.

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