50 Cent - Bulletproof

The real reward loop here isn't experience points or better guns. It's music. Cash picked off dead bodies buys unreleased 50 Cent tracks and music videos from a menu, which means every firefight in this thing is functionally a coin-op for a mixtape you can't buy anywhere else. That was a genuinely novel pitch in 2005, when a rapper's game tie-in usually meant a licensed soundtrack and a likeness, and it remains the most interesting thing about the whole package.

Genuine Games built the shooting around a cover system and a set of scripted counter-kills, the latter triggered when an enemy strays into grabbing range. Snap to a wall, lean out, fire, drop back. The animation work on the executions is heavy and unpleasant in a way that suits the material, but the aiming underneath it is stiff, the camera fights you in tight interiors, and enemies soak more bullets than any game about being shot nine times ought to allow. The levels are corridors dressed as blocks, docks and warehouses, and they rarely offer a second route.

What the game does have is a cast that a budget action shooter has no business having. Dr. Dre turns up as an arms dealer, Eminem plays a corrupt cop, and the G-Unit roster fills the second player slot in a drop-in co-op that is easily the most tolerable way to get through the campaign. The dialogue is delivered flat by most of them, but the sheer fact of hearing those voices in a mid-tier PS2 shooter gives the whole thing a time-capsule quality that a straight-faced military game from the same year has entirely lost.

Critics were unkind, and mostly right. The story is a revenge plot with no shading, the difficulty spikes come from bad enemy placement rather than design, and the hip-hop bravado curdles fast when the mechanics can't support it. Vivendi shipped it into a Christmas window where Black and Call of Duty 2 were showing what console shooting could actually feel like, and the comparison was brutal.

Still, it holds a strange place. This was the high-water mark of the celebrity vanity game, the point where a label's marketing department decided a console disc was a legitimate release format for B-sides. Play it now and the gunfights blur together within an hour, but the menu of locked tracks glowing behind a dollar counter tells you exactly what the mid-2000s thought a video game was for.