What's the difference between a vegetarian and a freight train?
In this spot for The Bigs 2 game from 2K Sports, they are one and the same, in the form of the always surprising Prince Fielder, the 270-pound first baseman of the Milwaukee Brewers.
If you've been watching Major League Baseball lately, you'll know that Fielder won last week's All Star Game Home Run Derby, the first Brewer ever to do so. Son of former A.L. MVP Cecil, the Big Guy also happens to be the cover-boy athlete for the newly released Bigs 2, which is being promoted on TV because gamers tend to be obsessive MLB fans. The spot, created by Ground Zero, clearly highlights the game's new feature: the ability to slow down the notorious play at the plate, that high-adrenalin moment in which the runner crashes into the catcher and knocks the ball out of his mitt. The spot dramatizes the split-second collision by using the literal metaphor of a train wreck, intercut with game play.
That action is set-up and reenacted in the spot with the obsessive attention to minute detail that monks in the of Middle Ages might have devoted to gilding the corner of one page in the Book of Hours. It's an expert melding of virtual reality and real-time. The genius is in the cutting, pacing and sound design.
Not satisfied with replicating the standard sound of forward locomotion (to me, that means "Good-N-Plenty, Good-N-Plenty"), the original score, according to press materials, was "inspired by both Inuit and Tuvan throat singers." (The latter reproduce sounds of a place, like a cave or bay, as an offering to spirit-masters. Who knew? )
Directed by Peter Berg (of The Kingdom and Friday Night Lights fame) and shot with a Red One digital camera, the result lives somewhere between the virtual and real spheres that, for better or worse, are familiar to so many gamers these days.
So, perhaps by the time they buy the game (which is available on every major platform) there's a deja vu factor -- that's how visceral the feeling is. Vegetarian violence -- something for everybody, even throat singers.
