VIDEO GAMES When it comes to characters, actors are now playing the part

One concern in the new '007' game was having James Bond die.
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Pierce Brosnan had no complaints about his death.
He didn't mind bullets punching holes through his body, the abrupt end to a skyscraper plummet or even being blasted to bits by a rocket-propelled grenade.
He asked the executive producer of "007: Everything or Nothing" for just one thing: He wanted to die with dignity -- not falling lifelessly to the ground like a rag doll or in a panic, arms flailing.
It may have been Electronic Arts' video game, but it was Brosnan's body, so the gaming company listened.
The video-game and movie industries' tenuous yet passionate courtship has sparked a revolution in gaming: actors' starring in games that have never been and never will be movies. And with this has come a torrent of movie stars with a love of the game and a need for creative control.
"The visual presentation is huge for the actors," said Scott Bandy, senior producer of "Everything or Nothing." "It's their voice, but it's not their face.
Putting them at ease
To put the stars of his game at ease, Bandy spent time with them during production, even sitting down with Brosnan and showing him all the ways he was going to die while in the hands of a gamer.
"We actually took small [movies] of him dying," Bandy said. "We told him: 'This is what it looks like when you fall. This is what it looks like when you get hit by a [rocket-propelled grenade].'"
Brosnan, who lent his likeness and his voice to the game, helped Bandy fine-tune Bond's reactions and movements. Bandy also had MGM and Danjaq, owners of the Bond license, to contend with.
Bond's death "is always an issue with Danjaq and MGM," Bandy said, because in the movies Bond never dies. "But they realized that a certain amount of [death] has to occur. In our world, a player must have a failure state."
So Bandy made sure not to glorify Bond's death. In "Everything or Nothing," the spy's spy never goes out with a bang.
More involvement
When Jet Li got involved in the game "Rise to Honor," he didn't just provide his character's voice and looks -- he wrote the fight scenes and helped create the game's combat system.
"When a guy comes at Jet Li in a film, Li doesn't face him -- he takes the guy on without even turning," said Jim Wallace, the game's producer. "We wanted to get that across in the game."
So the fight system in "Rise to Honor" is one that allows players to take on the bad guys without having to move around much. A player just smacks the joystick in the direction of an enemy, and Li's character does the rest.
To create the cinematic attacks and combinations that breathe life into the game, Li called in his longtime fight choreographer, Corey Yuen.
Like a movie
When Bandy talks about "Everything or Nothing," he tends to call it a movie despite the fact that it isn't even based on one.
It's an honest mistake. After all, the game stars the voices of Brosnan, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench and John Cleese. It took a crew of more than 100 two years to shoot, and it cost more than Bandy wants to talk about.
It just so happens that this latest Bond experience is on the small screen -- and that small screen is attached to a video-game console.
"The biggest difference really is the length," Bandy said. "Our productions are not 2 to 2-1/2 hours of entertainment. In 'Everything or Nothing,' we are talking 25 to 30 hours of gameplay."
There are also a lot of similarities between the people behind the cameras and the people behind the computers, said Neil Young, executive producer of the "Lord of the Rings" video-game trilogy.
"The game industry is in the process of changing. As our medium matures, it's going from feeling like it's a hobbyist thing, to a toy thing, to where it is now, where it's a legitimate art form," he said.
That legitimacy and advanced technology have paved the way for a new level of collaboration between the two industries.
"The technology enables actors to give the caliber of performance they want to give," Young said.