In the game, he's the lead singer with a band called The Dreamers, who can often be found performing in seedy bars. Pick up a flyer, go to the venue listed, and bingo - you get to watch a polygonal concert-in-miniature, as Bowie and co bash out one of the eight songs he's written for the game.
Thing is, you don't have any choice but to watch - you can't skip the songs, which is a shame since they're largely forgettable dirges. Still, you can always entertain yourself by watching Dave's ridiculous dancing. Paris: home of Sacha Distel, Gauloises and men in long coats meeting in brasseries or possibly brassieres at dawn.
That's home in the loosest sense of the word, as despite assurances that they had tidied up in preparation for the visit, it was akin to visiting a student squat.
A recent survey revealed that the French shower less than anyone else in Europe, and the upended mattress stood in the bath would appear to confirm this. That's not xenophobic, that's a fact. We're here primarily to see the game, though, which is an attractive looking effort, as the surrounding pictures will confirm.
What it's all about is less easy to explain, though. It's a sprawling affair, encompassing action, adventure, beat 'em up, first-person shooter and David Bowie. Yes, following his Internet dabblings, the Thin White Duke has launched himself headlong into the wonderful and frightening world of video games.
Despite the fact that he hasn't written a decent tune since Space Invaders ruled the chip shop, Bowie provides all the game's music, in conjunction with Tin Machine co-founder Reeves Gabrel. Bowie also appears in the game, both as a key character named Boz, and as the lead singer of an in-game band called The Dreamers, whose virtual concerts it is possible to attend. As ideas go, it's certainly an odd one, and you can almost imagine Alan Partridge earnestly barking into his dictaphone: "David Bowie to star in virtual reality computer game set in parallel dimension, along with his lovely wife Iman.
Must, repeat must, include original music. Call Bill Oddie As for the story, we don't want to give too much away about the tales of Astaroth, the Prince of Darkness, and his quest for souls. Suffice to say that the characters have ludicrous names, and that it's aimed squarely at people who spent their youth reading Lord Of The Rings when they should have been out playing football. As such, it should appeal to a broad cross-section of the PC gaming community.
All you really need to know is that the action is set in Km the fictional city of Omikron, a vast metropolis full of sick and twisted characters and an innovative public transport system. You begin the game supposedly as yourself and then enter the body of a character about whom you know nothing. Clues are offered as to your identity, and while you're about it, you might as well shag the poor bloke's wife the game features an early sex scene, albeit not motion-captured.
As a nation, the French are pretty open about sex. Bare breasts are rife on beaches and in adverts, while nightclubs think nothing of livening things up by screening soft porn. They absolutely love a bit of it, and this is a theme that continues throughout The Nomad Soul. Whores and strippers appear intermittently, along with fairly graphic artwork, some of which has had to be toned down to appease the Americans. However, it's not a deal clincher, and thankfully The Nomad Soul should have more to hang itself on than a couple of pixellated nipples.
The main hook the marketing bods are trying to get across is the idea of virtual reincarnation, claiming that the player's soul will be projected into the game's universe, where it will reside indefinitely. What it actually means is that if you die in the game, you take control of the first person who comes into contact with your corpse - a concept that would suggest you'll spend a lot of time as a paramedic or a necrophiliac.
Quantic Dream also claim The Nomad Soul will be the first video game ever to feature real-time facial motion capture, although we can remember reading a similar claim about a different game over three years ago. Admittedly, Roger Moore-style raised eyebrows are thrown about with gay abandon, but the lip-synching is currently no more convincing than formative kids' TV show Heidi - albeit with Swiss goat farmers supplanted by demons from a parallel dimension.
There is a hell of a lot of chat to get through during the course of the game - although, thankfully, not quite as much as the interminable Outcast - The Nomad Soul clocks in at around 16 hours of dialogue, as opposed to the 60 hours of Charlie Brooker's favourite chatathon.
The Nomad Soul is at least interspersed with action, whether it's walking and driving around the massive city, or simply punching and kicking people about the neck and face. The beat 'em up sections were apparently motion-captured by a Jujitsu world champion and a Tae Kwon Do European champion, but -as with every beat 'em up ever made - it is quite possible to win by randomly pressing buttons, and it's never going to be a match for Tekken , or whatever console buffs are currently into.
Likewise, the occasional first-person shooter sections are scarcely in the same league as Quake or Half-Life. What's the big idea, then? We never intended to make a shooting game that's better than Quake III because those guys have been making first-person shooters for ages.
Our goal was to make a first-person shooter where you have fun, it's easy to use and you have a reason to fight. When you play Quake, you kill people in corridors but you don't have the faintest idea why.
In Omikron, the concept was to have a story before this shooting sequence, have a story after and, depending on what you've done in the adventure before and the result of the shooting sequence, different things will happen. Not like five years ago, where it was just FMV that you couldn't play - it's now an interactive movie in real-time 3D.
So we never thought about making it an adventure game or a shooting game or a fighting game. We just thought: 'We are in a movie -what do you do in a movie? We just tried to get this movie-like feeling. I think a lot of games will go in this direction in the future - not mixing different types of game, but inventing a new type where you're free. Clearly a big film fan, David also came up with the story behind the game and cites such influences as and Brazil, as well as a genuine theory about parallel dimensions -something that French game developers seem obsessed with.
It's quite appealing to French people. I don't know why. It's probably a cultural thing. Cultural differences aside, The Nomad Soul is shaping up to be a curious game. With its fondness for demons and big robots, it's almost the gaming equivalent of a concept album - a theory that's given weight by the Roger Dean-style artwork the kind of pictures seen adorning the works of navel-gazing prog rock megaliths Yes and Genesis during the more self-indulgent parts of the Seventies.
The involvement of a major international recording star certainly gives it an edge, as the game's producer, Herve Albertazzi, explains: "The whole involvement of Bowie was not so much to contribute to the gameplay as to be part of the Omikron universe and be pan of the general atmosphere.
This was a collaboration - it was not a case of David Bowie coming to us and saying: 'I'm going to do a game and this is how I am going to be in there. Bowie contributes eight original tracks to the game, which are soon to be released by Virgin on an album called Hours. He also provided all the game's incidental music and earlier this year held a press conference at the E3 show in Los Angeles.
At the start of the game, players are asked by an Omikronian police officer named Kay'l to leave their dimension and enter Omikron within his body thereby breaking the fourth wall. Omikron The Nomad Soul is an Elder Scrolls like 3D adventure game published by Eidos Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Dreamcast and while developments did begin for Playstation 1 and 2, they were never finished.
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