In one of the final lectures of GDC '08, John Woo Presents Stranglehold's lead designer, Neill Glancy, gave the audience a whirlwind lecture on the concept of how Midway's action shooter effectively bridged the gap separating games from film. Titled "Dynamic Cinematic Gameplay: Creating Stranglehold's Tequila Bombs," Glancy gave a straightforward deconstruction of each of the game's movie-centric special attacks, how they help the player carve out his or her own "movie experience," and the highs and lows of implementing these features.

Glancy's lecture was loaded with clips from John Woo films to illustrate his points. The team worked very closely with the legendary action movie director in creating Stranglehold, and wanted to make a game that wedded his trademark gun ballets and heroic bloodshed with high-damage environments and third-person action gameplay. Glancy defined dynamic cinematic gameplay as something that's not a canned movie, nor is it pre-rendered animation like the classic Dragon's Lair laserdisc. Because it's not a series of scripted events, anything can happen.

That, he said, is what makes the experience both cinematic in quality, and dynamic in execution. The idea is that players are making their own action movie as they play through Stranglehold, but as part of that experience, they need controls that are consistent and draw them into the cinematic nature of the game. That's where Tequila Bombs, the power-ups used in Stranglehold, come in. They're all inspired by specific maneuvers used in John Woo films.

The idea behind the first Tequila Bomb, Precision Aim, gives the player a tool to play with. Inspired by the quick edits and split-second shootouts in Woo movies, such as the finale of "Hard Boiled," Precision Aim functions as a sniper rifle of sorts, Glancy said. Since Stranglehold only allows players to tote two guns at once, the special power-up gives them a third weapon, so to speak, as the camera shifts to the bullet's perspective and drives toward enemies.

It wasn't exactly an instant winner, though. In early builds, the bullets would travel across far-away areas, and the player would fall into the map and die. It was fixed, but then the QA department discovered that the feature gave them temporary invincibility, and would exploit it during boss battles. The team then discovered that the feature's camera would show off all of the development shortcuts, and even the spawn points for new enemies. Glancy said that they had to disable spawning during Precision Aim to get around that.

The next special ability, Barrage, gives players unlimited firepower in speedy bursts for a limited time. "Normal reloading in an action game can be a bit boring," said Glancy, "we wanted to give players a sense that something special is going to happen, and Tequila's getting ready to really kick some ass." It was a bit of a happy accident, as well. Originally slated to be a shotgun-only feature, the team found a bug that enabled players to use it with dual-wielded pistols. They liked it so much that they kept it. Of course, there was a catch. The loading sequence for each weapon was a lot of work. Also, it's tough to make a rapid-firing gun like the MP5 look like it's firing even faster. There were also performance ramifications for the physics system, and enemies had to be frozen during the animation, lest some of them run over and beat up Tequila as he loaded his guns.