#oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again

Oh dear. Half past midnight and I haven’t written anything. Time to quickly think of something off the top of my head!

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I’m going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it’s very good.

It’s a game that takes aim at Sega’s “Super Scaler” racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn’t slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice “pixelise” filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn’t have a graphics card, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, ’90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can’t think of right now because I’m tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I’ve played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as “Joker” levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I’m presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the “drift boost” mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 117: Car Racing

This evening, I felt like playing some random PlayStation 2 shenanigans, so I fired up R: Racing for the first time. (My wife misheard the name as “Car Racing” and was somewhat incredulous; I almost didn’t want to correct her.)

For the unfamiliar, R: Racing is a game from Namco where they sort of wanted to make a new Ridge Racer, but also wanted to get in on this “racing sim” action that had been growing in popularity since the original Gran Turismo at the tail end of the previous generation. To that end, they made what is essentially a new Ridge Racer game, but featuring real cars and circuits along with the requisite tuning options that no-one understands.

One of the things that excited me most about R: Racing back when it was originally announced was that it had an actual story mode. This was very unusual for racing games at the time, and when it first released I still hadn’t come to the conclusion that no, not all games need stories, a subject that I was sure I’d blogged about at some point in the past, but couldn’t find any evidence thereof.

Anyway, long story short, for one reason or another I never picked up R: Racing back in the day, despite it being something that appealed quite a bit… but it is one of the many titles I added to my PS2 collection when I stumbled across it in CEX for somewhere in the region of 50p and subsequently never got around to actually trying. Until now!

Honestly, of all the things it reminds me of, it’s actually most akin to the Ace Combat series. Perhaps not surprising, since they’re both Namco titles — and there’s a strong argument to suggest the Ridge Racer series unfolds in Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting — but it works pretty well. The narrative sequences are kept short and snappy — arguably to a fault — but it provides a certain incentive to progress through the game’s 14-chapter “Racing Life” mode, which appears to be primarily intended as an introduction before what I assume is “the real game” starts. Put it this way: I’m 6 chapters into that 14-chapter story after a little over an hour of play, and my save file says it’s 12% complete. That suggests you beat the story and there’s a whole lot more stuff to fiddle around with.

The narrative involves Rena, a female protagonist — quick, alert the Woke Content Detector idiots! — who works as an ambulance driver. One day, she displays some fancy moves on the job, and her coworker, who apparently never sleeps, signs her up to be part of a mysterious organisation known as “G.V.I.” who are somehow involved with motorsports, but in what appears to be a not entirely trustworthy sort of way. Rather than being a racing team themselves, it appears that they work with racing teams and… honestly, I don’t really understand at the point I’m at in the narrative because it hasn’t really explained anything other than the fact it somehow caused Rena’s amply-bosomed rival Gina to be pissy with her pretty much immediately upon first meeting her.

What then follows is a series of races and championships, beginning with a straightforward speedway race that is easy to win, and progressing through track, street and rally racing across several courses, many of which appear to have several variations in the same way that the Ridge Racer series’ tracks typically unfold as different routes through the same environments.

R: Racing’s unique selling point appears to be its “pressure” mechanic, whereby if you get up another driver’s arse for long enough, a bar above their car starts filling up, and when it fills, they’ll get so stressed out at your proximity to their rectum that they’ll do something stupid, allowing you to pass easily. There’s no obligation to fill the bar, and indeed doing so for every opponent is probably quite inefficient, but it’s fun nonetheless — and it’s a mechanic I’ve not really seen in a racer before. Presumably it’s attempting to reflect the sort of stress the player feels when they have an opponent bearing down on them in their rear-view mirror; in execution, it’s a tad “artificial”, but, well, it’s a mechanic that is there to be taken advantage of, so you might as well do so!

The soundtrack hails from post-Ridge Racer V Namco so unfortunately we’ve left the funky acid jazz beats of the late PS1 era far behind and are into cacophonous EDM territory. R: Racing’s soundtrack isn’t quite as obnoxiously awful as Ridge Racer V’s, but it’s almost aggressively bland, which is a bit of a shame. The Ridge Racer series has some serious highs when it gets music right, so it’s always unfortunate when an entry doesn’t really live up to those standards.

Still, it’s an enjoyable enough game. Although definitely more sim-esque than the mainline Ridge Racer titles, it’s also a lot more forgiving than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports (do they still make those?) of the world. There’s a braking assist function for those allergic to actually using the brakes themselves, which makes the game feel really arcadey (and a tad easy), but you can still throw the cars into power slides if you’re aggressive enough with them. It’s just not necessarily the best thing to do at every opportunity in R: Racing, unlike mainline Ridge Racer.

I enjoyed what I played this evening! I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further. It occupies a nice sweet spot between sim and arcade that I rather like, and the story mode is intriguing, even if, as I suspect, it turns out to be a bit rushed and doesn’t really go anywhere. Even if that does end up being the case, I suspect the “Event Challenge” mode, or whatever it’s called, will have a fair bit of meat on the bones to fiddle around with. We’ll see, I guess, and I’ll write something more substantial once I’ve spent some more time with it.

For now, though, an evening well spent, I say.

2434: Crewsin’

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I’ve been spending some time with Ubisoft’s The Crew for the last few days. I actually picked it up shortly after release but didn’t play it all that much. With the recent announcement that the base game would be free throughout September (you can still claim a copy here at the time of writing) I thought I’d give it another go.

What is The Crew? Allow me to elaborate in video form, because I can.

I’m left wondering why I didn’t play The Crew more when it first released, because it occurs to me that it’s what I wanted from a driving game for quite some time: the elusive ideal of the “caRPG”, or an RPG with cars if you prefer less clumsy portmanteaus.

The Crew ticks all the boxes that I wanted. For one, it has a plot that is reasonably interesting and features some characters that, while a bit cliched, occasionally have some entertaining things to say — the protagonist offhandedly complaining to his FBI handler that he really wanted a shower because he’d been in his damn car for days was a nice bit of self-reference to the fact that The Crew doesn’t have any on-foot missions. The plot itself may be Fast and Furious-level nonsense, but it works in context.

Secondly, it has a levelling system that is actually meaningful. Unlike games such as Forza Motorsport, which largely seem to have a levelling system just to show how long you’ve been playing, The Crew’s levelling system actually works like one in a more conventional RPG — some gear is level-locked, your cars get more powerful as you level up and there’s an MMO-style “endgame” once you reach the cap, further improving your abilities by getting better and better loot.

Which brings us on to the third point. The Crew is also a loot-whoring game, which is something I never thought I’d say about a racing game, but it’s true. Any activity you complete rewards you with loot, with better results giving you better gear. You get immediate feedback on whether the gear is better or worse than your current setup by means of an “item level”-like system for each of your cars, and events have recommended vehicle levels so you never tackle anything that is going to be way too difficult for you.

In case you’re still not quite convinced about The Crew secretly being an RPG, well, there are different classes of cars, too. Fullstock cars are exactly as they came out of the garage. Street cars are modified street-legal cars for road races. Dirt cars are suitable for offroading and stunts. Raid cars are powerhouses that can take a beating and dish one out too. Perf cars are extremely fast. And there’s plenty more where that came from — even more with the Wild Run expansion, which adds several “extreme” specs to the list, too.

And then there’s the multiplayer, which to be honest I haven’t tried all that much yet. There’s a sort of passive multiplayer a la Test Drive Unlimited as you zip around the open world, occasionally passing other players by. You can queue up for PvP-specific missions. You can recruit people to help you out with story missions, which then have to be played fully cooperatively — race missions, for example, mean that your teammates just have to make sure that you win by fair means or foul, whereas missions where you have to wreck a fleeing vehicle are likely to be much easier with company.

And on top of all that, The Crew makes driving around its vast open world interesting by 1) having some lovely scenery and 2) scattering Project Gotham-style skill challenges around the roads, tasking you with everything from slaloming around markers to simply getting as far away from your start point as possible. Each of these reward you with loot and experience, making them the equivalent of “trash” enemies in a more conventional RPG.

I’m enjoying the game a lot. Handling is enjoyably slidey and arcadey, just how I like it, and there’s a ton of stuff to do, yet enough structure to ensure that you never get overwhelmed with too many options at any one time. And it feels like the best use of Ubisoft’s open-world formula to date, with plenty of hidden things to find that reward you with experience, loot and even hidden cars to uncover.

The Crew is free for the rest of the month on PC. Be sure to claim your copy here.

2258: TrackMania Turbo: Impressions from the Full Version

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I knew after just a couple of minutes of playing TrackMania Turbo’s demo that I needed the full game in my life, so it wasn’t long before I was in my local game emporium picking up a physical copy. (Discs rule. Yes they do.) And I’ve been spending some time with the full version. Here are some things you might like to know about it.

It’s an arcade racer with gloriously old-school handling

That means tapping the brakes to suddenly find yourself going sideways, powersliding around corners, releasing the accelerator to slow down only when you absolutely have to, and all that good stuff. It’s not realistic in the slightest, but TrackMania has always been about having fun that just happens to be in cars; it’s never been trying to be realistic, and it’s always been all the better for it.

There are four distinct environments, each with a very different feel

Earlier TrackMania titles incorporated multiple environments, each of which had its own unique vehicle with its own unique handling. TrackMania 2 bucked this trend by releasing each environment as a separate game — Canyon, Valley and Stadium. It was a controversial move that some saw as new publisher Ubisoft trying to make a bit more money off the game and perhaps it was — but each of these environments was very well fleshed out with plenty of variety. Plus each individual game was a fraction of the price of a brand-new triple-A game.

TrackMania Turbo incorporates revamped versions of the Canyon, Valley and Stadium environments from TrackMania 2 and adds its own Lagoon environment to the mix. Lagoon is somewhat similar to the Island environment from TrackMania United, but with a few additions — most notably magnetic rollercoaster tracks that your car sticks to, allowing for corkscrewing, loop-the-looping and all manner of other acrobatics with zero risk of your car flying off into the sunset or plummeting from a great height into shark-infested waters.

Pleasingly, each environment feels very different. The Canyon cars are extremely drifty — we’re talking Ridge Racer territory here. The Valley cars, meanwhile, are a little more twitchy, plus the wider variety of road (and off-road) surfaces means that you have to adapt to several different ways of throwing your car around. The Lagoon cars are the most sensitive and grippy of all, able to get around very tight corners without having to drift (or even slow down, in some cases), and the Stadium cars are much like their counterparts from the previous games: heavy but grippy, with the ability to throw them into a drift with judicious application of the brakes.

There’s a 200-level campaign

Yep, 200 races for you to complete. You can’t just challenge them in any order, though; you have to start with the “White”-level Canyon tracks, then attain enough medals to unlock the “White” Valley tracks, then the “White” Lagoon tracks and finally the “White” Stadium tracks — only then will you be able to move up to the next tier. The top two tiers of difficulty require silver and gold medals respectively, while the first three only require bronze medals.

This structure is a bit more restrictive than past TrackMania games in that you can’t jump back and forth between each environment’s mini-campaign if you get fed up with a particular track, but ultimately it gives the game a good sense of progression.

There’s a bunch of ways to play multiplayer

TrackMania has always been an incredibly overlooked local multiplayer party game, and hopefully its jump to consoles will help fix that. Turbo incorporates a number of different ways to play together.

Split-Screen is self-explanatory: everyone races together, first over the line wins, and the overall winner is determined by a best of three. This is noteworthy for being one of the only four-player split-screen games I’ve seen on the last two generations of consoles.

Arcade mode is a flexible mode where you can pick a track and then attempt to set a time using three “credits”. The top ten times are recorded on a high score table, so you can challenge your friends to beat your best times that you’ve previously set — or have a mini-tournament there and then.

Hotseat mode is most similar to the previous games’ multiplayer option. Up to 16 players can play in turn, each of whom is given a full tank of gas. Each player then attempts to set a time on the course; if the current leader is beaten, they then have to try and beat their challenger. The process repeats until everyone has run out of gas, and whoever is top of the leaderboard at that point is the winner.

All these local multiplayer modes can be played using any of the 200 campaign tracks (all of which are unlocked from the outset — no need to play single-player to open them up for multiplayer), any tracks you’ve built using the game’s track editor, or a randomly generated track that the game builds for you. This latter option is fun, but a little time-consuming: you can watch the game building the track piece-by-piece, then it has to spend a few moments calculating shadows for the objects it’s added. (Pro-Tip: choose “Fast” rather than “Nice” for lighting quality unless you want to wait a good 3 or 4 minutes before you can play the track.)

It’s built for console

TrackMania has always felt like a PC game. And I don’t necessarily mean that as a positive thing. Past installments have been highly customisable and expandable, but this came at a price: a clunky, inconsistent interface and an online component that required you know about (and are able to set up) dedicated servers and suchlike. The game was considerably expanded by a worldwide community of modders, in other words.

TrackMania Turbo doesn’t support mods, nor does it do dedicated servers — at least not in the same way as the earlier PC games. This, naturally, has made the PC crowd get furious as they are wont to do, but really for the average player it’s a change for the better. Multiplayer is now a case of just creating a room or joining an existing one. The interface is consistent and controller-friendly. You don’t need to worry about having the right mods installed just to make other people’s cars show up, or spend time tweaking settings to optimise performance. It is an overused phrase, but TrackMania Turbo just works, and thank God for that.

It’s the best arcade racer for years

While many of the more “arcadey” racing games have gone in the open-world direction over the last few years, making for sprawling, unfocused experiences where you dribble from one type of activity to another, TrackMania remains so true to its arcade inspirations that on its title screen it prompts you to “insert coin or press X”, followed by the sound of a coin clunking into an arcade machine when the main menu appears.

It’s presented well, with a clear, uncluttered interface, wonderful handling and a pick-up-and-play nature that is accessible (but challenging) to all ages, and with the combination of the track editor, the ability to download other players’ tracks and the random track generator, has potentially limitless replayability.

So if you like arcade racing — or the technical, puzzle-like stunt racing of titles like Ubisoft stablemate Trials — then you absolutely, definitely should pick up a copy of TrackMania Turbo as soon as possible.

2256: TrackMania Turbo Demo Impressions

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Those who know me well will know that I’ve been a huge fan of the TrackMania series since the original release of TrackMania United, and have spent many hours on the various updates to United and the eventual follow-ups TrackMania 2 Canyon, Valley and Stadium. So it was with some excitement that I realised that the next official sequel, TrackMania Turbo, was releasing this week, though I was torn on whether to pick it up for console (PS4, in my case) or PC, which has traditionally been the home of TrackMania.

After playing the PS4 demo for a bit this evening, I think I’m going to grab the PS4 version. I’m very impressed with how at home it feels on console — much of the clunkiness of the PC versions, particularly in the menus, has been tidied up considerably, making it much more controller-friendly, and the addition of a variety of local multiplayer modes makes it eminently suitable for console play. It, so far, seems to be a highly polished product, which addresses what has always been my main criticism of the series as a whole: the fact that in terms of gameplay, it is wonderful, but in terms of interface and user-friendliness, it has traditionally been a ridiculous mess, only made worse by the gazillions of mods server operators apply to their custom dedicated servers, making the game screen more complicated than your average MMO come raid time.

PC players on Steam seem to be a bit salty that TrackMania Turbo has stripped out a number of features they’ve come to take for granted: specifically, the ability for players to run their own dedicated servers and install gajillions of mods that make players’ screens look more complicated than your average MMO come raid time. And while this is a bit of a shame from the perspective of the game’s flexibility — something that TrackMania has always prided itself on — I don’t think it’s going to hurt the complete package, and in fact it may well be good for the series as a whole. TrackMania Turbo will serve as the friendly face of TrackMania, in other words, while the truly hardcore still have United and TrackMania 2 to play and mod to their heart’s content. Both of those games are still a hell of a lot of fun to play, after all — and surprisingly good looking, to boot, especially considering their age.

But what of TrackMania Turbo then? How does it shape up compared to its illustrious, if clunky, predecessors? Judging from the five tracks available in the demo, extremely favourably. In fact, if the whole game handles in the way those early tracks do, I’m confident that it will become a new favourite arcade racer.

The thing I like the most is the unabashedly arcadey handling. We’re talking Ridge Racer-tier drifting here: release the accelerator, steer around a corner and slam the gas back on and you’re going sideways. Hit the brakes and you’ll find yourself in an even tighter drift, allowing you to get around even the most ridiculous of corners without losing anywhere near as much speed as if you’d have to drive “properly” like in boring driving sims.

The game screen, sans custom mod clutter, is clean, clear and offers ample feedback on your performance as you play, including split times, worldwide and regional rankings, and fun little extras like arcade-style counters showing how far you’ve jumped or drifted for — a nice addition that gives the game a very “Sega” feel.

I was debating whether or not I wanted to grab the game today. Playing those five tracks in the demo has made me quite happy to pick it up, though; I can see it being a whole lot of fun, and I hope it’s a big success, helping to show console players the joy of this wonderfully silly but skillful and creative series.

2177: Black Screen of Death

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I’ve noticed something annoying about technology, particularly entertainment technology: the moment you want to revisit something you haven’t played/watched/listened to for a while, the technology that makes doing so possible is almost certainly going to fail somehow.

This has happened to me on numerous occasions ever since I was a youngling. From games that refused to boot on our old Atari 8-bit to… well, today, games that refuse to boot on my Windows PC, it’s an inordinately frustrating experience.

It’s more frustrating than something just normally not working, because the fact that you haven’t indulged in the thing in question for a while means that you build up a certain degree of anticipation in your mind for the first time revisiting it in weeks, months, perhaps even years. As such, it’s extremely disappointing when you find yourself unable to satisfy your hunger for the thing you were craving.

Today, I had an extremely strong desire to play Bizarre Creations’ swansong Blur, one of my favourite racing games of all time. I own both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game — the PC version being something that I’m actually seemingly rather lucky to own, since it has been pulled from the Steam store at some point in the last few years — but I was keen to play the PC version, since it runs at a superior framerate and resolution to the 360 version. Plus I’d been having idle thoughts about doing a “racing games supertest” series of videos, and Blur was one of the games I particularly wanted to highlight.

Blur has run fine on my machine before and I don’t think I’ve made any significant changes to it since the last time I ran it. I’ve perhaps replaced the graphics card in that period — which may be the issue, though I don’t see why — but that’s about it. But no; I was to be denied. I fired up Blur via Steam, saw the familiar noisy Activision logo followed by the now somewhat forlorn-seeming Bizarre Creations logo… and then the menu music started.

And then nothing happened. No spinny thing in the corner saying the game was loading. No main menu. No prompt to login. Just the menu music, and a Steam popup with the CD key that I was unable to dismiss.

I tried again on the offchance it was a random crash; no luck. I took to Google in an attempt to find the cause of the problem, or indeed if anyone else had had it — note to game developers: if you name your game a single word, please don’t name it after a common graphical setting, because it really makes situations like this a lot more difficult than they need to be — but I was ultimately disappointed, since this was, inevitably, one of those situations where lots of people in the last five years have had this problem, but none of them have come up with an adequate solution.

I tried the few solutions that were offered, and swore silently at Yahoo! Answers commenters making inane, generic comments about Windows updates and checking video drivers, but none seemed to work. As I type this, I’m restarting my PC — a rare treat for that machine, which tends to stay on most of the time — in a last-ditch attempt to see whether or not that works. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with the 360 version; no great loss, since that’s the version I originally “discovered” the game with, but it would be nice to run it at 60fps and 1080p.

Oh well. It’s getting late now, anyway, so probably no Blur for me this evening. Fingers crossed I can get it working eventually though…

EDIT: Restarted computer. Game now works. Maybe those Yahoo! Answers idiots weren’t such idiots after all.

2175: Nail’d It

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My good friend Mr Alex Connolly was kind enough to donate me a copy of Nail’d on Steam over the Christmas period. This is a game he’s mentioned to me before, but I’d never gotten around to trying it. Now I’m regretting not checking it out sooner!

Nail’d is an offroad racing game from Techland and Deep Silver, the developer-publisher combo perhaps best known in recent years for the Dead Island series and its not-really-but-sort-of follow-up Dying Light. It’s an unshamed arcade racer experience, with no pretensions towards having a plot or any reason for existing beyond simply being fun — nor, it must be said, is it making any attempt whatsoever to be the slightest bit realistic.

Nail’d is ridiculous. There’s no other word for it, really. From the moment you squeeze the accelerator and you immediately ramp up to approximately three thousand miles per hour in less than a tenth of a second, it’s clear that this is not a game intended to be taken seriously. This feeling is further cemented when you take your first jump and spend a good ten seconds airborne before landing with no ill effects, and set in diamond when you crash for the first time and your quad-bike explodes into fragments, while your driver goes spinning off into the distance with exaggerated ragdoll physics.

Taking part in a race in Nail’d is a rollercoaster ride. There’s dips and undulations, huge jumps, banked corners, environmental hazards, narrow gaps to traverse and stunts to perform. Pleasingly, there are multiple routes through each track, too, bringing the races a feel somewhat akin to EA’s classic SSX series back in its heyday, particularly as many of Nail’d‘s races are downhill point-to-point affairs rather than circuit races.

I hadn’t previously been particularly interested in motocross or ATV racing games before, and I don’t know how many of them are like Nail’d. But I do feel I’ve been missing out on some crazy offroad fun with this game, at least; it’s an absolute pleasure to play, it’s a challenge while keeping its mechanics extremely simple, and it’s one of the most thrilling, exciting racers I’ve come across, ever. It’s just a pity that the multiplayer servers are no longer active, so it’s not currently possible to share the ridiculousness of a Nail’d race with other people, except by doing some jiggery-pokery with the LAN mode and external software.

My arcade racing renaissance continues, then; Nail’d has been a delight to discover, and it’s inspiring me to check out some other racers I haven’t spent all that much time with — or haven’t tried at all — with a mind to doing a full roundup at some point in the future, either here on the blog or in video format, or perhaps even both!

Now I think I’ll go hurl myself off a few cliffs before bedtime…

2170: The Slowest Racing Game You’ll Ever Play

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My good friend Mr Alex Connolly saw that I had been investigating various racing games recently, and recommended something of an oddball curiosity to me: the rather literally named Off-Road Drive, a charming, clunky mess of a game from Russian publisher 1C Company.

Off-Road Drive is a game about offroading. Not offroading in the usual video game sense — that is to say, racing like you’re playing Ridge Racer, only with mud textures — but rather a more realistic(ish) take on offroading in heavy duty vehicles more suited to chores on the farm than barreling around courses at high speed.

The interesting thing about Off-Road Drive is that it goes into a lot more detail than many other racing games, yet at the same time manages to do so without making itself completely obtuse to the non-petrolheads among us. The game features not only the usual accelerate and brake buttons, but also switches to toggle between two- and four-wheel drive, do something or other with your differential, hoist yourself up with a winch, downshift into a low gear and let the air out of your tyres.

You may wonder why on Earth you would want to do any of those things and it’s initially baffling. However, a good tutorial mode gives you an introduction to the most common hazards you’ll face while offroading — and the appropriate tool from your arsenal to make use of when attempting to traverse it. By the end of a couple of laps of the tutorial circuit, you should have a pretty good idea of how things work and what you should do when. It’s perhaps best thought of as a racing game in which you’re required to use various special abilities at specific points on the track; thinking of it this way rather than trying to get your head around what the “differential” does is the way to go, it seems.

Off-Road Drive is not a particularly polished product. It doesn’t support VSync in full-screen mode, leading to screen tearing; its menus are clunky and don’t work properly with a controller (despite the game itself supporting controller); controller buttons are labelled the wrong way around (LT instead of RT and vice-versa); and its collision detection is occasionally a little questionable, but there’s little doubt that the developers set out to create something different to the norm and have succeeded in producing something that’s actually rather interesting and fun to play.

One of the greatest things about gaming is that it gives us the opportunity to try things we’d never do in real life. I don’t see myself ever flinging a Land Rover around a muddy course in Thailand, so Off-Road Drive acts as an eminently suitable substitute for now, at least.

Now, to go and look up what the fuck a “differential” is.

2169: Starting GRID (2)

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One of my acquisitions in this year’s Steam sale was Codemasters racing game GRID 2. I already owned the previous GRID game and had enjoyed what I played of its multi-discipline racing, but hadn’t delved into it in depth. The price that GRID 2 and its more recent sequel GRID Autosport were going for was too much to resist, however, so I snagged copies of both and have been putting the former through its paces over the last few days.

GRID 2 was a bit of a controversial release when it originally came out, since it’s a distinctly more “arcadey” affair than its predecessor. That’s not to say that the original GRID was particularly sim-like in the first place, but the true petrolheads of the Internet appreciated things like its lavishly detailed first-person cockpits and semi-realistic handling. In contrast, GRID 2’s emphasis on drift-heavy driving and the removal of the cockpit view led to a bit of an uproar among the racing enthusiast community, who saw it as a step backwards from its well-regarded predecessor.

Me, though, I love it; GRID 2’s slidey handling is exactly the sort of thing I love in a racing game, and to be honest, while I love the way a cockpit view looks, I find it extremely difficult to race from that perspective, since visibility is so limited in most cases, and you don’t have the peripheral vision you’d have in reality. Consequently, I much prefer racing from a bumper or bonnet cam (preferably the latter) since I find it much easier to judge my own position and have a feeling of spatial awareness during a race.

I also appreciate GRID 2 for its attempt to spin a story throughout its single-player game. All too often, racing games are rather dry affairs in which you navigate boring-looking menus to get to the actual racing, and there’s often very little in the way of personality. GRID 2 doesn’t go so far as to be Wing Commander with cars — although man, I would so play that game — but it does feature voiceovers and a sense of narrative progression as you play through the game. It’s not a complex narrative — you’re an up-and-coming driver headhunted by an eccentric rich dude who has decided he really wants to set up a new worldwide multi-discipline racing league, and your efforts as the face of the series allow you to build up the fanbase required for the WSR to become a success — but it works well in context, and it’s punctuated nicely with infrequent cutscenes, including authentic-looking TV broadcasts featuring full-motion video rather than in-engine characters.

This sense of narrative progression and personality carries over into the actual racing gameplay, too. You’re constantly getting advice and feedback over your radio while you race, and most race series highlight a named rival for you to try and beat. While the personalities of these rivals aren’t developed all that much outside of text messages and social media posts in the menu screens, it’s a nice touch that gives you more of an incentive to do your best than simply trying to get into first place.

The game also makes minimal but cinematic use of music: most races don’t have background music, instead featuring some impressive sound effects that allow you to hear not only the roar of the car’s engine, but the rumbling of the tyres on different surfaces, the sound of the crowds as you whizz past them, and other environmental sounds according to where you’re racing today. There’s an exception to this, though: when you get into the final races of each season, the final lap or sector of each race is accompanied by some electro-orchestral music that lends a real sense of drama to proceedings, making some already butthole-puckeringly tense finishes even more exciting. Good job there.

There’s a good variety of events, too, with both circuit races and point to point races — a subject that I was talking about wanting to see more of just a few weeks ago — as well as time attacks, overtaking challenges, endurance races and all manner of other disciplines. The aforementioned petrolheads don’t seem to like the fact that the game’s career mode insists that you participate in all the disciplines, since most seem to prefer picking and choosing their favourites, but I really like the amount of variety this brings to the campaign: it, again, gives a good sense of progression as each new season presents you with new disciplines to conquer and new types of car to get to grips with. By the time you reach the end of the career mode, you’ll most likely be a well-rounded driver able to turn your hand to all manner of different events — ideal for jumping online and taking on all-comers.

So I like it a lot so far, then. I’d go so far as to say that it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite arcadey racers for quite some time, and I’m very interested to explore it in more detail over the coming weeks.

2165: Dirt Showdown and Vulgar Racing

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I am a fan of what I described to my friend Alex yesterday as “the vulgar side of racing games”. This is a pretentious way of saying that I’m a fan of arcade racers more than more realistic fare, but it kind of goes a little deeper than that: I’m a fan of racing games that firmly put an emphasis on fun and spectacle as opposed to providing a faintly plausible virtual driving experience.

Codemasters’ Dirt Showdown, which I picked up in the Steam Halloween sale, pushes all of my buttons in this regard.

Dirt Showdown is the very essence of vulgar racing. It’s loud, it’s brash, it’s very American (despite the Codies being British), it’s full of scrappy-looking cars that you’d expect to find burnt out in a council estate in Croydon… and it’s a ton of fun.

A lot of Dirt Showdown’s fun factor comes from its hyperactive nature — and this is true both within single events, all of which are chaotic and specifically set up to encourage full-contact racing, and within the game structure as a whole. The single-player campaign sees you flip-flopping from one discipline to another — one minute you’ll be racing, the next you’ll be smashing your way around a course made up of barriers, the one after that you’ll be trying to knock all of your opponents off a raised platform — and multiplayer is much the same, with the added chaos of some rather “sport-like” competitive games modelled on Capture the Flag and Halo’s Oddball mode.

You’re never stuck doing the same thing for very long, in other words, and this is what keeps the game interesting. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you setting the multiplayer mode to do nothing but races, but where’s the fun in that? The beauty of Dirt Showdown is that it encourages you to master flinging your car around with a variety of different goals in mind, be it dispatching opponents as quickly as possible, or simply beating them to the finish line.

The big appeal element in Dirt Showdown for me, though, is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness arcade racer. This is not a game intended to be taken seriously or be regarded as a sim; it’s not a game where you can admire lovingly detailed cockpit views; it’s a game about taking a hunk of junk (or, indeed, a few licensed rally cars) and then hurling it at a bunch of other hunks of junk and seeing who comes out on top. It’s a game about tapping the handbrake rather than using the actual brake to go around corners; it’s a game that features races specifically designed to encourage pileups. I approve of all of this.

Plus it’s super-cheap in the currently running Steam sale. So if you haven’t given it a shot yet — assuming you’re a racing game person — be sure to check it out.