2441: That Racing Game I Always Wanted

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The more I play The Crew, the more I like it, and the more I’m surprised that it only got middling reviews which, consequently, led to it being one of Ubisoft’s lesser-known, less popular games. (Actually, I’m not at all surprised about middling reviews, because we all know how (in)accurate reviews are these days, and how meaningless scores are.)

Fortunately, Ubisoft doesn’t appear to have taken these middling reviews to heart and neither does the player base, as there always seem to be plenty of people online when I boot up The Crew, and its second expansion Calling All Units is due to hit in November.

The Crew is pretty much everything I’ve come to want from a racing game over the years, and very few games have successfully provided for these wants so comprehensively. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that The Crew is probably the only racing game I’ve played that ticks pretty much every single one of the boxes in my imaginary checklist for my “dream racing game”.

First up, let’s talk about the open world. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of open world driving games ever since I played Test Drive II on the Atari ST and wished that I could go off the predefined routes to explore. I never got to play it, but I was particularly enamoured with the idea of Test Drive III’s move to open environments, as primitive as they were with their early untextured 3D polygons. Then open world racing games actually became a thing with the Midnight Club and Need for Speed Underground series — the latter of which set in place a formula for the series that it hasn’t deviated from ever since.

The Club takes the concept of an open world racing game to an extreme level, offering a world that represents the entire United States. Unlike a full-on simulator, this depiction isn’t entirely true to life and is scaled down somewhat — you can drive from Key West to Miami in two minutes — but this makes sense for the purposes of fun. Real driving isn’t fun, largely because it still takes a very long time to get anywhere; video game driving, however, needs to be fun to keep people interested, and to this end The Crew provides an open world that is manageable in size but packed with enough hidden bits and pieces to make it well worth exploring rather than just proceeding from mission to mission.

The best thing about The Crew’s use of a miniaturised United States as its open-world setting is that it allows for a hugely diverse landscape. There’s the wasteland of Arizona. There’s the swampland of the Deep South. There’s the twisting, turning, tree-clad mountain roads of the central mountain states. And, of course, there are the various cities, each of which have numerous landmarks present and correct. It’s a delight to drive around and a pleasure to explore in search of data uplinks and hidden car parts.

So open-world driving is one box that The Crew ticks. What else do I want from a racing game? Well, as much as I’ve tried to enjoy the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports over the years, I came to the conclusion a while back that I’m just not a driving sim kinda guy. My taste lies with arcade-style handling a la Ridge Racer, in which it’s possible to slide sideways around a corner with just a hint of a tap on the brakes.

The Crew very much delivers in this department, and with some variety, too. Each car you get in the game can be specced out with different “classes” ranging from full stock (the basic model, no modifications) through “street” (tuned for street racing), “dirt” (more suited for rallying), “perf” (high-performance, particularly suited for street and circuit racing) and “raid” (super-strong and eminently suitable for complete offroading). Each of these specs feels very different to drive, too. The perf spec cars are fast and can pull off some impressive drifts, but don’t get much air if you fly off a jump and do not do at all well if you leave the tarmac. The raid cars sit high off the ground but provide an enjoyably bumpy ride as you ignore all the roads on the map and just leap over hills at every opportunity. The dirt cars get convincingly filthy and throw up dust clouds as you power them around unpaved roads, sliding sideways around corners like a pro.

It’s not at all realistic, in other words, but at no point is it trying to be. It wants to be fun, and by God it succeeds at that. I love driving in The Crew. It’s just fun to drive around the map, even without a mission. Throw in the fact that the missions are accompanied by dialogue and dramatic, cinematic-style music and you have an absolutely thrilling game.

Which brings us on to the story aspect. The Crew’s storyline is cheesy and stupid, just like The Fast and the Furious, but it’s entertaining and does its job. It has some good characters including some loathsome villains, and the protagonist (played by the ever-popular Troy Baker) does a good job of deadpanning his way through some genuinely amusing lines.

I’ve been hungry for a “driving game with a plot” ever since I learned of the existence of Racing Lagoon on the PS1, and endured the subsequent disappointment that it never got localised. (I understand that it was supposedly not that good in the first place, but I would have liked the opportunity to judge for myself.) Various games over the years have toyed with adding a plot — most notably EA’s Need for Speed series — but they always seem incredibly half-hearted, all but abandoning any attempt at storytelling once the game gets going.

The Crew is different, though. It keeps its plot flowing at a good pace, and you feel like you’re taking part in a Fast and Furious movie. As I say, it’s dumb and stupid, but it’s good dumb and stupid — the sort of summer blockbuster fare that would get you munching on your popcorn as if your life depended on it. It draws you in and makes you interested, and rewards progress through the game with satisfying (and impressively realistic) cutscenes.

Finally, there’s the “RPG” aspect of the game. The one thing I always liked about Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo was the part where you earned money and bolted bits on to your car to make it better. Where that part fell down for me was in the tuning aspect, where the game expected you to understand how cars worked in order to fine-tune all the settings to their optimal levels. Fine for true petrolheads; less good for people like me who just want to power around a course and feel cool while doing it.

The Crew adopts an almost Diablo-esque loot system in which every event you complete in the game, big or small, rewards you with a part that you can either stock or equip on the car you’re currently driving. Parts come in bronze, silver and gold variants, with the gold versions naturally being considerably better than the bronze.

You don’t need to know what a “differential” is in order to enjoy this system, though, much as you don’t need to know exactly what the purpose of each piece of armour is in a loot-whoring RPG. Instead, each part simply affects one of your car’s core performance stats — acceleration, top speed, braking and grip — and contributes to an overall “level” for the car. The higher your car’s level, the better it is — and you can leave it at that if you so desire, or you can further customise and specialise your car by mixing and matching parts in order to emphasise a particular stat if you so desire. It’s a simple but effective system that allows even non-mechanically minded people to enjoy a feeling of progress and advancement without ever having to touch a gear ratio menu.

The Crew is marketed as an MMO but I must confess I haven’t dipped my toes into the multiplayer at all as yet. The story is enjoyable enough in single player — and feels like it’s been designed with single player in mind, with the possible exception of the “takedown” events, which would doubtless be much easier with four people — but it looks as if there will be more than enough things left to do in multiplayer once you reach the end of the story. It has its own “endgame”, if you will, which I can’t comment on with any authority just yet, but I’m interested to explore, particularly the “Summit” events that were introduced with the Wild Run expansion.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your free copy of The Crew from Ubisoft, you’ve got until October 11 to do so — head on over here to do so. What have you got to lose? And if you are already playing, do feel free to add me as a friend via UPlay — my tag there is “AngryJedi” — and send me a message if you want to try any aspect of the game’s multiplayer; I’m keen to give it a go!

2438: Gunslinger

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Eager for a short palate-cleanser after polishing off Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force last night, I sought the counsel of my online friends. Mr Alex Connolly was first to answer the call, suggesting Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, a game which I recall had everyone very excited a few years back, and a game which someone — possibly Mr Connolly himself — had provided me with a gift copy of at some point in the recent past.

I have no experience with the Call of Juarez series as a whole, or with Westerns in general, but I was willing to give it a shot (no pun intended) as it had been so well-received on its original release — particularly for the amount of content it offered for its budget-tier price.

I liked it enough to play through the whole thing today, but I was left with mixed feelings. There were some things I really, really liked about it, and a couple of things I absolutely detested.

Let’s start with the positives, chief among which is the story and the way it is handled. Presented as the recollections of ageing bounty hunter Silas Greaves, the game unfolds over the course of a series of levels punctuated by attractive cutscenes featuring the Silas of today and the companions in the saloon that he is telling his tall tale to. During gameplay, Old Silas narrates the action — with his descriptions reflecting what you’re doing and the choices that you make along the way — as well as performs most of the dialogue on the cast’s behalf.

Gunslinger particularly plays with the “unreliable narrator” trope through Silas presenting alternative explanations of what happened — sometimes saying “well, I could have done this…” at which point you have to play through the hypothetical situation before it rewinds to what actually happened. Silas also posits that much of the history of the Old West as told by “dime novels” isn’t quite what happened, and in fact he just happened to be present for some of the most notorious events in the region alongside the most notorious outlaws of the period. Indeed, in the game you run into everyone from Jesse James to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though with Silas’ flair for the dramatic, you can never quite be sure if he was telling the truth all the way through his story.

Gameplay-wise, Gunslinger adopts a somewhat arcadey mould by featuring a combo system and points being awarded for kills. Kill bad guys in rapid succession and your multiplier climbs; dispatch them in ways other than just filling their torsos full of lead and you get additional base points multiplied by the multiplier. This isn’t much of an issue in the story mode — though points convert directly to XP, which can unlock various passive skills that make Silas’ journey a bit easier — but is brought to the forefront in the Arcade mode, where you’re tasked with attaining high scores in short, narrative-free levels.

Gunslinger’s style initially appears at odds with its gameplay mechanics, because you’re using Old West weaponry — six-shooters and rifles that are painfully slow to reload, breaking the “flow” of combat somewhat. Unlock a few skills, however, and you’ll find things become much more fast-paced and frantic, particularly once you obtain the ability to repeatedly hammer the reload button to reload more quickly. By the end of the game there’s a nice rhythm to the combat for the most part, and the story provides sufficient incentive to continue exploring.

There are two real things I didn’t like at all about Gunslinger, however. First of these was the prompt “You’re straying too far from the story…” that pops up if you walk more than three feet in the “wrong” direction during a level. This is simply bad game design; the levels should be designed in such a way that the player is confined to the “story area” without feeling like they’re confined. If there’s open space, let them use it! This became a particular issue in the final level as the Sundance Kid bore down on Silas with a shotgun; it was impossible to get more than a few feet away from him to hide without this annoying message popping up, which also happened to break Silas out of a sprint any time it appeared, too.

The other thing I didn’t like was the dueling system, although it was stylistically appropriate for the genre. In duels, you have to move Silas’ hand back and forth with the A and D keys so that it’s hovering over his holster, ready for a quick draw, while simultaneously manoeuvring an erratic, drunken mouse pointer over the enemy you’re facing off against. Once the enemy draws, you have a split-second to click the mouse button to draw your pistol and shoot them dead before they do the same to you. Trouble is, even with high “speed”and “focus” ratings obtained by performing the aforementioned manipulations, it often seemed to be a matter of luck as to whether Silas actually drew his gun as you expected and managed to get off a shot. Supposedly you’re able to dodge the bullets that come at you in this mode, but I don’t think I ever successfully achieved this; all my duels were won by what felt like dumb luck and perseverance. Perhaps there’s more to it than that, but I didn’t like their execution at all.

Aside from these issues, I enjoyed Gunslinger a lot. Its story was presented in an unusual, effective manner and its levels were well designed with plenty of variety rather than all being set in drab, brown “Old West” type settings. I’m not sure whether I liked it enough to play through it again on the harder difficulties, but I’ll probably check the Arcade mode out, at least. As for the mode where you can voluntarily subject yourself to more Duels? I think I’ll pass!

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.

1782: The Crew: Project Gotham for a New Generation?

I wouldn’t say by any means that I’m a die-hard petrolhead, but I do enjoy a good driving game, with the emphasis on game. That is to say, I tend to find the more hardcore driving “simulations” such as Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo to be hard going, slow paced and more difficult than is enjoyable; I’d much rather play something where the “correct” way to play is to fling your car sideways around a corner, not caring if you’re smashing street lights and fencing all over the shop, not worrying about fucking your car’s performance up after a few bumps and scrapes, not having to engage in anything even remotely resembling “sportsmanship” when racing against other cars, be they computer- or player-controlled.

One of the driving game series that I did find myself enjoying a whole lot over the years was Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing series, which actually began with the venerable (and awesome) Metropolis Street Racer on Sega’s ill-fated 128-bit console, the Dreamcast. Project Gotham as a whole occupied a curious middle-ground between serious sim and arcadey racer; on the one hand, you were racing real cars around realistic environments and it wasn’t really a “smash and bash” racer — in fact, Metropolis Street Racer even penalised you if you crashed too much, though this harshness was toned back a little in the later games, since they were already difficult enough — while on the other, you were flinging your car around with gay abandon, swinging its back end out whenever possible, darting between cone gates and playing chicken with upcoming walls as you tried to build up enough speed to actually leave the ground when racing down San Francisco’s hilly streets.

In other words, Project Gotham demanded some genuine driving skill, but also knew that people liked having fun in cars, too — the sort of fun that would quickly get you arrested were you to try it… well, anywhere, really. Project Gotham allowed a safe environment for you to hop into various high-spec sports cars (and a few low-end crap cars towards the beginning) and just have some fun. It was later taken to the next extreme by the rather wonderful commercial flop Blur, which combined Project Gotham’s semi-realistic racing (and real cars) with the stuff of pure fantasy — neon-coloured Mario Kart-inspired weapons that allowed you not only to race aggressively against your opponents, but to fire various explosive devices up their tailpipe, too. How sad that it wasn’t more of a success than it was.

But I digress. Today I’ve been playing The Crew from Ubisoft, a game that I’ve been cautiously curious about ever since I first heard about it a year or two back. Promising a (somewhat scaled-down) recreation of the entirety of the United States of America, a variety of different mission types and a strong focus on working together with actual, real-life other people, it sounded like a natural evolution of the direction racing games had been moving in for a while.

Need for Speed Underground 2 introduced us to the idea of a racing game set in an open world. And boy did it work well. It worked so well that pretty much every Need for Speed game since has had some variation on this formula, with you driving around a vast (and suspiciously geographically diverse) map to discover events, take them on and complete them — or just to drive around for the fun of it. These open worlds didn’t have the same level of detail about them as something like Grand Theft Auto, but they didn’t need to; you only saw them from behind your windshield, and you never left your vehicle, unlike in Rockstar’s classics. They did the job, though, and that was to provide you with an interesting environment in which you could get to know your car and the various roads, then challenge you with various events that would test your knowledge of both these things in a practical sense.

Later racing games played with this formula in different ways: Need for Speed Most Wanted had a strong emphasis on dramatic police chases, for example, while Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (the more recent version) actually allowed the choice of whether you were cops or street racers. Burnout Paradise, meanwhile, took that series’ typically exaggerated crashes and built a whole game mode out of them, where you’d have to crash and then bounce your car along the street for as long as possible, hitting as many things as possible along the way. (Oh, you could race a bit, too.)

The reason why I’m bringing up all these other games is that The Crew, so far, feels like an entertaining mishmash of all of them. It has Burnout’s crashcam, Project Gotham’s driving through gates and beating speed milestones, Need for Speed’s police chases. All of these different strands of DNA are very much apparent as you play, but for some reason it’s Project Gotham I keep thinking of as I play, even though they’re very different games; Project Gotham may have unfolded in realistic environments like The Crew does, but it took place entirely on enclosed courses rather than in open-world environments where it’s possible to find shortcuts and go off-piste.

I think it’s the variety of events which brings this to mind: most open-world racers in the last few years have included some sort of variation on the “race, destroy, time trial” formula, but The Crew adds a number of additional elements to the mix in the form of small, short skill challenges dotted around the various maps. Bringing to mind some of Project Gotham’s short but teeth-gnashingly difficult challenges, the skill tests task you with everything from remaining above 50mph for as long a distance as possible in a time limit to slaloming around posts. And, of course, just completing these tasks isn’t enough; there’s bronze, silver and gold levels of completion to take on, plus online leaderboards.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game, though, is the “co-op” multiplayer, as this adds a strange and welcome twist to the usual online racing formula. Instead of everyone jockeying for first position as usually happens — or, more accurately, the person with the best car screaming off ahead, never to be seen again, as everyone else fights for second — these events just require that someone wins. Everyone else’s job then effectively becomes ensuring that the computer-controlled racers don’t have the opportunity to catch the person who is screaming off ahead, hopefully never to be seen again; it becomes a team effort, and when it works, it seems like a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ve only had the opportunity to try event in this manner so far, but hopefully as more people pick up the game there’ll be more chances to enjoy the game the way it was clearly designed to be played.

The Crew is often described as an “MMO”, though at present that’s not altogether accurate. The execution is somewhat like Test Drive Unlimited, in which you’ll be driving around minding your own business and occasionally see other people in the area. When you reach an event, you have the option to “quick invite” anyone in the vicinity to join you, or you can pre-form a crew of up to four people to tackle challenges in a more organised manner. There don’t seem to really be enough players online as yet — at least not on the PC version — to make this feature shine as it should, but I’m interested to see how — or indeed if — it grows in the coming weeks.

Even if it doesn’t, the single-player offering seems fairly solid, and it has so far made a good start at fulfilling my wish of a racing game with a semi-decent story, so I’m intrigued to see what happens next. I’m also pleased to see the protagonist is a bespectacled, bearded Gordon Freeman lookalike rather than the usual self-consciously cool douchebags that usually populate this sort of game.

First impressions are pretty good then; more will doubtless follow very soon.

#oneaday Day 644: This Post is Pre-Owned and Proud

Fellow daily blogger and #oneaday 2010 alumnus Ian Dransfield posted a good rant about Online Passes earlier, and I thought I’d add my two-penneth.

These arguments have been made before, and will doubtless be made again, but people need to stand up to this behaviour and stop defending it. Why? It’s quite simple.

Online passes are completely indefensible.

It really is that simple. There is no reason for a publisher to lock off sections of content from people who have purchased copies of their games legally other than the completely mercenary “to make extra money.” Sure, publishers don’t make any money from preowned game sales — the thing which systems like this have been clearly set up to combat — but let’s look back, shall we? We survived the PS2 era with a flourishing second-hand game market. Grew enormously, you might say. Even the early part of this console generation did just fine without requiring you to enter three or four codes before you can even play the fucking game you paid money for.

One frequently trotted out excuse from publishers is that online passes help pay for server space and maintenance. Again, in previous generations and on the PC, that has never been an issue, so it’s a spurious argument at best. The argument is often extended to point out that when a second-hand copy of a game is sold, some space on the server must be created for the new player when, in fact, an extra copy of the game has not been paid for. Fine, but bollocks; the previous player is no longer playing it because he traded it in, meaning their precious server space can be taken up by the new owner. Easy.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that this argument is completely destroyed by games such as Arkham City, which lock single player content behind an online pass. And exactly what, pray, are those gamers who don’t have their consoles connected to the Internet supposed to do? Just go without? Well, yes, apparently, so it seems.

It astonishes me (and Ian, for that matter) that there are people out there who will happily defend this obnoxious practice — people who are the very consumers getting bummed senseless by it. It’s unnecessary, it’s indefensible and it’s just plain rude to consumers. And it’s giving me pause when considering whether or not to purchase new games — an issue which started to grow as DLC and later Game of the Year editions started to rear their heads.

Let’s take Uncharted 3 — a game which, by all accounts so far, is likely to be pretty brilliant. The Uncharted series is known for its excellent single player campaigns with strong stories, wonderful characters and spectacular setpieces. And yet news has emerged recently that the game will be making use of both an online pass to access the multiplayer, and a Season Pass allowing people to “preorder” downloadable content. The presence of both of these rubbish things is making me not want to purchase a new copy of Uncharted 3 when it’s released. Because I’m unlikely to play the multiplayer anyway, I may as well wait a while and pick up a preowned copy for cheaper, thereby depriving Sony and Naughty Dog of the money that I actually wanted to give them for producing a spectacular game.

I’m hoping these horrific business practices will cause the “mainstream” part of the industry to implode at some point in the future, because at the moment the vast majority of the gaming population is proudly presenting its collective posterior to the likes of EA, THQ and Ubisoft and allowing itself to be repeatedly violated with a large phallus made of money. It doesn’t have to be like that. If an independently developed game such as Dungeon Defenders can be one of the most-played online games on PC while costing $15 and without demanding anyone purchase any kind of pass for the privilege of playing online, then large publishers such as EA clearly don’t need any money.

The sad thing is, though, that the desire to play the latest and greatest games as soon as they’re released is a far stronger impulse than the “hang on, I’m being bum-burgled here” sensation. People want to play things day one, and by buying new copies they figure the online pass thing won’t affect them. But in doing so, they’re indirectly giving publishers the A-OK to carry on with these anti-consumer measures. And that’s not OK.

#oneaday Day 632: Safety and Peace, My Friend

So I beat Assassin’s Creed. Yay! I’m glad I finally did this, as it was rather enjoyable. The game’s flaws are very much apparent, but the narrative was enough to keep me wanting to play through to the end.

The game is a completionist’s nightmare. It’s full of progress bars and things to fill in that are completely unnecessary. Most people who have played it will, by now, know that there is absolutely no purpose whatsoever to collecting all the flags in each city, or killing all the Templars, or even doing every “Investigation” side mission when preparing for each chapter’s assassinations. Fortunately, I knew this already going into the game — it didn’t stop me from completely clearing the first few chapters, but then my copy of Assassin’s Creed II, the game from the series that I was really interested in playing, showed up. So, naturally, I just wanted to finish it.

The ending of the game was… a little odd. (Spoilers ahead.) While the majority of the game was pretty realistic in tone and obviously based on historical events (with, I imagine, a bit of artistic license taken) the final battle was rather odd. I wasn’t expecting a “fight every boss again at the same time” sort of situation, nor was I expecting a final boss with quasi-magical powers able to split himself into multiple forms.

Following the credits, the stuff you can read about on the Abstergo computers does, however, make it clear that we’re dealing with sci-fi here. The material about orbital satellites for mind control, the fact Africa was wiped out by a plague and. obviously, the technology on display — it makes it clear that all is not exactly what it seems.

I dug the story though. I enjoy a good conspiracy theory tale and even if it’s somewhat unsurprising to see the Templars involved in this sort of behaviour yet again, the way the story unfolded was interesting and kept me guessing up until the end, were it not for the fact that I inadvertently spoiled who the final boss was before I got to it. Oh well.

The thing I like most about it, though, is the fact that there’s a ton of possibilities for the series. Desmond is a likeable enough character, and the “exploring memories” angle leaves things nicely open for travelling through lots of different time periods. In some ways, it’s a bit of a shame that we’ve only seen Altair and Ezio so far — I’m hoping I’ll see the apparent appeal of the latter once I make a start on II tomorrow. Something must have inspired Ubi to keep on with him for three games. (Money, probably — but most layers of the series I’ve spoken to seem to be a fan of the character.)

Ubisoft has said that Desmond’s story will have to be wrapped up by the end of next year, however, but that doesn’t (and likely won’t) mean the series will be over. Desmond is, of course, “Subject Seventeen” — there are, then, sixteen subjects prior to him to explore, including at least one of whom that went completely mental and splattered conspiracy theories all over the walls in blood. That could be an interesting story to follow up on — or perhaps the end of Desmond’s cycle will leave things open for another subject.

I can’t really comment any more because I know literally nothing about what happens in II, Brotherhood and Revelations. Having beaten the first game now, however, I am very much looking forward to finding out.

Safety and peace, my friend.

#oneaday Day 139: Tr-Tr-TrackMania

Those who have — ooh. Hold on. [gets momentarily distracted by the new WordPress interface that has apparently launched today.] Pretty.

Ahem. What was I saying?

Oh yes. Those who have known me for a while will know all about my love affair with Trackmania United Forever Star Edition, née Trackmania United Forever, née Trackmania United. And indeed my Steam usage statistics would seem to back this up — with 24 hours’ playtime recorded on it, and nothing else close. Granted, Steam doesn’t seem to have tracked my playtime on quite a few games I know I’ve played through to completion, but 24 hours on a silly driving game is pretty substantial, and it just doesn’t get old.

Yes, it’s unpolished. Yes, certain aspects of it are inaccessible. Yes, it doesn’t tell you about a good 95% of the possibilities it offers anywhere in the documentation — but somehow, despite all this, a huge, dedicated community has sprung up around the game and has been supporting it and driving it forward ever since its release. So much so, in fact, that it’s spawning a proper, bona fide sequel, along with two exciting-sounding companion games.

TrackMania 2 Canyon looks like it will be a lot of fun from what I’ve seen so far — though the Canyon subtitle does make me wonder if it’ll have the variety of environments and vehicles that United offers, but it’s the other two ManiaPlanet games that intrigue me more, if anything. The possibilities on offer in ShootMania and QuestMania, offering the facility to create FPS levels and RPG games respectively, are potentially limitless. And while little has been revealed about how — and if — the three games will interact, the fact that they share a common community portal in the form of ManiaPlanet is immensely intriguing and offers some very exciting possibilities for those, like me, who are interested in game design but whose experience with building tools is limited to Lego, Scalextric and the Wolfenstein 3D map editor. (I remember trying to make a Duke Nukem 3D level once. That didn’t end well, much like several efforts to make a Doom level work in any shape or form. And those games weren’t even proper 3D. I like tiles. Tiles are good.)

For those who have never experienced the joy of TrackMania, it’s worth remembering that the game’s probably most oft-used environment — the stadium — is available as a completely free game to download, with a significant amount of content and the ability to make your own tracks as well as play online. It’s not often you see that sort of generosity from a developer offering what is essentially a “demo”, but there you go. Steam users? Knock yourself out.

Okay. That’s enough TrackMania ranting for this year. See you next year.

So I’ll see you on the loop-the-looped circuits, no?

#oneaday, Day 149: Games are Cool

After spending the last couple of evenings covering E3’s press conferences for Kombo.com and discussing all things gamey over at the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox, I’ve come to a conclusion.

Games are cool.

Whatever you might think of Kinect, PlayStation Move, the Nintendo 3DS, the million-and-one first-person shooters on display, Assassin’s Creed, Child of Eden, Ubisoft’s DRM policies or fitness games, one thing is clear.

Games are cool. And they’re here to stay.

There’s always a lot of cynicism around at E3 time, particularly when new technology is shown off. Especially if said new technology appears to be somewhat gimmicky, or limited in its practical applications. But the flip side of all the more outlandish stuff we’ve seen so far is that it’s a symbol of the diversification of the “gaming” genre. Games are no longer the sole preserve of the spotty, overweight, greasy-haired teenage boy who would rather lock himself in his room than go out and meet people. Though those people still exist. I am one of them. Sometimes, at least.

No, rather, we’re getting to the stage now where there’s something for everyone. I was interviewed for a position at a major chain of games retailers today, and one of the things I was asked about was whether I’d be comfortable selling something like a Wii game – you know, those interminable collections of minigames. Babysitting Party, that sort of thing. I could answer with some confidence that yes, I would, because I know people that those games would appeal to. They’re not “gamers”, they’re not the sort of people who would be sitting around in their pants watching E3 press conferences (you know who you are) and they probably wouldn’t even consider themselves part of the gaming community. But they’re still there, and it’s great that they are. They might never “graduate” onto more “hardcore” games, but that doesn’t matter either. Who says you have to? If you enjoy reading but you find great literature tough going are you forced to “graduate” from pulp novels to Dostoyevsky? No. (Unless you’re doing an English degree.) So it should be that if you enjoy Wii Play with friends, you shouldn’t be obliged to end up playing Gears of War.

The barrier for entry to the world of games as an entertainment medium is now practically non-existent. Very little in the way of technical knowledge is required to get started, save the ability to plug things into the right holes in your TV. There’s no arbitrary rules to follow – Atari users will remember holding down the “Option” key while they turned their system on fondly, for example – and there’s no complicated things to learn. The experience is becoming more and more intuitive, and with technologies like Kinect, whatever you may think of its real-world applications, we’re getting closer and closer to a world where absolutely everyone, regardless of age, gender and technical ability can enjoy interactive entertainment without feeling stigmatised.

We’re not quite there yet. Games still do have a bit of a stigma to shake off. There are subcultures within the larger group who let us all down a bit. But they have just as much right to exist and enjoy what they enjoy as the sort of person who buys Job Island for the Wii.

Gaming is no longer a thing for just one specific group of people to enjoy. It is – or at least should be – something that absolutely everyone can enjoy on their own terms.

Games are cool. And if you close yourself off to that completely like some people choose to, you’re denying yourself a whole world of entertainment.