Be Excellent To Each Other
https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/forum/

The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)
https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9499
Page 1 of 3

Author:  JohnCoffey [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 12:58 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

OK fair enough.

Author:  MaliA [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 13:00 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

Time dilated because your mum walked past

Author:  Hearthly [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 13:31 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

In my first post I said that both the framerate and loading time issue were 'console/shit PC' issues, not specifically console.

There are actually three things going on here I suspect, and I will roll together the 'console/shit PC' into a single device which I will refer to below as a PonsCole.

1) A PonsCole will have a mechanical hard drive. Stop using mechanical hard drives for games. We have already established that you can buy a 480GB SSD for £85. By all means keep a 2TB drive for data and suchlike (that's what I do), but use SSDs for games. Otherwise, don't moan about loading times when you've got 8GB of RAM to fill.

2) A PonsCole won't have enough processor/GPU grunt to shift the game around at a steady 60FPS, this is very bad for an arcade racer that quite often demands very quick reactions.

3) People using PonsColes have often not realised that many issues are the direct result of the game being always online, and that these can be easily remedied by choosing the 'play solo' option from the ingame menu. This sorts out a list of things, for example (a) Other players interfering with your game and crashing into you (b) Regular lag spikes and framerate drops which are very injurious to the overall game experience.

Some people worked it out for themselves - viewtopic.php?p=908846#p908846 - Others chose to go on ill-informed rants about how shit the game is.

All that said, this is by no means a perfect game, some of the criticisms are entirely valid (the total rubbishness of the police for example), but many of the original criticisms are either inaccurate or subjective, and yet are being presented as fact.

Author:  myp [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 13:44 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

Most games use data though.

Author:  Grim... [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 13:45 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

Hearthly wrote:
PonsCole

Image

Author:  Bobbyaro [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 15:55 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

I can't see that image at work, but it better be one expressing disdain.

Author:  MaliA [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 16:02 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

It's me, naked, in a sink.

Author:  zaphod79 [ Wed Jul 27, 2016 16:15 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

MaliA wrote:
It's me Chinny, naked, in a sink.


(its the Amstrad 386 / Megadrive hybrid)

Author:  MrD [ Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:39 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

Quote:
1) The issues with other racers pissing you off in single player (which admittedly is awful), and pretty much all the rest of the glitchy stuff he mentions there, is completely fixed by putting yourself into 'solo drive' mode, which disconnects you from the amazing shared online experience and puts you in your own single player world.

I tried that, but I didn't understand what it was doing.

When the game starts, you're given the choice between Alldrive and Speedlists. Speedlists seemed to be some kind of 'generated list of challenges by your speedwall friends' mode, so I just stuck with Alldrive.

When you 'pause' Alldrive, there's an option in the Options that says 'Play Alone', but all it did was take me back to the main menu (that looks like a wall of photographs). When I got back into the game after that, nothing had changed. I didn't understand how to confirm whether I was in single or magic multiplayer from that point on so I just left it.

I played NFS on my bro's PC which is rather good, but I had the best experience playing it on low everything because the better framerate made everything a lot more controllable-seeming. NFS is pretty where you can see it (I wondered why my car was sparkling when I turned on NFS for the first time, and it was only when I put on AA that I realised it was supposed to be rain. It never occurred to me, since I'm still stuck in Lotus Espirit Turbo Challenge tech mentally.), but lame that I can't turn it down enough to get at 60.

And to be clear, the only comment I made about the frame rate was in comparison to the original MW (specifically on the 360, where it nails 60 all over the place). Definitely not scientific apples-to-apples. :) The comp I was playing it on pretty much matches the minimum requirements listed here. It's what I've got.

Quote:
ill-informed rants

Well, yeah. They're more fun.

Quote:
but many of the original criticisms are either inaccurate or subjective, and yet are being presented as fact.

They happened. And they'll happen to anyone else who's luckless enough to try the game. Inaccurate or subjective, sure, but also the truth of my experience.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Sep 16, 2016 0:06 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

The Crew

What if Need For Speed: World was actually Burnout Paradise but was more like Need For Speed, but you actually played as Gordon Freeman except maybe he's more like Commissioner Gordon as played by Gary Oldman?

Yeah, this game has a plot!

You are Alex Taylor, driver of cars, who is framed inexplicably and suddenly for the murder of his brother, who is (I assume since we only see him for a few minutes) an unlikeable turd of a man who cares more about his racing gang than anything else.

Five years into his sentence, Alex is visited by Magic Zoe, F.B.I., who offers him carte blanche to pelt around the Extremely Small United States of America (now reduced to just five states: West Coast, Mountain States, Midwest, The South and East Coast) at 160 MPH and run over civilians, bison, wolves and anything else on the sole condition that he agrees to remain inside a car at all times and perform race after race to progress some unseen investigation. Presumably Zoe works for the same mysterious branch of law enforcement as Chase Linh from Need For Speed: Undercover where winning in races is just as good as talking to suspects and gathering evidence.

The menus are silly complicated, everything is in the wrong place and makes no sense. When you pick your first car, you're given a choice of three muscles and a sports car. Some of them don't even have full stats listed: the top speed of the Nissan 370 is a SECRET. And you get the 'real life car stats' like horsepower and torque and not the 'actual in-game useful stats', which is great. I didn't need to be able to tell which car had the best handling anyway. There's little letters in coloured boxes meaning... something. And on the 'collection' menu, where it apparently lists your progression through each of the six cars you potentially own, the text is so small on my 1280x1024 monitor results that block capitals have one-pixel-wide lines.

I didn't get to do much racing when I tried it just now. The intro to the prologue of the tutorial told me to find secret satellite installations and 'sync up to the 5-10 Net' to reveal local objectives, so I decided to just drive straight South to the 'pits', but the game yanked me back. So I did a few more tutorial things and drove West to Chicago, and the game yanked me back.

It's not clear when the tutorial ends (it's after you've installed the Tuner parts to 'transform your car' into a 'Street' car) - just don't dare go outside of the coloured area until you're told. (And when you get to the parts screen, the game DOES show you the 'actual in-game useful stats', just in time for you to have nothing to compare them do. Fabulous.)

But, once you're done with the tutorial, it DOES have the magic whooshy map from Test Drive Unlimited, with fast travel for those who like it fast and waypoints for those who like it slow. It's not as stylish or colourful as TDU's, and TDU is ten years old now, so there's no excuse for not having such a map.

On the plus side, there really is no out of bounds. You can drive all over the grass if you want to! You may as well. In The Crew, everything is made up and the brakes don't matter. Pulling the left trigger has basically no effect in this game, and you will take every turn absurdly wide. You might as well be racing hovercars. But if you decide to go for a wander, like you're playing Hard Drivin' with cheats on, or 'blazin' new trails!' in Test Drive Off Road, it's really hard to get back onto the road once you've left it. The highways all have little concrete fences around them!

But hey, DAYTIME. This makes for a nice relaxing drive through America. But unfortunately, real-ish cities. The cozy archetypes and swirling rollercoaster highways of Need For Speed: Most Wanted Good Edition are nowhere to be found. Instead, you get the searingly dull flat grey wet splats of Chicago and Detroit, which look like Burnout Paradise at its worst. Test Drive Unlimited is set on a tropical paradise island; The Crew starts you in Detroit. And refuses to let you leave.

There's a whole clusterload of don't-care-about multiplayer nonsense that flickers on and off screen sometimes. Ms. F.B.I. will go on about at length how having a Crew will help me complete race objectives, but since my personal race objectives run along the lines of 'Be 1st', I don't see how having other players going for the same goal is going to be of any help.

It's worth the zero pounds Ubi are asking for it but I will noogie your skull right through to the brain if you buy any of the zillions of ingame real-money items the snatchers are desperate for you to buy.

-
It's like Need for Speed: Undercover, Burnout: Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited had a baby:

Test Drive Unlimited: Undercover Paradise

---

I should probably add that I got really bored after the first race and don't have much wish to turn it back on any time soon. But it is 1AM, after all.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Sep 16, 2016 0:30 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed

GRID

GRID is a Serious game, from serious people. In fact, it's a Codemasters game! They made ToCA Touring Cars, and ToCA: Race Driver. And now, they've made Race Driver: GRID. To be followed by GRID 2 and GRID: Autosport. Or, to give it its full Slap-Chopped title: ToCA: Race Driver: GRID: Autosport.

Autosport is the Most Serious, for big car nerds, except I'm told big car nerds hate it because it's insufficiently serious. GRID 2 is The One They Messed Around With, getting rid of cool features and screwing up the handling, which means that Race Driver: GRID is the Original & Best.

Codemasters wanted to make a game that was both Serious and Fun. And damn, they won.

I can tell that the racing is serious, 'cause my bro who always plays on inside view on racing games and likes Forza can't get past level 2. But somehow, I've managed to complete the game with gold on everything and get the 'most money in a season' achievement by winning Le Mans without any retries.

Oh yeah, it has RETRIES. At any point, you can press the Flashback button to cycle back through the last ten seconds of race (the range of this is pretty arbitrary, sometimes it's long, sometimes it's short) and pick any moment to resume the race from. And if you're Too Serious for this kind of Fun Feature, you can trade in any Flashbacks you don't want for ingame money. Or turn them off altogether. Or turn off the ability to restart the race too!

Because this game has tons of options!

All of the race sets are championships of varying length, so if you're a hot-dog Serious person who echews Flashbacks and laughs in the face of being able to retry a race, you still stand a chance if something were to go wrong. And something WILL go wrong because in GRID you have to have an AI controlled teammate, who is ostensibly on your side. Of course, this means that they will ram you off the road in the last 20 seconds and repeat the same apology dialogue in a thick Japanese accent, just when a 1-2 finish would have won the championship, but instead the 5-1 finish has screwed up everything.

There's music during races, but dang even the music is Serious! If I'm racing to obliterate some other racing team's chances of victory, destroying their reputation, annihilating their every dream one race at a time I want it to sound like this. It's so Serious, it only actives if a race is Serious. Which is weird, 'cause surely all other races are by definition Not Serious. And why would you make the player play a Not Serious race?

There's loads of different race types, ranging from Fun to Really Fun. And also a single inexplicable Stock Car race that they jammed into the menu, and never repeated because it's a huge slog.

Yet, somehow, the 24 Hours of Le Mans that you're invited to do at the end of every four race season isn't a slog! It's a tense twelve minute race over a hilariously minified Circuit de la Sarthe which is played in complete silence until this comes on in the last thirty seconds and your controller slips out of your greasy hands since you can see your team mate coming up behind you and you just know they're going to do something stupid and the computer players are beside him like they're teaming up, and it's all you can do to keep alternating between wicked tight fast lines and tactically denying the computer players the ability to pass you, since once again you're playing by 'Behind: they're cautious, Ahead: they're godlike' AI rules.

There's quite a few cars too, car fans! But I only really cared about stats rather than car-nerding. There's no upgrading and no tuning, mercifully. You get what you get. You get to set up your team cars' livery and racing number, which is neat. But don't try to get the 360 achivement for getting all the cars, since they broke it. They were originally going to have a Ferrari in the game, but then they took it out, without updating the number of cars you need for the achievement. They patched it, but then the next patch re-broke it.

It looks good and drives good and it's often super cheap on PC. You oughta get it.

Author:  TheVision [ Fri Sep 16, 2016 10:38 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Brilliant reviews. I like it!

Author:  MrD [ Sat Sep 17, 2016 0:04 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

One for anyone who's sat through a few hours of GRID loading screens, here:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CfHy6cIWEAAuj0i.jpg

Author:  MrD [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 2:34 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

GRID 2

Fucking Grid 2.

I'd heard that Grid 2 was one where They Fucked It Up, but I wasn't prepared for just how subtle and how consistently they had Fucked It Up.

Let's start with the big meme that most folks have heard about Grid 2. They ruined the physics and now it's a slippy mess.

Well, they're kinda right. There's three categories of car in the game: Drift, Balanced and Grip. I can't tell the difference between any of them, they're all slippier than anything you're asked to drive in Grid 1. Grid 1 was pretty solid and predictable, with the rule that on the road you can pretty much do what you like but hit a ramp or a patch of grass and you'll be moving in a straight line no matter where that takes you. In Grid 2, you're moving in a straight line all the time. Every corner is like trying to pick up icecubes in the sink with your bare hands. Eric Frederiksen of Technobuffalo summed the game up masterfully when he wrote it was 'Frustration around every corner.'

The game doesn't help itself by starting you in the U.S.A. with a Mustang Boss, a legendarily wacky bar of soap on wheels. I say starting, I mean trapping. Grid 1 let you pick your favourite territory out of the American muscle car series, European tuner series and Japanese drift series whenever you liked, with a big friendly boxy menu.

And speaking of menu, Grid 2 seems to be missing tons of features from Grid 1 despite there possibly being more cars. I can't tell. Everything's hidden. I hope. Moving from screen to screen is a real pain in the backside. There's an achievement for upgrading cars, but I can't find that option in the garage I don't have.

Repainting your car is something you do ONCE, 'cause flicking backwards and forwards through the pages of colour layers is brain-crackingly awful. You have all these ideas of how you want your team's car to look and you can't do any of them because the designs are all terrible and you can't test things out and the colour you want isn't there and it's all so slow. And it's pointless since, unlike G1's optional bonus money challenges, the sponsors in this game are mandatory and ugly as sin, splattering your car with horrible logos from head to tail. Need for Speed: Undercover might suck, but at least it sucked fast and you could paint your car however you pleased.

There's a new plot, where you're hired as the poster boy (only male drivers allowed in Grid-land thank you) for a new racing league called World Series Racing. When you've suitably impressed all the drivers around the world by driving around the same three tracks forwards and backwards for forty hours, you can race in the WSR proper, which is exactly the same thing except the races are set at night and there's multi-race tournaments. Pointless ones, since the drivers know their Mario Kart places and stick to them like glue. For you, it's first, first, first or bust.

Since you've got an investor paying for all your cars, you don't have money in this game, you have Fans. You get Fans by winning races and completing optional objectives. It's basically just a score. You're given a choice of two cars to keep every couple of races and you can win the one you didn't pick by completing a time trial with it. Considering I'd never end up touching 90% of the cars in the game otherwise, this is actually really cool. It's like an enforced test drive, so you can tell whether or not you can drive the car in way that suits your race style. Cars come in two varieties: acceptable and completely useless. Something like the Corvette Z06 steers responsively, grips predictably into and out of curves when you finesse the triggers and goes nice and fast. Everything else: understeer. I always tried to pick the car with the best acceleration, but the stats are useless and trying to compare cars means using the menu and nooooo.

Every twenty hours or so, you'll get either a little cute pre-rendered-esque sequence of pages of the WSR website with 'NEW SEASON COMING SOON' 'lol :) my favourite racer is Your Name Here!' 'omg I love Your Name Here' flashing up, or some inexplicable live action full motion video. I can have a go at explicking it though, it's all part of paid promotion from ESPN and shit like that. Sadly, they don't even try to refer to you by name despite the Grid 1 spoken nickname menu making a return for your friendly radio guy (without my own G1 nickname 'Hotshot', gits). They could at least composite in a banner or something with your name on.

And nobody at all finds it suspicious that the mascot for this new racing league who is funded by the guy who runs the new racing league wins every single race, year after year, without question.

But they say that success breeds success and that is nowhere truer than in the world of racing sims.

There's something magical about pole position in Grid 2 that makes it almost inassailable. Computer players in pole position get a crazy boost to their grip, poise, determination, flavour, charisma, everything. If you're anything less than flawless they will be a speck in the distance.

It does however work both ways. In normal races, the bad guys just don't know how to overtake. Maybe it's my unpredictable driving style, but when I manage to reach first place, I tend to hold it magnificently, building up a ten or twenty second lead without much fuss. The computer just can't figure out a way to pass me. It's the getting there that's the effort. You never, ever, ever, ever start at the front of the pack (random MY ARSE), and immediately when the race starts everybody from 3rd backwards will without fail coalesce around you like a police cruiser box-in on the first corner. Later seasons have them sliding around the track, deliberately hitting you, spinning you out. They're unharmed of course. Of course.

Flashbacks make a return from Grid 1! Woo! In Grid 1, you could trade in Flashbacks in advance to earn extra money (and unused ones got you money too!). In Grid 2, you always start off with five in every race regardless of difficult and damn you'll need every last one. Walls are sticky, cars are sticky. If an enemy slides up alongside you, steering doesn't happen, towards or away. If you try to slide across the walls like you're playing NFS: Most Wanted 2005 Good Edition you'll catch yourself on a stray Lego brick and end up getting flipped instantly.

And, presumably to stop online cheating(?), there's a new mechanic stolen from... let's say Project Cars. I can't remember which one. One of the ones from around 2013 that had an off-road racing demo. If you're playing on a proper race-track style level with loads of grass around you and all four wheels leave the tarmac simultanously the game flashes up a 'Corner Cutting Detected' message and slams you into 1st gear for five seconds (this deceleration would turn any human racer to mush but never mind). No more exciting Grid 1 ballistic hail mary grass shortcuts, the Fun Police are here. Does it affect the AI cars? Ha ha ha ha.

In Grid 1, you got a video editor style timeline and could freely re-enter the race at any point in the last ten seconds. In Grid 2, time whirls backwards by itself and you have to hit the button at the time when you think you're mostly likely to be of help. It's faster! Gets you in the game quicker! Keeps up the pace! Except the pace doesn't mean anything when you've crashed and time has stopped, so why not just let me chill out?

You can't play on anything above Normal. Just try it. The magic of pole position becomes something to truly behold. First and second will shoot off, out of sight. There's no question of either of them being bound by realistic physics, or player-like physics. They are simply Perfect.

After playing it for a couple of weeks non-stop, I get the impression that you're supposed to be using drifts as your primary weapon to advance. But the game doesn't tell you this, there's no Need for Speed: Underground drift culture thing going on (you go to Hong Kong and do tons of drifts, but I was so unimmersed in the mood of the locale I honestly I thought those races were set in Slough until I caught a bilingual street sign), and it's not all floaty and weird like Ridge Racer can be. You just don't seem to slow down when you're sliding at all. The computer players never drift (not even during a drift race which makes them kind of easy), so if you brake slightly later you'll whizz past them. Except on Hard.

In Faceoff races where it's one-on-one the CPU is bizarrely aggressive compared to a normal race. And for some reason there's both Faceoff and Touge even though they're both one-on-one, point-to-point races. Don't get me started on Touge. Crap, I got myself started on Touge.

There's a mode in Grid 1 called Touge, it's a gentlemanly race. One on one, you and an opponent, point to point. One leg there, one leg back. Each leg, one racer is the leader. The other is the chaser. The leader scores points based on the lead they have at the end of the leg. At the end, the racer who had the greatest lead when they were the racer wins the Touge.

If the chaser bumps the leader, the chaser gets a points penalty. You've got to follow the leader, but never attack them. However, if the chaser passes the leader and wins the race, you've all but won. So the idea is to either race smart and get right up your opponent's rear and get a good time O_O or pass the leader and rush to the finish to dominate the race.

Wouldn't you know it, They Fucked It Up For Grid 2. TFIU might as well be the prefix for this game.

In G2 Touge, there's a leader and a chaser still. There's now a Need for Speed Carbon-like 5-seconds-ahead-takes-all rule, which is nice. I don't remember that in Grid 1.

But there's a new pair of rules in G2 which change Touge dramatically.

1) If the chaser bumps the leader, the player loses. With me? Drastic, but sure let's roll with it.
2) If the leader bumps the chaser, the player loses.

See the sneaky trick? I'm not saying the chaser loses. The player loses. Regardless of which side they're on.

You can be driving a perfectly clean race and if the computer decides to PIT you, you instantly lose. And it's an irreversible loss. Unlike a 'terminal damage' crash (which KILLS THE PLAYER, there's a G force of impact statistic and everything) which you can rewind freely, a Touge disqualification permanently stops the race and you forfeit.

https://fat.gfycat.com/SmartEagerAfricanbushviper.webm

I'm a horrible sportsman when it comes to Grid. I ram my own teammate off the road to prevent them from getting 1st if the leaderboard means we won't win unless I'm on top. I'll maliciously brake sudden, hard and late at corners during Touge to force the computer to crash into my backside and clock up huge time penalties. Some call it 'brake checking' and say its reckless. I call it hilarious and practical.

https://fat.gfycat.com/LivelyPointlessAnaconda.webm

But I never, ever cheat!

Now I have to win Grid 2. It's one thing to win a fair game by skill. It's another to join a game you know is rigged against you and win anyway. Just don't expect fun or fair racing.

Type in 'Grid 2 Touge' or 'Grid 2 disqualification' and see the misery curdling around every word. Even on other random non-game forums, if Grid 2 is mentioned multiplayer is often spoken in a low mutter thanks to 'the annoying bug where you got disqualified for being rammed'.

These replays were taken by propping a camera up on a stool and pointing it at the TV. Since this game is all Cool and Rad and Social (but not in an in-your-face, super-fast, challenge-your-friends today Need for Speed: HP/MW2012/Burnout Paradise way), you can upload your replays to YouTube from directly inside the game!!! If you buy the VIP pass voucher!!! (NO. DIE.)

I hope you like engine sounds, because you can't turn any of the various volume levels below 50%. I mean, who'd ever get tired of the same selection of tyre screeches and metal buckling sound effects over and over again for the rest of time. But hey never mind, at least there's the music oh no wait They Fucked The Music Up For Grid 2 as well.

Grid 1's music was awesome and also a disappointment. Electronic music with absurdly dramatic, almost cheesy orchestral instrumental layers on top, all expertly mixed based on your lap, race position and speed. But you only ever got to hear them when you were about to qualify for a medal. Every other race was completely silent. And you can't replay medal races either, so once you've heard them, they're gone.

Grid 1 also had a villain in Ravenwest, the sneaky team of racers whose cars were ALL BLACK. At the end of every race block, you'd be challenged to a one-on-one race usually against a Ravenwest driver. Ravenwest are led by Nathan McKane; almost certainly a relation of the McKane from the first Race Driver. A man you've made it your sole mission to obliterate from history by dominating every single discipline of racing one by one, THE CROWD CHEERING YOUR NAME WHILE YOU TAKE EVERYTHING FROM HIM, LEAVING HIM BROKEN AND ALONE..

Grid 2 doesn't have jack. No antagonist. No tension of trying to get the 'most money in a season' achievement by taking on a series of back-to-back difficult races, trading in your Flashbacks for extra kudos with the Le Mans to look forward to at the end of the week.

And 90% of the music is slightly glitch-remixed versions of the Grid 1 soundtrack, which is just lazy. Grid Autosport does it again with even further glitched remixes of the Grid 2 music until it's almost entirely unrecognisable as either Grid or music.

If you're going to do music for a sequel, poke your head into the world of Intelligent Qube a.k.a. Kurushi.

Intelligent Qube (I.Q.) a.k.a. Kurushi is a 1997 puzzle action game for the PlayStation. The sequel, I.Q. Final a.k.a. Kurushi Final was released in 1999, also for the PlayStation. I.Q.'s on the left, I.Q. Final's on the right.

Image

They are exactly the same game, except the latter has a few extra modes. Want to know why nobody minds?

Because IQ starts off with this, The 1st Tide. And then gives you THIS, Ecliptic, a rearrangement of The 1st Tide, because if you've gotten to level 2, you're clearly cut out to be humanity's saviour in an interdimensional mental battle for our right to exist. I.Q. Final starts off with this, The 2nd Tide, to ease folks who didn't get a copy of Kurushi into the bleak world of stomping cubes and darkness. And then gives you this, Theory, a rearrangement of The 2nd Tide, because if you fail the entire universe will never have been created.

You might not like it, but you can't deny that they at least made the effort.

(That's probably a bad example, since most folks familiar with Kurushi will have played the demo from the cover of OPSM which didn't include the music so they'd be used to the eerie silence and echoing footsteps and disappointed when there's themes playing. But at least those guys can turn the music off if they don't like it.)

And on top of the music being lazy, you hardly ever get to hear it anyway. The condition for music playing in Grid 2 is that you have to be playing a season final race, and this time it only appears on the last lap or in the last quarter section of a point to point. Thanks a lot for that thirty seconds of glitch remixed, barely audible music. Really gets me fired up.

Also the box sucks, like Grid 1's box. I hate over-stylized racing game covers. It makes it hard to tell what kind of game you're going to get. Grid 1's one's all carbon fibre and monochrome, Grid 2's one's all dark and moody, but they're both blazing sunshine and green grass for the most part.

Except the end of Grid 2, where it becomes WSR after WSR, tedious night race after tedious night race. Black and yellow flying at you at 200mph like you're bobbing for bumblebees in a vat of licorice custard.

Despite having won over 150 races and just reaching the fifth season (of five I HOPE), I feel like there's very little to actually do in the game! No memorable tracks, nothing to really root for. It's like a prototype of Grid 1 (though the graphics... might be better?).

Author:  MrD [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 3:41 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I thought I'd cheat for a sec and see some other Grid reviews and my mind was blown when I read that the games don't have any weather conditions! No rain, snow, ice. It's never even overcast. Hell, Lotus Espirit Turbo Challenge had all that nailed down. And The Run had a snow level!

Author:  Hearthly [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 9:48 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Me and the chaps have got Grid, Grid2 and Grid Autosport.

Only Grid Autosport has stood the test of time and remains the one we all keep installed, and is our go-to game for racing shenanigans.

Grid2 was pretty bad and didn't last long on our Saturday night games list.

(The best Dirt game was Dirt2 but that broke forever when Microsoft turned GFWL off, but Dirt3 Complete Edition is still a pretty tidy rally game.)

Author:  DavPaz [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 9:52 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I love your reviews MrD

Author:  Grim... [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 15:11 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

DavPaz wrote:
I love your reviews MrD

:this:

Author:  MrD [ Sun Apr 30, 2017 22:50 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Just had a weird episode on G2 where when I triggered the Flashback to rewind the race it showed me on a completely different part of the track driving really slowly. A literal flashback, to what exactly I have no idea. Weird as heck.

Author:  MrD [ Sun May 07, 2017 5:09 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed / Porsche 2000 (and despite my wonky memory, never Porsche Challenge. High Stakes is a.k.a Road Challenge, and there's a SCEE Porsche Challenge on the PS1, but not an NFS Porsche Challenge.)

Imagine a world where every car is a Porsche. Sounds kinda dull, doesn't it? Well at least you get to race 'em about a bit.

The intro text for the game says that you'll have to get used to the distinctive Porsche handling style. And they're right, it is distinctive, 'cause the cars in Porsche don't turn. But that's okay since they don't accelerate or brake much either. But unusually they don't tend to slip much. Porsche gets a reputation as being the slippy one, but I can see now it's because the others are ridiculously (albeit usefully) grippy. I switched over to High Stakes for a mo to compare graphics against 3 (HS includes all of HPs tracks as bonus level), and the Lamborghini Diablo SV just slurped up road, handing intense bends without me even lifting up the accelerator.

It might be because I just came off winning Grid 2 (LIKE A BOSS), but I found the handling in Porsche to be really forgiving. When you're in a skid, if you don't panic, you'll come out of it well. Let go of everything and steer into it. If you panic, you'll start flipping out all over the place. The walls are definitely forgiving... sometimes. The walls you can see are kind: you'll slide off them, lose a bit of speed, but you won't be dead. The walls you CAN'T see are vicious. A single bush in the rough grass beside the track that turns out to be solid is enough to send your car hurtling horizontally across the track, flipped and dead.

If you somehow do make a single mistake you might as well restart the entire race. The computer cars don't tend to make a lot of mistakes. Since the cars are all super slow and the tracks are super wide. You've got no excuse for hitting the walls yourself really.

You get nice full action replays in this, full of angles and time controls (if anybody ever cared except the trailer editors), but nobody's thought to link 'em up with Lemmings 3's idea of letting you replay from any point.

There's two main modes in Porsche: Factory Driver and Porsche Chronicle Evolution.

Factory Driver lets you work as a newly-minted Junior Test Driver for Porsche, working your way up to Ace Driver over the course of three dozen missions.

There's point-to-point challenges where you have to 'deliver a car' without it getting damaged. Of course, this means you have to drive like the dickens through the cities of the world, trading paint with cops and avoiding the suspiciously jackknifed trucks along the way. The cops aren't super sticky and devious like in the other games, they're just scripted obstacles, more or less like The Run. In fact, this mode is a lot like The Run! There's a plot, characters, all that stuff (though they're just stock photos and text, really). There's even a tearful farewell, confrontation and rivalry!

There's races where you're challenged by other Porsche test drivers, and as you might imagine these guys are pretty good at driving Porsches. They simply don't make mistakes. And you can't ram them because you can't reach them. You just have to drive absolutely perfectly and hope that when they brake, you don't have to. The better the cars get, the worse the TDs are, since they'll have to -gasp- drive above 60mph.

There's quite a few slalom tests, but despite them being set on different tracks (and often on the skid pad) they very samey and not a great challenge.

The final, and surprisingly least frequent (oh but you'll be -restarting- them frequently...) type is the skid pad technical challenge. The Porsche mechanic (they only have one) has tuned up a new car and you have to test it works by gently taking it around the skid pad, performing simple maneouvres like... sprinting to a set of cones, spinning the car exactly 180 with the handbrake, driving in reverse for a while, spinning the car back to face forwards, diving around two cones and finally hurling the car around in a 360 spin all while maintaining a minimum speed. That's no issue for me, though. I've won Driver. (Alright I used cheats on the final level, but "that tutorial" is NO THANG to me.)

And in the final boss of the skid pad, you're forced to use Manual gears!

If you do well in Factory Driver, you're given cars to keep which you can use in the Porsche Chronicle Evolution mode. Evolution mode is a standard buy-cars-paint-cars-upgrade-cars career mode, with the gimmick that you're racing through the era's of Porsche's history, starting with their classic cars and moving up to their modern ones each chapter. This used to be my preferred mode but now Factory Driver is simply because I won it tonight.

I have it another rumble today and heaven's above I don't know how I could stand it. The game starts you off racing 1956 Porsche 356 with a heady top speed of 70 MPH. The first few races are tournaments, so you've got a whole lot of repetitive, dreamlike hovering around the same few tracks until you try to enter the second tournament and you're told you don't have the correct car (that's a 356 A tournament, silly!). You can buy used cars if you can stand flicking between the menus over and over again. These come pre-damaged and you have to repair them, since this game has persistent damage! And I took one look at the Parts menu and threw up. NFS4 has three global levels per car and that's it. This game spews dozens of part names at you, and doesn't show you the descriptions of their effects immediately. It's up to you to remember what each part of the car does and how effective each upgrade is. (Just like the Car Compare menu being less than great.) If you're persistent enough you can replay the first tournament enough to be able to buy a car suitable for the second tournament. And that's about where my interest died. I'll take my Driver-like mission-based driving any day. But with NFS5, you don't have to compromise 'cause you've got both modes, hooray!

This is a game for people who really care about Porsches, which is not me. I couldn't tell the difference between any of the cars, except the very old ones drive like bathtubs (probably where the game gets its super-slippy reputation from since you have to start your Evolution career in The Olden Days), the modern ones are all the same, and there's a GT one that looks like the Batmobile. The ULTIMATE BEST car is the '00 Turbo (That's the present day. Yes, you're old.) which you get for winning Factory Driver. Apparently getting to drive this brand-new Porsche is a big deal but I couldn't tell it from the other cars, except the computer didn't know how to drive it - after all it is brand new. I only noticed that the Turbo race was the end of the Factory Driver mode 'cause it chucked me back to the main menu when I won it. Didn't even get credits!

There doesn't seem to be many tracks in this game. There's four 'locations'... maybe? And there's some variations of the routes if you bother to dig into the horrible slow menu... but all of the tracks from 3 and 4 are gone. And obviously you're not getting a Diablo unless Porsche made one when no-one was looking. You don't get a lot for your money in this. There isn't even that much in the way of Porsche nerdery. I was expecting tons of photos and videos, but nope.

I was playing this to test out my new almighty PEGATRON (it's a nettop PC with an 1.6ghz Intel Atom processor and a Nvidia Ion graphics card, so 2000 games is about all it's good for), and I was very satisfied to find that not only does Porsche work on Windows 7, but since it runs on DirectX my standard USB controller was detected perfectly. Sure the game expects you to have a racing wheel, but all it really wants is any old joystick and my PS2 Dualshock 2 clone pad worked flawlessly with it. It detected the 1360x768 mode of my TV too, it's almost like it was made to be played as a console game! (Except you have to get out your keyboard and mouse every time you want to restart a race or move between races on the menus, but you can't have everything.)

Dick to XInput. DirectInput for life!

Author:  MrD [ Thu May 11, 2017 4:48 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Need For Speed 4: High Stakes / Road Challenge

What the hell is this? I was all making fun of NFS5's driving model, saying it's all slippy and whatnot, but this game is, for want of a better word, wack.

At least NFS5 -has- a driving model. This game just has manic speeding all over the place. The cars don't seem to drive anything like anything! In fact, they remind me a lot of how old fashioned stripey-road driving games would work, with the nose of the little sprite car gently shearing to the left or the right and the world sliding into position. There's no weight, just weird arcadey grippy magic. Every race begins with all the cardboard cars blinding smashing together then shooting off into the distance, leaving you in their dust.

This is the first NFS game with a persistent career mode. NFS3 had progression and goals and unlockable bonus levels and cars, but it didn't have any way of holding them all together. If you looked carefully you could perhaps see a little checkmark or some golden text, but otherwise you'd never know that if you won a tournament on each track you'd unlock a bonus level.

In Heist Aches you've got a series of trophies to aim for, each one requiring you to get a medal in a set of predefined events. And these events start off pretty long and only get longer. Two two-race tournaments with three laps. By the end... I don't even want to think about it. You can buy cars as you go, upgrading them to get minor bonuses in all your stats, which also adds STRIPES! to your car. Higher levels give your driver dude a racing suit to wear. You can pick an arbitrary colour for your car and everything, so of course you'll get attached to 'em. Who doesn't want a Mercedes SLK?

Later on you get the titular High Stakes races. Simple: you and a CPU opponent do a race. Winner gets the opponent's car. Tension! Drama! Threat! Loss! Of Hours Worth Of Racing Money In A Single Race! (And exiting mid-race counts as a loss, buddy.) You thought Dark Souls was hardcore? Suuuuuure.

What I don't understand is how I used to like this game. This used to be my favourite one! But then again I could never get past the first tier of cars when I played it, plus I was twelve years old.

This one gave me tons of trouble when I tried playing it on the Pegatron (on Windows 7). Couldn't get it out of software rendering mode (where it looks like a Playstation game) and it doesn't support widescreen resolutions by default. Modern patches let you pick widescreen resolutions, but they seem to just offer various kinds of upscaling from 4:3. I installed nGlide, which got the 3dfx logo coming up when I started the game, but it still kept on using the software renderer. I'm pretty sure I used 3dsetup.exe to change it, but nothing I did worked. Joystick worked great though!

All the old cars (I think?) and all the old tracks from NFS3 are back again as bonus levels, which makes this game feel almost like an expansion pack of sorts. The cop modes are still there and everything. However! The modern patches for NFS3 seem to work a lot better, my bro is running 3 on his Win 7 machine with full everything at 60hz, while I'm stuck with everything terrible. Plus, I had tons of custom cars and tracks downloaded for NFS3 back in the day and I'm not sure if they're compatible with this one.

Hot Pursuit might be the better game after all...

Author:  MrD [ Fri Jul 07, 2017 20:07 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Squadra Corse Alfa Romeo

(That's Italian for 'hey, that spells SCAR!')

Fresh from my success in the realistic world of GRID, I've laid out the princely sum of a single pound and bought myself a Proper racing game for the original Xbox. Proper licensed cars from a manufacturer you've probably heard of and Proper real-world tracks you've probably already gotten sick of in more popular games.

And no gimmicks. Alright, maybe one. But it's a doozy!

According to the back of the case, SCAR is the 'very first CARPG'. Yep, it's a car playing game. You thought you were playing at cars in all those other games? Don't be ridiculous. This is the very first time you've been able to play as a car in a game. Wait, what? No, that's stupid. You don't play as a car at all. And even if you did, the chibi-toy-car ChoroQ licensed game Road Trip Adventure came out first and you DO play as a car in that!

So what is a CARPG?

Does it have an expansive overworld for you to explore, an intricately designed chain of towns each with their own self contained plots and characters all subtly linked together to slowly involve the player more and more in the events that will define the future of the world? Do you increase in power and influence as the game progresses, gaining access to increasingly sophisticated forms of transportation to allow travel to even more remote locations? Does it have a series of cunning antagonists each hiding behind one another's spoken and unspoken agendas, making and breaking alliances with the player as suits their needs? Does it have deep dialogue options for the player to project a personality of their choosing onto their avatar, with characters within the world reacting seemingly spontaneously to this new free agent in their midst? Does it have a moving score that surges and ebbs to reflect the action depicted on screen - tense confrontations, comedic asides, life or death rapidly changing encounters in the wild, pivotal confrontations encompassing a battle of wills as much as a battle of physical and magical prowess?

No. No, it doesn't have any of that stuff. It's just a fucking car game. And as you might have guessed from the way it has Alfa Romeo in the title, that's all the cars you're gonna get.

(Surprisingly enough... For a stupid, wacky, rush-translated kiddie game, Road Trip Adventure does have quite a lot of the stuff I listed... after a fashion...)

But anyway, if there's no high adventure and you don't play a role, what exactly is SCAR's claim upon the name CARPG?

It has stats! Totally unlike the stats you get in, say, every other racing game where you upgrade your car, like Crazy Cars III or Super Cars on the Atari ST or whatever. No, these aren't car stats... In SCAR your driver has stats!

Heart! Vision! Intimidation! Handling! Acceleration! Recovery! Anticipation! Endurance!

Wait! Two of those sound like things that should have been car stats! Never mind. Lets give the game the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're improving the driver's ability to get the most out of their car.

So, you put in your character's name into the very tiny box. And the game doesn't even put it on the back of your car. LAME.

So, what the heck do all these amazing stats do?

The manual goes into absurd detail over all of these. It dedicates a page to each of them, explaining how each stat represents a different facet of your experience as a driver. Or rather, to be more direct, the manual is full of epic amounts of bullshit. Every page waffles on and on in the most flowery indirect language ever trying to make the most basic of game mechanics sound like Shakespeare and Keats's very own blessed baby barf.

I'll simplify it.

In game you have two health bars, your driver condition and your car condition.

The driver condition represents the racer's mental state. It starts at around 150 and decreases when they're in situations that would cause them to lose their calm. Which in SCAR's case is 'another car being somewhere near them'.

If you're drafting behind or hanging beside another racer, you'll cause him to lose condition (this is listed in the games menu as the bizarre and immersion-breaking term 'intimidation damage') when a computer player hits zero... Boy, are you in for some fun...!

Is what I would say if intimidating a driver had any effect. As far as I can tell, driver condition only affects a racer when it hits zero. In the computer players case it causes them to wobble a bit. Maybe in a championship other than the Rookie one this would result in a devastating spin out, but you're only allowed to play the single player career mode (sorry, the 'Dynasty Mode') in order, with no 'winning the Hard cup counts towards the Easy cup' rule, so I never felt like I'd deliberately knocked out another racer with my intimidation ability. (And really it's not much of a 'Dynasty' if there's no interstitial videos introducing the locations, no narration and no car ownership, customising or colouring. A dynasty is all about owning shit!)

Human players are also affected by intimidation. If your condition reaches zero, the screen goes out of focus. Or, to put it another way, you get GTA 3 trails for a moment. I suppose its designed to be off-putting, but I'm playing this original Xbox game through composite cables upscaling onto a 32 panel so it all looks a bit naff anyway.

Your car condition is a hit points gauge that starts at 100, goes down when you get hit, and when you get to zero, your car is dead and you lose. Getting damaged dings your bodywork but doesn't affect the car's performance. You can't get burst tires. Inexplicably, you can get Gear that increases your car condition!

Oh yeah let's talk about Gear. You've played BioShock infinite, right? You remember how it had four slots for hats and jackets and things and each slot gave Booker a little twist to one of his basic innate abilities like making you invulnerable for a short time after a melee kill or making every other ammo reload cost nothing or something like that? Well SCAR has that too!

Except we're in very basic RPG land so you just get simple stat increases. Boo. This does lead to the scenario where your character can have racing boots so intensely powerful that they increase the probability of the racers in front of you losing their focus and spinning out.

What I said about the game looking naff wasn't entirely fair. The graphics in SCAR look rather good. You just don't go to many different places. The grassy roads are all colourful. The racetracks are all racetracky (and I could've sworn I've been to a few of these famous places in GRID before, so they're accurate), but the city courses unfortunately look entirely dead.

Again, maybe its because I'm trapped in the noob zone, buuuut... There are no.crowds in this game! No.matter where.you go, from the huge stands and the nurbenburger, to the deathtrap-corner American cities, everywhere is totally deserted. It's like the game wasn't finished.

But hey, at least all the gear is pretty colours so you can make your driver look like however you want! Except your driver has no physical avatar in this game. You name him but never see him, ever.

And speaking of making the game feel unfinished, there's no in game race music, again. You're on a system that supports custom soundtracks. If you can't afford a composer (and you can, 'cause you've got menu music), and you can't afford EA Games Trax or what-have-you, allow the player to play music stored on the console, you divvies.

Driving feels solid and weighty. I've gotten used to the no fun allowed style of racing from playing GRID. Every straight is balls to the floor acceleration. Every corner is slamming hard on the brakes until scraping around the corner at 10 MPH. Unlike in GRID and especially GRID 2, skidding in SCAR slows you down. You really need to keep traction if you want to stay fast. So it's no speed allowed, and no hot-dogging allowed.

GRID 2 introduced the much maligned corner cutting feature where if you tried to improvise and have fun the game would tell you in big capital letters that you were doing it wrong and slam you down into first gear. GRID lets you corner cut as much as you like as long as you don't mind the journey from tarmac to tarmac being entirely ballistic. SCAR compromises by allowing you to go offroad and make like an ice cube as much as you like, as long as you don't mind it sapping your car condition like the grass is made of lava. If you're willing to give up the Clean Lap XP bonus, you can make a mockery of some of the hairpins on the Serious Racing TM courses by powersliding a neat tiny curve miles away from the hairpin itself and re-enter the track facing the right way having lost hardly any speed.

In fact that's the only way I won the first race of the second difficulty because computer cars just don't make mistakes... Ah! But! What about the intimidation? It doesn't quite work nicely in practice. You can't really choose when you're intimidating an opponent. You're too busy racing and going to fast to select a clever alternate racing line to cause them to crash (which they won't) while staying in the correct position to take the next turn. You can't turn it on or off.

Aside from all the cars being identical within a single race, I couldn't tell the difference between any of the cars provided throughout the game. They all sounded and drove the same. Sorry, Black Bean, but all your authentic recorded Alfa sound was for naught. Every so often I'd be told that I'd reached a new total XP amount which granted me access to A BRAND NEW CAR, but since the cars are selected for you in Dynasty Mode, you can't do anything with unlocked cars except use them to play in multiplayer. And this game only supports two player multiplayer and despite being from 2005 doesn't work with Xbox Live.

Despite it being silent and feeble and samey, I was having an acceptable amount of fun until I completed the first difficulty and moved onto the next and then it was too hard and I stopped having any fun.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Jul 07, 2017 20:21 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

The US title for Squadra Corse Alfa Romeo is 'Alfa Romeo Racing Italino'. As in ARRI. As in YER A WIZARD 'ARRI.

Because I totally forgot to mention in my post that you are in fact a wizard. Despite being a Level 1 driver, you start off with the ability to call upon your decades of driving experience to anticipate future conditions and react to things before they transpire. It's called The Tiger Effect.

You tap the Tiger button and everything slows down, smoothly whirls back a little undoing your mistakes, then resumes naturally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSb7dfsyg50#t=11m42s

Yeah, it's got GRID's trademark Flashback feature three years before GRID came up with it. (Or to be exact, it's -identical- to GRID 2's version, complete with the smooth reversal and resuming of time, a timeline-less version of GRID 1's having traded the accuracy of the timeline for instant restarts.)

It's such a non-entity in gameplay it didn't even occur to me to write about it. You start off with enough T for a single Tiger and it lasts one second. You can level up the amount of stored T, the length of a Tiger and the regeneration rate, but for the majority of the game you're going to have a single restart at your command which lasts for one whole second. It regenerates at 0.1 per 28 seconds, so if you can last four and a half minutes, you'll get a second one.

Some of the races are nine laps long. Nine, three minute laps long.

Author:  Hearthly [ Tue Nov 14, 2017 19:34 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Latest NFS.

Lootboxes to make your car go faster.


Author:  MrD [ Thu Nov 16, 2017 3:38 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I'd really like to like Payback. Somebody buy it me and I'll write about it!

Need To Pee: Hot Fursuit
I've finally gotten all golds on Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit: New Edition, and the game has really grown on me. Now that I'm old and wise enough to realise that sometimes letting go of the accelerator is probably a good thing, my skill levels have shot through the r00f. A little. There's not enough music in HF, so be prepared to mute it twenty minutes in. And I never found a purpose for driving anything other than the fastest car I had in any given class, but there's achievements for winning specific races with specific cars, so cheese-fiends have nice stuff to do.

I got HF and The Run out of my cupboard and played them alternately and gawd lawd do you get a screenful of carbutt in The Run. It basically makes the game unplayable for me now, even though I used to like it. :( So I'm stuck with HP.

I'd say it's the NFS that I'd most readily recommend. You race fast cars in pretty places. There's easy levels, difficult levels, and stuff to listen to while you do it. It's what the original 3DO Need for Speed was trying to do all along, except it doesn't have any FMV stuff (which other people inexplicably hated anyway) but instead has annoying, almost blinding, YOU UNLOCKED SOMETHING animations.

It's also got weird wacky catch upping, stupid gadget weapons, and frustrating interactions between the two that mean people hit with spikes and weapons will somehow be shooting past you in seconds, but hey you can't have everything. If the weapon gauge is on screen, prepare yourself to play a race that's superficially racing, but really a skewed psuedo race thing.

And the Cop levels are super easy, but that's alright. Any harder and they'd be disc-snappingly bad. Hold Y/Triangle to turn off the annoying siren.

Author:  Hearthly [ Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:40 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Hot Pursuit is two games in one.

Racer mode is a 9/10

Cop mode is 6/10, at best.

This is the last full price game I bought for the XBox 360. Then subsequently bought it cheap on Steam for PC. (This is back in the days before Origin was a thing.)

My advice these days would be to buy it cheap on Origin. Play racer mode. Ignore cop mode.

viewtopic.php?p=490667#p490667

Author:  MrD [ Thu Nov 16, 2017 15:02 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

There's not a lot to distinguish them for me. Racers have 'you have to get to the end in this time' races and shitshow 'cops everywhere and you just chuck whatever powerups you lile everywhere' pursuits and almost puzzle-like 'survive until the end with these feeble powerups' races where there's finite cops, finite powerups and you have to figure it out. Cops gets 'you have to get to the end in this the but you're penalised for collisions but we expect you to crash so here's tons of extra time' races, kinda tense and fun and Burnouty 'you have to eliminate all the racers by touching them' pursuits and finally 'there's one racer but he's tougher than usual and sometimes he turns around but he has a tendency to do it so that he hits your spikestrips and helicopters twice so its piss easy' interceptors.

I did all the pursuit takedowns first, then all the racer pursuits, then the racer races, then the cop trials.

I thought the trials were going to be my least favourite levels because I expected the time limits to be really tight but they were pretty straightforward and they're easily the most fair out of any races in the game. Your success depends on your ability to stay in the nitro lanes as long as possible more than anything else - its kinda Trailblazery. You could drive perfectly but if you dont have or use any nitro you're going to fail.

Author:  MrD [ Tue Apr 24, 2018 22:07 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Need For Speed: Most Wanted: Black Edition (PS2)

Quote:
The Black Edition is a special collector's edition of Need for Speed: Most Wanted released in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Need for Speed series. The Black Edition features additional events, bonus cars, three bonus vinyls, and a special challenge series event. It also comes included with a special feature DVD that contains interviews and videos relating to the development of the game. It was made available for the PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox releases in North America, but was only made available for the PlayStation 2 release in Europe.


Yup, there's a Special Edition of the Best Need For Speed racing game (and therefore the Best Racing Game of All Time).

Over here, you can only get it on PS2, which is really damned weird. What do you get?

A single new Challenge event!

What are Challenge events? They're a mode distinct from the Career mode consisting of distinct levels each with a pre-chosen car and track, arranged in ascending difficulty and car speed. It's just like the Event Mode in Super Smash Bros. Melee and onwards in fact! Except without the interesting gimmick levels or gimmick enemies. They're just, y'know, more races, like the ones you select from the Blacklist tiers except you don't get anything for completing them. Not even an Achievement on the 360 as the game came out prior to the now-established pot-pourri Achievement norms, so the NFS:MW achievent list is simply Beat The First Boss, Beat The Second Boss... Beat The Last Boss. (And the game is bugged so it'll dole out Achievements to random players if there are multiple people signed in on the console).

The standard list has 68 challenges for you to complete, or rather get bored after the first few because who wants to do a bunch of circuit lap races in a lousy-ass car for no reason when the Pursuits are where it's at, but you have to complete specific prior events (and the hold-ups are usually boring ones) to play the proceding ones (the good ones) so let's just give it all a miss. It's a little like the Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 single player event tree in that respect, except they didn't lay it out like a tree in MW even though it logically is one. The last Event is 'survive a pursuit for 30 minutes' which sounds like slippery controller time to me.

There's a secret 69th Challenge that you can unlock in any version of NFS:MW by typing in a secret code. The Burger™ King™ Challenge™. It's just a normal race (no BK branding mysteriously) except you play in the Titular That's My Damn Car (the blue (sometimes coloured green because the filters in this game are strange) BMW from the box), which is nice since it has all the max-power parts from the Career mode. You only receive the car normally in the single player after you win the entire game, and there's no real reason to drive it when you get it unless you're a mad completionist.

Black Edition owners get the 70th Challenge, which is puts you in an orange-with-black-stripe 1967 Chevrolet Camaro SS on Heat Level 7 (usually it goes up to 5) against Supercharged SUVs. I honestly didn't notice a difference between this and a regular pursuit. And there was no new music to go with it. Still damn fun though.

It's a shame that it only came out on PS2. Playing it on a HDTV through RGB SCART is a bit nasty, but as far as I can tell the entire game is still present and correct - every race and every car. It doesn't do any ridiculous GTA3-style loading screens between islands or regions. It's just in 30fps and 240p as opposed to 60fps and 768p. And the accelerator is the X button or the right-stick up. I'm really glad for the right-stick up method because the X button uses the much-maligned button pressure sensitivity, so unless you're holding the pad in your hands like an industrial press, your car will eventually run out of puff as your hands tire and you'll be wandering around at 70mph without realising.

I did enjoy the extras DVD though! It was 90% terrible, and there were no interviews on it that I could tell. It's just a DVD video, so you have to endure a horrible pre-rendered video transition between menus and you're never really sure what you're selecting. There's some concept art for the city but it's baked into a rolling video, so you can only see the preliminary blocky untextured city layouts and annotated route diagrams for split seconds before the video fades to useless, pointless prerendered ingame footage of the final city, which you're already familiar with from having played the game at all.

The real fun stuff is the FMV cutscenes shown in their original green-screen form without the backgrounds added, everybody doing cocky tilted-shoulder gangsta poses or leaning on green cushiony props, fake car bodies and car doors. There's very little in the way of actual interviews here, which is a shame, and it doesn't last very long (but then again if you put all the cutscenes in NFS:MW back-to-back it'd be about fifteen minutes max anyway).

Author:  MrD [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:00 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Burnout Paradise

Is it Burnout Paradise or is it Burnout: Paradise? The two different typefaces in the logo make me lean towards the latter. Either way, everybody's been pronouncing the title wrong: little does everybody know that the word 'Burnout' is actually French, and thus pronounced 'Burnoh'. (N.B. May not be actual fact.)

The game opens with so much speaking. Endless, endless speaking. I'm not going to skip it. I paid for it, so I'm going to enjoy it to spite the game.

Actually, no it doesn't. I'm getting ahead of myself. The game opens with god-damn, dog-damn Paradise City by Guns & Roses. It's cute the first time you hear it, but if for example you worked in the building where they were testing the game and had to sit next to a guy who was assigned to it for months at a time, you'd go... absolutely... crackers. And also you can't skip it because if you're playing from scratch you've got the 1.2 GB big Burnout: Paradise 1.9 Patch to download first before you can play. Do yourself a favour and get your console downloading this one in the background while you play something else.

Next-first, the city gets described to you by a lass who does her best to make a tedious description of finding game events at traffic intersections into some kind of seedy sex chat recording.

Also: "Events in Paradise City finish at one of eight locations. One for each point of the compass." I think calling Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Northwest compass points is stretching it.

Having every race in the city end at one of eight locations doesn't seem to have any practical use for the player in my eyes. It just means that you know in advance that you'll be seeing the same damn roads again and again for the entire game. Start the game well by tainting the entire experience with bad news.

And then you get passed to an American radio gent named DJ Atomica who prolongs the preventing-you-from-playing sequence by describing the license system in full a second time for some reason. I keep getting him mixed up with DJ Stryker, who was the DJ in Burnout 3: Takedown. (I was worried I'd made up DJ Stryker, getting him mixed up with MC Striker from the first Guyver movie.)

He finally offers you a brand-new, disconcertingly pre-crumpled Learner's Permit after it being built-up so much and a smashed up Hunter Cavalry made-up car and tells you to go for it! And then a few seconds later the game stops once more and he tells you exactly what to do to get the car repaired. And from there the game stops again and again every twenty seconds to point out that you've passed something or that an event can start at your current location and it'll be added to the map.

When finally you're allowed to enjoy yourself, the Cavalry slides around the map at a moderate walking pace, making a sound like an angry, confused lynx with a head cold, constantly snorting ever upwards through a seemingly infinite array of gears. Like Split/Second there's no speedometer or tachometer, so you're just left to guess at how fast you're going. If I was being pessimistic, I would suggest that they don't show you because there's something bad they want to keep hidden.

I decide to drive a full lap around the outside edge of the map to start to fill in all the blanks on my map and get used to the controls. There's the main city area, which looks like a mixture of flat roads and flat buildings with all the zaniness and spontaneity of a car park, and the mountain area which looks identical to the Route Adonf in Need For Speed 4 High Road Challenge Stakes. Colour, layout, level of detail, you name it.

Image

The whole game has a sort of bland visual style to me. Flat. No shaders. Little colour. Barely any darkness. Kind of like the opposite of its over-detailed shiny successor Need For Speed Most Wanted 2012 Crap Edition.

While I'm driving around, I'm nagivating by the mini-map in the bottom right, as you do. But it's a weird thing: the map doesn't rotate as you do like it would in, say, Grand Theft Auto 3 or Driver. Of course, I can just change it in the options...

Uh..

PAUSE THE GAME CHAPTER 1.

Dear Google: "how do i rotate mini-map burnout paradise"

Quote:
Did they patch in a rotating minimap? (6 years ago)

Apparently, at one point, they were talking about adding an option for a rotating minimap through a patch. Did that happen?

And please don't tell me how great the game is even without a rotating minimap, or how I shouldn't need a rotating minimap. I just want to know if they eventually added it, or not.

Quote:
Nope.


Fab. Even back then, games had the option to have a rotating minimap, or not, as your orienteering preference dictates. Hell, the interfaces for Need For Speed 3 and 4 were customisable to the extent that you could drag all the pieces around with the mouse as you pleased and individually enable or disable them.

You know why a minimap would rotate? It's because it imitates the visual experience of driving, and greatly reduces the thought required to nagivate from said map. Things that would appear to your left and would require a left turn to head towards appear on the left. It's obvious and intuitive.

The only reasons I could think of for the map to not rotate would be to match the pause map which is always North upwards. Or perhaps they want it to mirror the layout of a paper map. But I'll call you a stinky liar if you've never rotated a physical map in your hands in order to check what a route looks like from the perspective of driving it.

They're imitating a thing that was a necessary limitation of SNES/Mega Drive tiled graphics for no good reason.

The bad reason might be to get you to not focus on the minimap while you're driving, in which case they can naff off. The reason I fly by the instruments in so many games is because what I'm shown on screen is useless! Give me a better camera and I won't use the radar!

Anyway. Options: a good thing.

And still Paradise City is playing in the background. When the EA Trax logo flashes up in the bottom-left corner of the screen to announce the start of a different song, I'm so relieved I decide to celebrate with a big cup of tea and a long, well-deserved break from the game.

There's a special kind of event called a Burning Route that can only be attempted in the appropriate car. I've driven past a few of these for cars that I don't have (I don't know how the car ownership works in this yet), but by luck I find the race for my starting car. I decide to open the map and plop down a marker to lead me back towards it. It's my first day, I don't know the good routes yet.

Open the map. The legend doesn't tell me how to put down a marker.

PAUSE THE GAME, THE SECOND.

Dear Google: "burnout paradise waypoint"

Image

Soooo, you've just got to remember it then? That's a little strange. Maybe the game is set in 1987, when the song Paradise City was released.

Early 3D games didn't have dynamic routes lit up on the map for you, it's true. Good algorithms for finding optimal routes are decades-old old news, but putting them into games in real time is a slightly fiddly business. As soon as it became trivial to do so, open-city games put it in. Coincidentally it would appear in games alongside the rise of in-car GPS systems, with game publishers eagerly arranging sponsorship deals directing players through their (long dead) Cingular phone to engage their branded GPS to head to their next destination. As a result, game players were fascinated and gratified to find little cool maps appearing in their cars more frequently, and real life people were comforted by the appearance of in-game guidance systems resembling real products making games more approachable and realistic.

Conclusion: everybody expects GPS in city car games: it's a real thing.

Maybe I can warp to this race from the menu. There wasn't a button listed for that either, but...

Ugh. I don't know why they didn't put in a warp.

Need For Speed Underground 2 was the first Need For Speed game with an open world with race start triggers within the city that you had to drive to, and I'm fairly sure you couldn't warp to them. They weren't in the next game, Hot Pursuit 2, but they were in the next three: Most Wanted, Carbon and Undercover. Do you know why you don't remember that? Because there was no point to doing it instead of selecting the races from the menu. Driving without an objective was, and is pointless. It's backtracking, and it gets rightly and loudly booed whenever it appears in any other game in any other genre.

Sure, there's billboards to destroy and gates to smash through. And that'll pass the time while you head from point A on the map to point B. Once. And then what? Not being able to warp reeks of s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g - not respecting the player's time.

Test Drive Unlimited has a great big pretty tropical island (well at the time it did) and it also had a slick warp sequence where the camera would lurch down from the satellite map of the island to ground level to reveal your car waiting for you already on the road. TDU2 lets you slurp up small change from driving to improve your collection of hideous golf clothes.

So I turn the game off and moan about it on Twitter without even starting the Burning Route, the end.

Author:  Hearthly [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:01 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

So many words. So much wrongness.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this game, I played it through to completion on XBox 360 (launch day purchase for £49.99). Then I bought it again on PC and completed it again. Then I bought it again recently for my XB1X in its 'Remastered' form and I'm over 25 hours into that playthrough.

You pretty much just have to learn the city, really. The Burning Routes are joyous, I'll happily spend an hour or more on a single route until I get a run I'm happy with.

This run is FAR from perfect, but I did have the route nailed down. I'm just waiting for Trousers to get the game on his birthday in a couple of weeks and then we're going to start Leaderboard jousting like we did on OutRun2 on our original XBoxes back in the day. (Although the leaderboards for that weren't online so we emailed pictures of our times to each other.)

Oh yes the soundtrack for Paradise isn't great, (it's no Revenge, that's for sure), get a decent playlist on Spotify for music, and just have the effects for the game.


Author:  DavPaz [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:37 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Yeah, criticising Bury Pee...

Giphy "that's a paddling":
https://media3.giphy.com/media/GQMYzsHTdSsmY/giphy-loop.mp4

EDIT: FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOU, GIPHY!

Author:  TheVision [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:54 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I agree.. Never saw the fuss about Burnout Paradise.

Author:  Mr Dave [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:04 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

You never tried to fit 8 people on Dimrills plank.

Author:  Doctor Glyndwr [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:15 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Mr Dave wrote:
You never tried to fit 8 people on Dimrills plank.

I did, and I still very much don't see what the fuss was about Burnout Paradise.

Author:  devilman [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:26 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I'm not sure what it was that didn't grab me about Burnout Paradise. I wasn't massively keen on the open world nature of it, but then I enjoyed Test Drive Unlimited, so maybe it was just the brash presentation of it all that rubbed me up the wrong way.

Author:  Grim... [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:40 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Everything about Burnout Paradise is great, except for Doc complaining constantly about Burnout Paradise while you play Burnout Paradise.

Oh, and the way you create a multiplayer game, which is whack.

Author:  myp [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:52 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

I loved it at the time and I will pick up the remaster when it's onions. I'm glad they patched in a restart for the single player events though. Having to drive back to the start was a bit tedious, especially when you only gag a few events left.

Multiplayer challenges were indeed glorious.

Author:  MrD [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 11:44 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Quote:
So many words. So much wrongness

Wrong about any specific thing or just wrong in general?

Author:  Zardoz [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 12:01 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Mr Dave wrote:
You never tried to fit 8 people on Dimrills plank.

I did, and I still very much don't see what the fuss was about Burnout Paradise.

It wasn't so much about the game. It was more about an excellent chunk of time when you had guaranteed full lobbies of BeeXers LOLing over each other.

Author:  Hearthly [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 13:30 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

MrD wrote:
Wrong about any specific thing or just wrong in general?


Well it's obvious you don't like the game and didn't really give it much of a chance. Not liking the minimap implementation and lack of GPS is fine, and factually accurate, but it's always been a total non-issue for me.

I think the point of having the fixed eight finish points is that you naturally learn more and more of the map over time, and as different events run through different sections of the map, but finishing at one of those eight points, you start to knit the map as a whole together in your head.

The time limits for just about all the events are very generous, so you can sort of 'muddle through' but you'll feel you're not doing well and it won't be satisfying - I think the joy of the game is getting to the point where it all flows naturally and you can sort of 'zone in' like a fucking Burnout Jedi.

The fact you don't know how car ownership works suggests to me you played it for a very short period of time (for reference, as you complete events towards your licence unlocks, new cars will enter the city and when you encounter them you need to take them down and then they become unavailable at the Junkyard).

For an arcade racer it's quite a demanding game, but it rewards both effort and skill in equal measures. It also ramps up the difficulty of events in a rather forgiving manner, it's only when you're working towards your ELITE licence that it starts to get fairly punishing.

I also love the way there are different event types, sometimes I'm in a RACE mood, sometimes I'm in a ROAD RAGE mood, sometimes I'm in a MARKED MAN mood, and sometimes I'm in STUNT mood - and they all require a different driving approach, and different cars. (And sometimes I just go off for a cruise to find a couple more billboards or smash barriers, or work out how to do a super jump.)

Driving to the event makes sense in the context of the world, even on this, my third full playthrough, I've seen new opportunities for different routes on events, which only happened because I was on my way to an event start line and saw something I decided to take a closer look at. (Admittedly the original incarnation whereby there was no restart event option was way over the line, but they patched that in fairly early on.)

I can understand why some people don't like the game, but for me it's one of the best single player arcade racer games ever.

Author:  Hearthly [ Wed Apr 25, 2018 21:40 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

This run was after about 40 minutes of practice. I'm still waiting for TROUSERS to come on-stream in the game for some real leaderboard competition.

Note that to do a run like this waypoints and GPS and rotating minimaps and nonsense like that cease to mean anything, you need to know the route, know where you're going, and how you're going to do it.

This is, once again, very far from perfect, but it's a decent marker in the sand.

Direct link to the run - https://youtu.be/H6oKVbUyfOM?t=1m38s

With a couple of poorer results included below. In 4K if you've got the capability to watch at that res :)

Also I think DJ Atomica is deliberately tongue-in-cheek.


Author:  MaliA [ Fri Apr 27, 2018 0:36 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Love Burnout Paradise. Buzz about and knock off a few events,Atomica is chill and BOOM! NEW CAR.

Rinse, repeat. Love it.

Author:  Hearthly [ Fri Apr 27, 2018 7:41 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Mali understands it.

Author:  myp [ Fri Apr 27, 2018 11:33 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Hearthly wrote:
Mali understands it.

I think most of us do. It's not exactly a niche Beex gaming experience!

Author:  Hearthly [ Fri Apr 27, 2018 11:39 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Opinion across the last few posts seems pretty evenly divided, and MrD clearly didn't like it at all!

Author:  MrD [ Fri Sep 06, 2019 1:57 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Ridge Racer: Unbounded (Demo) (PC)

It's a special occasion, so I had cause to re-download the demo of Ridge Racer: Unbounded and give it a go. And I figured I might as well update what I'd written here previously about it.

Which, somehow, was nothing at all. I was expecting a thousand words of Ridge bashing from Past MrD that I was to ignore before I wrote another thousand words of Ridge bashing from my present, older, wiser self, but all I can see is ""It's Like Need For Speed Except Deliberately Not Fun" isn't really the way to sell a game to me. If I wanted that, I'd start up a Carbon career using Muscle cars. Or Ridge Racer: Unbounded. AHAHA." and "absolutely impossible to play due to visual effects, like Ridge Racer: Unbounded", so I can't cheat by copying from my prior self even if I was tempted to.

But I'm not, because my opinion is pretty firmly set. Ridge Racer: Unbounded is a whole bucket of proper slop. It's fancy slop, but it's definitely slop.

Let's start again, a fresh slate. Clean brake. All that. I downloaded the Ridge Racer Unbounded demo on Steam (it's still there) and had a quick whirl.

The basics:

Everything is very murky, like a used, burned teabag. It's somehow dark, even when it's bright. The visuals have a limited range of colours, like it's a HDR game that's been poorly mushed through and out of our feeble human technology. It looks better to watch than to play.

There are obstacles in your path (like in CUBE) and sharp turns everywhere. There's no map. I don't know why there's no map, but there is no map. Which makes where you are supposed to go a complete mystery. The chevrons that are supposed to appear around the outside edge of the track to guide you are infrequent. They do seem to appear somewhat reliably when you're supposed to turn, but they -don't- appear when you're -not- supposed to turn, which makes it unclear when you're supposed to go in a straight line. Occasionally you'll rush up to a coffee shop at 200mph that juts out into the road (you're going 200mph, the shop and the road are stationary), and you won't be sure whether it's the start of a ninety degree turn or just a lane blockage.

Crashing isn't so bad. There are very forgiving NFS-style wall slides, rather than the 'orrible grotty early Ridge sticky-slow-you-down walls. Crashing isn't the problem - you'll get killed more or less randomly anyway as you race if you stick next to other racers. You get a Burnout style 'TAKEDOWN!' sequence with your car flying in slow motion, except this isn't Burnout so instead you get FRAGGED. And also because this is Not Burnout, you don't have a boost gauge*, you have a POWER gauge.

Everything in RRU revolves around POWER. When you activate it (and it's only available on a full gauge), you become a super-faster, near-invulnerable version of yourself. Touching other cars while under the influence of POWER will hurl them sideways away from you in a fiery explosion (putting you into another YOU FRAGGED THEM sequence that lasts a million years with your car under automatic control). It even makes certain scenery elements destructible!

It's really inconsistent about that. Some obviously indestructible things like solid girders holding up the elevated railway are little more than painted plaster even outside of POWER, and other times a shortcut will lead you into tiny little wall of the kind you've been pushing aside like bead curtains and it will be instant death while within POWER.

When you have a POWER ready, the devil on your shoulder will fill your vision with hallucinatory text instructing you in block capitals that you must DESTROY SHOPPING MALL (even Skrillex is telling me to 'Kill Everybody' for some reason). And the devil is correct, for if you ram headfirst into the indicated wall with your POWER active, you will fly through the building and cause untold chaos, scoring massive points and launching out the other side, having taken a shortcut. And since you scored massive points, another POWER will almost certainly be at your disposal.

This means that if you want to get anywhere, you'll be POWERing through every shortcut you can find, and attacking each fuel truck in sequence to disable opponents both ahead and behind you. If you try to play it like a racing game you will fail, because it is all about POWERing against objects, obstacles and opponents. POWER is not nitro, using it against no targets is pointless. You've got to be on the ball as you complete the laps for all the triggers and link them up into a seamless run. That's right, this game is Nobody Can Stop Mr. Domino, The Racing Game.

There's no 'ding' when you get a full POWER bar, so you'd better be keeping an eye on the gauge (not that there's much else to look at, the UI feels very unfinished). There's a subtle 'dummm wooooahhhh' sound, but nothing as immediately satisfying as Split/Second's fighter jet 'bi-deep'.

I can imagine the full game getting very samey; all the city destruction stunts look the same when you perform them, with the sole exception of the fancy, convenient shopping mall on Level 2. When you pass through previously POWER-opened shortcuts on subsequent laps, they are marked with a pair of very obvious flames, which is nice. I've never seen an enemy use POWER to do anything but inconvenience me; they never seem to POWER through buildings. Maybe to save the cool stunts for the player?

The inside view is very low and it's almost like it's angled towards the sky.

No announcer. How un-Ridge. But the music sucks so that's authentic - at least what I heard in the demo was some boring nyum nyum nyum techno stuff that left no impact and didn't make me feel like the most important person in the universe, so it was a failure.

Bless you Ridge Racer Unbounded. You came, you were rubbish, nobody cared, everybody knew you were awful, and now you are gone. It's a shame that you took the whole concept of Ridge Racer with you, but I was never that struck on it.

* I'm aware in some special races your orange POWER gauge is replaced by a blue BOOST gauge :nerd: , but that isn't in the PC demo.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Sep 13, 2019 4:28 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Forza Horizon

Here's a game that frustrates me in its obstinate refusal to frustrate me. It doesn't even do -CRASHED!-. You're in control of your car at all times. Fancy that!

You do races. Or you don't. I've got 9h30m of playtime, of which is 2h in races because I decided to try and get all the billboards (ESSENTIAL) and roads lit up before I did anything.

Each race has a class restriction but all the cars can be upgraded a few tiers above and below where they naturally sit, which is nice, if you have a favourite car you want to use a lot. The upgrade system might be copied over from FM4, but it feels kinda vestigial. There's twenty different categories of options, but all of them seem to upgrade the car in all areas rather than pushing it towards some characteristic extreme, so there's no reason to not just use the auto-upgrader always. (It isn't clear, but the auto-upgrader will just make your car as good as it can within the tier required for the currently active race. It counts as a purchase for the parts bundle so you can switch between the old and new tiers for free.)

There are nowhere near enough races in the super fast zoomy cars. I'm on the final stretch of the game and it's still throwing class C and class B races at me. When I switch from my world exploring Aventador to the Mini, it feels like I'm driving backwards and all these Chucklemobiles will start tumbling down the slightest hill due to lack of power.

The enemy cars are very heavy and any attempt to attack them will result in absolutely nothing happening. But that's okay, because on Medium they are very conservative on corners, allowing you to slip past on the inside like a ghooost. You can selectively turn off any combination of assists you want, in case you don't want the game to steer for you (??) or brake for you (?????).

Um... that's about it. The DJs are deliberately trendy and all that. Everything is really well done.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Sep 13, 2019 6:07 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Captain's log, supplemental:

The electronic/bass radio station plays nothing but dubstep, and each time I enter a race, the current station seems to be random. The other two stations seem fairly substantial... until you play the game for two hours straight, at which point boom boom boom boom!

The car livery trading servers still seem to be up, and my search for kittens returned some adorable naff recreations of nyan cat and friends. Don't know if I could pay Cr for it without Gold though.

Oh yeah there's microtransactions everywhere. Bluh.

For some reason I don't mind driving to races in this, even though I hated it in BP. Maybe because there is a 'fast travel anywhere' option... that's paid DLC. So the more I drive, the more I'm sticking it to The Driving Man by not paying. Or maybe the driving in FH is just fun.

Bad things:

Without original music the game doesn't feel like its escalating as you progress through the wristbands. They didn't even have some super cool remix for the final race.

It seemed like there was only a half dozen Rx ranked races in the entire game, which was really lame. I was beginning to hate having to bring out the horrible little Abarth every time the game wanted me to do a C, B, A or S race because it had the best acceleration.

The Horizon Final was just an ordinary town race except with five laps. The track wasn't especially long or complex.

I don't think any races in the entire game used the highway on the west side, only two of the Star Showdowns did. The last Star Showdown was fun, but I don't see any way to be able to replay it...

There's no quick race, and no way to quickly set up a custom race of your own choosing I think. There's an achievement for winning a race on hard but picking one from Race Central didn't count - I had to drive to the already-completed race manually... sucks.

When you win the last Star Showdown and get the boring Ferrari, nothing happens. There are no end credits because the developers dont want you to stop playing, they want you to continue microtransactiiiiing. You can't even buy vinyl designs from the ingame shop for not-real Crs without a Gold account, which is dumb. I wanted a cat car.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Dec 06, 2019 0:06 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Need for Speed Payback

You start off in a series of plot missions playing as Tyler Morgan, generic dude; 'Mac', generic black dude and whats-her-face, some woman. They're some kind of action packed criminal crew for hire, whose amazing idea to steal a multi-million dollar supercar for some other person goes wrong when they decide to steal it for themselves. So now you have to do a series of street races and things in order to get the chance to bring them down and get Payback(TM). The camera is right up the car's backside, and the interface looks just like The Run, you've got strict objectives, scripted cops and time limits, and it's a Frostbite game, so for the first hour or so, it feels like a kind of lame-looking sequel to The Run. (What is it with Xbox One games just not meeting their potential compared to their Xbox 360 equivalents? I haven't played Bone Rivals yet, but I would not be surprised to find out after waiting all this time that it just looks identical to 360 Rivals.)

Driving around the towns in Payback is annoying because sometimes you can't see a damn thing. I'm at a serious disadvantage for this, and I can't judge the game fairly, because I'm playing at 720p on an older Sony Bravia TV that has really dumb upscaling for 720p that includes overscan, so I'm only seeing 90% of the visible area and everything is blurry, but under these conditions, distant roads are very difficult to pick out.

When you complete the prologue (you can tell because you get the 'got the crew together' achievement), it decides it's done being The Run and wants to be Forza Horizon instead. Like Undercover, except without the fast travel, so I hope you like mindlessly driving around for no reason! Actually Payback makes driving around mindlessly for no reason quite entertaining, because the characters are fun and interesting to listen to (THE FIRST TIME), and they don't shut up (until they do! no more being reminded to do missions by the radio!!) so it's like the best bits of Need for Speed (except the driving feels more Forza-y than NFSMW-y) and Driver San Francisco (I hated Frisco's driving, yuck.).

There are activity type things around the landscape - jumps and checkpoints and variations on jumps and checkpoints, and you're awarded a score from one to three stars based on how well you(r car) did. I thought at first you had to do them one at a time: get the one star score first and then go back for the two star score, but later on I went straight to getting a two star score on my first attempt, which I was very happy about. The game had an opportunity to be a time-wasting dick for no reason and decided not to. Hooray!

You've got a car upgrade system that's made more complicated than it needs to be because of the terms used. You've got something called Speed Cards which you get for winning races, and you can trade these in for Part Tokens... maybe? Whatever. the gist of it is that every car has six components like ECU, Turbo, Suspension, etc., and you can freely equip improved versions of these into the appropriate slots if you get them (better ones have higher numbers). Each 'card' also has a random colour and if you equip three of the same colour at once you get an extra bonus. Each car is upgraded independently, which is a bother, but the menu says that later in the plot you can bring any car up to spec (without any random bonuses) for ingame bank. (Unless I'm mistaken)

I can't think of many things that are bad about Payback! The driving is very chunky and solid. So chunky I can't get any of my cars to drift on demand! I had to have a few attempts at the prologue mission where you're driving around a (deliberately annoying and wacky/whiny) streamer dude named Hashtiger and have to get a high drift score because I don't know how to do it. Later on when you're in the open world, you can access a tuning interface while you're driving, which is nice, but there's hardly any options, which is not nice. You can basically have your car be responsive, or not responsive. There's so much of a delay on NeXtGeN consoles' input anyway (and that's before you get to defective modern televisions with display lag, the most obscene thing ever), so why the hell you'd want them to be even less responsive I have no idea. I set my tuning to be max responsive, and now I stand a chance at being able to weave through traffic at all. Regardless of your choice, your car will feel like it has marshmallow suspension: every turn you make, the wheels will stick to the road and then the chassis will float on after it a little while later. Any sort of rapid motion on the analogue stick will have your car body bobbing about on the wheels like a dashboard toy dog.

Speed cameras and things STILL FLASH THE SCREEN WHITE WHICH IS STUPID AND DANGEROUS but at least it isn't sudden (it's a fade) or a series of flashing lights (seriously, A Criterion Game should be banned).

No Speedbreaker, no rewind. It's all up to you. If I'm not entirely mistaken, they've taken out -CRASHED-! at last as well!! When you hit a wall, the interface disappears momentarily, but if I'm not mistaken you never lose control of the car. GOOD!

Actually, one bad thing has come to mind, and it does sort of put a big dark cloud over the plot-related missions. Because the missions are scripted The Run style, you don't get a lot of chance to improvise like you would in NFSMW (re: cop chases, etc.), and the few times where a big stunt is hinted at and built-up to, the game will always yank control from you just before you reach the stunt and do the difficult jumps on your behalf, showing you them as a cutscene rather than risking you approaching a jump incorrectly. It's pretty lame in that respect.

Another thing while I'm on this post-play tsunami of regret: damn that Curator radio voice is annoying. It's annoying me now more in retrospect than it did during the racing. I don't need to be told how cool the world is. If the world was cool, I'd go to it and find it cool. Grr.

- Meanwhile, the next day -
I dunno where I was getting the idea the graphics were bad. Maybe it's because you start the game the casino night zone and then spend a million years in the desert. The desert looks nice, but you can still see big rectangular chunks of shadows appearing as you move around. And there are lots of sand-coloured rocks that you can't see that are just itching to ruin your offroad races.

Finding the derelict cars from the little maps is fun, but they're always in places that can only be reached by jumps, which aren't marked on the map, so finding all five pieces of each car becomes a frustrating task as you rub your nose all along the rock walls looking for the one place where you can drive up that leads to the correct ramp.

The game loves to stretch things out with its You Don't Know Jack text flashing up all over the place telling you about side bets and questlines instead of letting you get on with the bloody racecars.

Having to have a specific flavoured car to enter each event is a money sucking nuisance. The drag races are so boring at the start in a naff 80mph car...

This soundtrack is really getting on my butt now. I don't like neverending hiphop with the lyrics on triples normally, and that's 80% of this damn soundtrack. The rest is t r a i l e r m u s i c.

Author:  MrD [ Fri Dec 06, 2019 0:38 ]
Post subject:  Re: The Need For The Need For Speed (and Friends!)

Also if you'e interested in lots of old Need for Speed titles, you should definitely read Ray Hardgrit's four part series on it!

Page 1 of 3 All times are UTC [ DST ]
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group
http://www.phpbb.com/