Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, criticising Bury Pee...

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

EDIT: FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOU, GIPHY!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wrong about any specific thing or just wrong in general?

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.

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.

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.

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

Rinse, repeat. Love it.

Mali understands it.

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

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

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 , but that isn't in the PC demo.

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.

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.

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.

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!

I like these words you wrut. It reminds me of Need For Speed.

I've just won Need for Speed: Payback. About the half way point, the game doesn't half turn into a low-effort wet fart of itself. The whole middle section is just boring nothingness. There's only two or three The Run-like levels, with stunts and whatnot, and the game really has absolutely no faith that you'll be able to do any stunt whatsoever. Your characters steal cars, jump into trucks, smash helicopters, all of that... but never while you're in control of them.

Drift and Drag fans are going to be disappointed: they're definitely zeroth-class citizens in Paybackland. There's a single digit number of events of each, and you barely do anything in the Drags at all. It's a real unfriendly move by the game to force you to buy a different flavoured car for each discipline, even though you're purchasing from the same catalogue of cars. Your Red Flavoured Dodge is completely incompatible with the Yellow Flavoured events, sorry. There's Racer (races), Offroad (races off the road), Drift (soapy cars), Drag (cars?) and Runner (strong cars). Except Runner cars have no distinguishing features from the other cars because they all have infinite health.

The double agent missions have cops in, and every pursuit in the game is along a predefined track which makes them a lot like the pursuit races in Hot Pursuit Reboot, except without weapons. And inexplicably you don't have a health bar. The best thing about them is that you don't have to listen to the damned awful soundtrack while you're doing them! Yay! Incidentally, I think The Curator is the main villain of the game because of her atrocious taste in music. The double agent missions go absolutely nowhere and have no meaning whatsoever. Characters come and go, and you drive to a lot of checkpoints, but nothing comes of it.

When you win the game, you just win and that's it. Even for ostensibly winning The Outlaw's Rush (the easiest pair of back to back races in history, oh my gawsh, it's nowhere near as nailbiting as the timed segment races in The Run), Tyler doesn't actually receive any bloody money, which means that you're going to have to spend all your career cash following the super expensive (ingame money) achievements that have to be done in specific cars. (There is also an achievement that you receive for grinding an earlier story mission for new upgrades. That's exactly how it's described on the achievement.)

In place of CRASHED, Ghost has decided to let the player have a choice when they crash: whenever the player bomps headfirst into something, the interface will disappear as if it were a cutscene. However, if you just keep racing like normal, the interface will come back as if you totally meant to do whatever you did. It doesn't take control away from your car, which is fantastic. Press nothing and your car will be reset. And the resets are really generous - I've been put in positions ahead of where I was before the crash, and at faster speeds. I can't figure out how to manually reset though, which can be annoying if the car gets repeatedly reset on the side of an unclimbable hill leading into an out of bounds area. Another neat thing that Payback has is the ability to have a far camera. In The Run the camera was right up your backside with the bumper falling off the bottom of the screen sometimes. In Payback you can have a more NFS3/4 style camera with the whole car visible at least. You can't elevate the camera to see what's in front of you like Virtua Racing, but, you know, it's early days.

And now it's time for me to play Need For Speed: No Subtitle. Heavens, it's been a while since I played this, and totally forgot that the cast on the loading screen were such a bunch of listless scruffy bastards.

"WILD HANDLES, BRUH!"

Need For Speed: No Subtitle
This is the same game I played on PC back in July 2016! I forgot I wrote about it after playing the time limited trial! Now I'm playing it again on the Xbox One on my brother's EA Access account (you can play other folks' Xbox Game Pass and EA Access games on your own Gamertag, which is nice).

Once upon a time, you were showing your mad skills in some very dark city when some dude in a hat named Spike (the dude, not the hat) runs up and taps on your window and praises your "WILD HANDLES, BRUH" before handing you an advert for a super Secret Cool Club for Super Attractive Folks.

You drive there in your default terrible car (or not, if you like - there's special dialogue where Spike gets a little impatient but eager for you to be there, which you'd only hear if you took too long getting to the club, which is a cool touch), and your character -gets out of his car-??

Spike is there, grinning like a fool and fist-bumping everything and everyone he sees as introduces you to his FMV friends, who are now your FMV friends. These are the only people you know in the world, and who will now ring you up every ten minutes with the latest hot goss' from the world of night street racing.

Spike, who fiddles with his baseball cap so much in every scene I start to feel sorry for him. He must've really pissed off whoever glued it to his head.

Manu, who is a big guy, smart guy, rude guy.

Amy, pretends to fix cars and remains spotlessly clean doing so. She has a major obsession with Protagonist Harry it seems, because she just won't stop bloody ringing me up to say she's bored and just needs to race with me.

And Robyn, who is basically a smiley-face balloon on a string that gets dragged around by Spike.

And Travis, who is a suspicious bastard who rarely shows up.

The sets in these clips are really cool. Totally believeable. Pool tables, garages, a whole damn diner. They're ace. Each one of these live action cutscenes probably cost more to make than the entirety of Payback. And there's no cuts that I can see. It's like Hardcore Henry, except on his days off when he hangs out with his super cool friends and steals their fries while pretending to be attentive. The game is half racing, half fist-bump simulator.

As Spike shows us around the club, showing us dozens of extras all dancing and doing their thing, "There's some real people in here tonight!" he says! I see what you did there, Spike-o. FMV Spike and pals gesturing at the screen... It's actually pretty funny in an endearingly weirdly acted way. Like I'm in a murder mystery weekend and these guys are the staff of the house I'm staying in, and we all know it's fake but we're all playing it as if it were real.

One neat trick the game does with its FMVs is that many of them are set in the garage where you work on your own car, and your custom car is superimposed onto the scene amongst the characters! The game almost gets away with it too.

These Super Cool Guys give you your first car from a selection of three. And you're not told the stats so I guess you're just supposed to by whichever one you like the look of.

No pause means you can't easily go into the settings and change the music, speech, engine and sound effects mix during a race in case a really loud song comes on. And there aren't any options for that in the menu anyway, so bah. There's even an option on the main menu to play <ALONE> but it doesn't do anything.

The first hour of the game is constantly interrupted by big rectangles of text telling you stuff. There's no pause in the game, so the game doesn't pause while these are displayed, and there's phone calls going on in the background as well. It's not very well thought out at all.

Steering is a lot twitchier, but also feeling weirdly delayed. It was awful on the PC for the delay, I couldn't understand it at all. With a pad, it's better, but I would prefer it if the car went right when I pulled right, rather than 'start to turn right'.

You can drive to races if you want. Or you can just teleport now! Yay! Don't know why it isn't in Payback! That's stupid!

There's lots of things that were improved in Payback, like most of the menus and the maps (you can't fully zoom out the No Subtitle map, the fools). The car visible customisation interface is completely unchanged between the two games, which reeks of cheapness. The garage is very very familiar, and there's tons of reused icons and things. Most of No Subtitle City is lit by very strongly single-colour lamps, so painting your car is not really that effective since it's just going to look like whatever colour you're underneath.

I'm enjoying not having to listen to the Payback soundtrack (I spent the second half of that game in complete silence, and glad for it. There wasn't even any unique music for the final race, that's how much of a low effort cack-job the latter half of that game was.) For some absurd reason, the 'skip song' button in No Subtitle is to click in the left thumbstick and hold it for three seconds. That's not at all completely impossible to perform in the middle of a tense race! That's almost as bad as Driver: San Francisco's idiot choice to map its nitro analogue Boost to Up on the steering analogue stick, preventing you from doing nifty manoeuvres where you skid, turn and boost simultaneously.

Your cars drive like damned luxury liners. Or perhaps space rockets. I'm sure there's a lot of whoosh and a lot of energy being used, and if you were closer you'd probably realise they were going pretty fast, but from my perspective my car just creeps gently down the road as if it's afraid of waking someone up. Turning is possibly something these cars are capable of? It might be DLC. There's a reason why for the first four hours of the game, most of the events are described as simply 'Race with Amy' rather than 'Race Amy and place 1st'.

And I say 'cars', I mean 'car', since you get such little money for each event that buying another car is a tragic fantasy. And you'll be spending all the money that you do receive just making your car somewhat competitive in the ugly as hell upgrade screen, with giant illustrations of various car bits and figures just splattered all over the place. Say what you like about Payback's Borderlands random vending machine and slot machine mechanics, at least you could see immediately what parts of your car were good and bad and fix them.

In races, there's never a count-in, and the AI cars always start off moving faster than you and further away from you, which I don't think is particularly fair. They also know the route, which I don't, and they can also see in the dark, which I can't. They also hit like the solid slabs of metal they are and have no issue with slamming you into the wall.

Unlike the good Need for Speeds, the walls in No Subtitle are antimatter treacle. If you're lucky, you'll stick. If you're unlucky then the slightest glance against a simple railing at speed will send you barrel-rolling madly through the air, often neatly crossing the width of the road left to right and landing on your roof. And you can't do anything about this, especially not anything so base as a manual reset. No, you must endure Crashed, and worship at its feet.

The random dynamic open world cops from Most Wanted and The Worse Most Wanted are back! They're nowhere near as dangerous as Criterion Game's ones, but they seem to be completely invulnerable. They're absolutely nothing like the Hot Reboot style ones you get in payback which seem to zoom right up to you and encircle you regardless of your current speed, and then fling themselves into the air at the slightest jolt like synchronised swimmers performing a petal routine.

Yeah the pursuits are pretty cool, though the cop music is pretty understated. It doesn't really feel like an undefeatable force has dedicated itself to erasing you from existence, which is what it ought to do. The Outlaw targets, which appear maddeningly slowly, and one at a time, are similar to the pursuit targets from the Blacklist in Good Most Wanted, but without the option to immediately begin a useful pursuit from the menu. Instead you have to manually teleport to the closest open race next to the police station and monkey around until a cop appears to tell you to go away. Sometimes they never do. And then you have to deal with the pursuit targets themselves, such as minimum fine and minimum duration. And these are really annoying because they're so damn slow, and even a mediocre starting car will be able to effortlessly escape from the cops just by holding the accelerator, so whenever I have a pursuit target to meet I have to half-pull the accelerator trigger and slink around at 50mph collecting traffic cones, bike stands and bus stops like a lazy Katamari Damacy to rack up enough score to let me finish the level. When you want roadblocks, they don't put them down, and when you don't want them, they're everywhere. There's at least two types now, the kind you can go through but are like quicksand, and the kind you can't which are solid impassable walls. I suppose having random walls pop up does make the chases more interesting, but I'm playing the chases by ear anyway because -fanfare- there's no pause, so I can't safely check the map while I'm playing. I just pick whatever road the radar indicates most suits the kind of move I want to pull and razz to it.

You don't have a bustedness gauge in this one, instead your vulnerability is represented by the screen fading to grey and the camera rising up above your car. Coupled with the severe, ever-present film grain, it's almost like the police are tearing your soul away from your body. It's real eerie.

There's lots of effects throughout the game, some of them very annoying, and some of them very cool. The frostbite engine is good at mimicking light sources in reflections. Las No-Subtitle is in a constant state of gloomy drizzle, so you can park you ride under a street light and see little flickering reflecting drops of rain on it. The baked in trickling rain texture-sources for the shaders are very convincing, and active light sources like headlights and police roadblocks are very pretty. I wonder why there wasn't any rain in Payback. It's making Payback seem like the Undercover of the new games - functional, there's a plot, the races work and they're fun, but that's all they are. And there's stingy car acquisition mechanics too.

But they've gone overboard with some flashiness again. When you complete a race, you're told your place, time, money earned, and the REP you've been awarded based on the five disciplines. And every time a number appears on the screen it has to do so accompanied by a full-screen flash. Do yourself a favour and just turn away from the screen for a few minutes after you win a race?

Things near the sides of the screen are usually displayed in non-converging electron beam/chromatic aberration (delete as per preference) vision, which gives me a headache on my already incompatible TV.

Underground has tangible chevron walls. Payback has intangible chevron walls. No Subtitle has a racing line of chevrons (not Forza-style coloured to indicate speed though) and no walls. The camera positioning is really low, even on the more NFS4 zoom level. Trying to see into the distance in the dark through film grain is a challenge, and that's my deduction for why these huge, dazzling chevrons are present and un-turnoffable. I hope you like flying off the track when you can't tell when the race is leaving the highway by a subtle bearing to an offramp and all your progress is ruined. It's alright though, you can just restart from the nonpause menu... except when there are cops around because that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

When you have a decent car and have fought the menu to get it to turn and drift when you'd like it to, the game is rather fun, if pointless. There's very little sense of progression. I've been playing for four hours and according to the swirly progression graph I'm 25% through the game and have done 71% of the Outlaw story. Nothing has happened, I'm just racing longer and longer of the same type of thing. I know that as I progress I start challenging the proper actual good racers of each discipline, but that hasn't happened yet.

I'm going to play it until I get stuck, win, I run out of days, or I get bored, in decreasing order of likelihood. There's some stunt races coming up where you have to drive in formation and work with other racers and ain't nobody got time for that nonsense. I drive fast and very, very loose. Not that I can't be delicate when I need to be - I completed Porsche's Factory Driver mode after all - but, No Subtitle has a few too many too long loading screens between restarts for me to enjoy a 'race' where my score can be ruined by another participant acting in a way I hadn't anticipated.

It goes without saying that in Payback and No Subtitle both I spend most of my time flying by instruments because the stuff shown on screen is basically useless.

The next day....! -->

I'm getting into this. I don't mind endless pointless races as long as there is a point and they do end. Hmm. An upgraded car finally feels like a car, and everything starts to become rather easy. Maybe the game expects me to be as fast as the unupgraded version of whatever I'm driving, and that's why I'm razzing off?

The drift scores are really achievable too, though the drift train levels have a lot to answer for. The AI is a menace - when it controls your car going into and out of races (and some cutscenes) it's bomping and hitting stuff all over like it doesn't know how to drive your tuned car. In the drift train levels, you have to be near the AI cars to score, and they go from curve to curve at 60-70 mph and it's absolutely maddening. They should be following ME damn it. If I try to stick near the pack I don't have enough speed to enter a drift! I don't know what the game wants me to do.

Also what is Travis' relationship with these guys? They all seem to hate him, and him back.

--

I pressed Up on the D Pad to enter photo mode during a race and it didn't stop.

How are you supposed to take photos if it doesn't stop??????????

-

I won!

I earned my sketchy bastard toast of Monster Energy, and all is well.

The very end scene is really cute though.

---

No Subtitle vs. Payback:

NS:
Shorter. 14 hours.
FMV! But pointless. But a lot of it.
Plot goes fucking nowhere.
Long races with hard to hit checkpoints.
Very very very dark.
NFSMW style pursuits, except the cops are idiots like in Undercover and Carbon.
Enough money to buy cars and upgrades, but you really have to keep an eye on it, it's easy to forget you even use money.
Obtuse upgrade system that should've just been a bar graph.
Stupid understeering driving model. Only drift cars are drivable.
Drag races patched in, stupid and pointless, and there's about three.
Monster Energy.

The zombie corpse of Most Wanted tries to revive itself. Would've gotten away with it too if the walls didn't bloody detonate on contact.

Payback:
Longer. 21 hours.
Ugly weird cutscenes. Hardly any of them.
Plot goes fucking nowhere.
The Run style checkpoint races with time extends so you don't get stuck in unwinnable races.
Lots of offroad bounciness with invisible rocks.
Hot Reboot style pursuits. Hope you like the takedown cam!!
Not enough money to throw around on cars.
Obtuse upgrade system that wastes your time but is satisfyingly gamey.
Stupid unconfigurable driving model. Only drift cars are drivable.
Drag races part of progression, stupid and pointless, and there's about three.
Coke Trucks.

(Hot Reboot + Forza Horizon + The Run + Driver: San Francisco)/4

They've taken an average of three good racing games (and one bad one) with distinct styles and made a composite game that does all of their gimmicks a quarter as well.

Need Speed For Rivals
I'm playing Rivals again, having won Payback and No Subtitle. The daft as hell serious business monologues haven't got any less funny, and the unskippable tutorials for the Racer and the Cop and then a final Alldrive tutorial in case you weren't paying attention to the first two haven't gotten any less annoying.

Right away the driving is totally different to No Subtitle and Payback, to my senses. I don't know whether it's a different driving model, or because of the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S Turbo S Turbo Turbo you start off in, but you can actually turn in this game. And that's good because you start off surrounded by chicanes. And cops. Boy are there cops. I barely got out of my garage as a Racer and I was up to Heat Lv. 7 with almost a dozen lamborghini shaped cheese wedge cars flying around me like wasps. It's practically a survival horror, and reminds me kind of how the Dust works in Metal Gear Survive: you go out of the safe place, you're in Danger Land and probably gonna get killed. There's very little hope of recovering from mistakes. You've got very VERY limited health as a Racer, and if you don't head back to the hideout after some antics, you don't get to keep any of the Speedpoints you got.

I like the sinister cop music in this one, when you're on the menus, even though it doesn't bloody loop correctly like it's a PS1 game. This is not a happy game like No Subtitle and Payback, it is WARRRRrrrrr. The ingame chase music is a boring clattering percussive bangy mess. Not music. Not memorable. 2/10.

Can't zoom the map out. That's a flaw in this and in No Subtitle but not Payback. What's the point of having a super multiplayer mega online game if you can't zoom the map out to see where your friends are? Oh yeah, it's kinda MMO-dynamic-structureless-racing-ish. It's a lot like Need For Speed World, in fact. Which means no pause. Ghh. Good grief. I just got Busted sitting still writing this. A Cop was chasing some AI Racer and they bashed into my car, which started a pursuit, and since I wasn't moving I was easy prey. So on my Busted Summary, I had driven 0.0 miles, and achieved a top speed of 5.4 mph since that's how fast I was rolling after the cop smacked into me.

The map is not a densely interconnected series of roads like most other open Need For Speeds. This one is a lot more sparse. It's like Hot Reboot. There doesn't seem to be any city-like part of the map. The place feels like a bunch of strands or bridges floating in space since you can't go offroad much. Not a bad thing since Hot Reboot was fast and nice and good, and that in turn was a lot like The Need For Speed, but you can't improvise a route during a pursuit (hey, that rhymes) if there's no other roads to choose from. The roads aren't Undercover wide here, and the cops are vicious as heck, so every race will inevitably degenerate into a luck-based catastrophe with racers and cops alike spinning out constantly.

Oh, and you can just hit the enter base button even in the middle of a pitched pursuit? That's a bit weird, don't you think?? Surely it defeats the point of having to escape pursuits if you can just go next to the magic building and disappear? They counter this by making the magic building almost indistinguishable among others despite there being a huge indicator on the minimap, and having the caption that invites you to bank your points only appearing when you're driving at a walking pace. You could (and will) pull up next to base and get smacked right out of position into an out of control slide by a cop before the damn caption fades in.

Also it has the same hilarious fault that the other Ghost Frostbite games have (Ghostbite?). Cars are placed onto the road in mid-air, and the developers hope you don't notice. In Payback this means that the cool-ass donkers who crowd around at the starting line all bounce down like they've just been airdropped into place, and whenever you leave the hideout in Rivals your car jolts about on the tarmac like it's just been woken from a nightmare.

The Racer HUD uses the The Run font, and the Cop HUD using the Most Wanted 2005 font. :D

The map has several distinctly themed areas as you go around, which makes it even more Hot Rebooty. It's like you're driving through the maps of the previous Need For Speeds all linked together somehow. The graphics are really nice! I'm playing the Bone version. It doesn't have shiny roads like No Subtitle, so headlights are noticeably non-shiny on the tarmac, but everything else is fab. There's a tornado-like zone where all the palm trees are getting blown about, and a desert and a snowy place. Daytime is nice for racing in, nighttime is basically impossible racing across Tron lines on the ground. Your view forward is obstructed by words flashing up every second, so if you're like me you'll be racing by the minimap and instinct again. Don't try to pause to check the map.

It's a lot like Hot Reboot, down to the gadgets. You get to pick your own gadgets this time though. You've got a very very stingy health bar (that you can upgrade by like 5%) before you instantly die. In most of the other Needs for Speed you usually always stand a chance in a pursuit if you keep calm and accelerate madly towards any opening. In this, you rarely stand a chance. You've really got to be paying attention. Pretty much everything is luck. You have to return to Magic Base to keep your money. If you get Busted, all the money you got since the last time you went to Magic Base is gone forever. No bloodstain!

The main plot of the game (such as it is) is moved on by completing predefined lists of objectives with silly titles read out by the silly protagonists. I find myself hardly ever going into the proper listed Events like races and time trials and so on since they're rarely the objectives given to me in the Speedlist. Getting busted doesn't reset your progression through these, which is all I care about. There's not much you can buy with the money anyway. You only need to attempt a single objective to become so Wanted that your loseable money will shoot up to the point where you can buy all the upgrades you could want if you can get home.

It's also really short? I've been playing for four or five hours and I'm already at 13 completed out of 20 on the Racer story's rankings.

I don't know what the differences are between the 360 and the Bone versions. The Bone controller has a nice dpad so it's easier to Easydrive (the GPS menu you'll be desperately trying to navigate while drifting at 170 mph) at least. But its usefulness is questionable. I told the bloody thing to take me to the nearest repair place, and it put a marker 3 miles away... and along the way I drove past another repair place!

The driving itself is really really good. I think everybody would have liked this game a lot more if the cops simply weren't in it.

I miss there being characters though. I play driving games for the music or the plot. This game doesn't have either. I'm going to turn the music off, it's awful. There is a plot, kind of, but it's just your too-serious avatar talking to himself while images of computer screens flash about. It's not as soulless as A Criterion Game's shiny-shiny awfulness, but it is difficult to get too fired up about Rivals because of the difficulty.

-- Edit: Having played some 360 Rivals: The frame rate is there but only just. When there's a few cars about, the game doesn't like it. And there's something that looks like tearing maybe? Some of the full-screen effects are missing, like the distortion of the HUD when you're hit by an EMP. And also there doesn't seem to be any anti-aliasing, so when you're looking at small things (i.e. the very tiny proportion of the screen that shows you what's in front of you) it's like looking into twinkling sand. Objects like highway obstructions, fences and, critically, oncoming cars tend to instantly materialise a little too close to react to them. The game itself seems to be totally intact, complete with angry cops and quick Busteds, just a tad less pleasant to look at. And if I'm not mistaken, the cop radio chatter is completely missing?? As are half the police??? I just deliberately tried to get into a Heat 10 pursuit and escape it, and it was so much easier on the 360 than the Bone. Very curious.

--

I have now won Rivals! Zephyr finally gets what he wanted, to gaze up into the sun as the most famous scrambled egg who ever lived. I didn't think it was possible for an entire game to seem to be made out of filler, but here you go. The objectives-based progression is nice. It's like the whole game is just mucking about to get achievements. Except without the achievements, so who cares?

Speaking of achievements, there's 20 ranks in the story mode. Every rank, you pick one of three Speedlists to complete, and every time you complete a Speedlist, you gain a rank and progress through the story. When you reach 20 the game ends, and then allows you to try any of the 40 Speedlists you declined on your way towards the end. That sounds nice, right? It would be, if a noticeable portion of the Speedlist tiers contain three copies of the game challenge. The last tier contains only one goal: win a big long race. If you want to reach rank 60 for the achievement, you have to do that same goal under each of the three alternative names it appears under.

Also, naturally the later tiers contain more challenging variations of the previous tiers. One tier might say 'bump 1 cop, get Silver in a race', and another might say 'bump 2 cops, get Gold in a race, achieve 100000 points and bank it'. You have to do each of those separately even though one subsumes the other. It's very annoying. And you have to return to base to make a Speedlist your active goal - all your incidental racing stunts you'll pull off that would be applicable to goals you have but aren't the currently selected goal are just wasted. It's one big timewasting, filler-filled lamezone. Except it's not that big, the island is pretty small.

-- Edit: Now I'm playing the cop career and loooooord it's boring.

You know the sound design is annoying when first I lower the sound because I'm sick of the engines, then I lower the music because both the soundtrack and pursuit music are awful, then I turn off the sound entirely because you can't turn off the sirens while pursuing, and any bump will automatically put them back on anyway. So now I'm playing in silence listening to Star Trek podcasts.

The cops objectives are boring, and there's an unforgiveable amount of useless pointless filler. One level has you get 100000 SP, which is a huge amount of points, and most walkthroughs can only offer a commiserating hand on the shoulder and a 'yeah, you have to grind races and busts and there's no way around it, sorry brother'. So I did it, and the NEXT OBJECTIVE is to get ANOTHER 60000 SP. Arrrrrrrrrgh.

F8 is a dangerous lunatic. Neat. He also appears to be some kind of schizophrenic. On the menu, he's got a super. intense. i. am. the. law. the. iron. glove. fits. perfectly. voice, but then in the game when you activate the Pursuit Tech he's got a 'Ten-tenny four to central ahm gonna active spike strips' hick cop voice.

There's some lovely storm effects; it gets properly dark and blowy and rainy and the cop lights even light up the rain blue and red! I thought the whole game was leading up to a really intense storm level at the end, as hinted at by the title screen... but no. There seems to be a tiny area of the map that's themed as blowy zone, which is a really big bloody disappointment.

And the next damned objective is 75000 SP as well.

STREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETCHING.

And now it's 100000 SP again.

This is a beautiful graphical engine, a lovely driving engine, combined with absolutely cack no-effort tedious thoughtless game design aaaargh.

The arrows on the floor from No Subtitle are here, but they're really shy. I can play for minutes at a time without them showing up, even in the dark when seeing the road would be very handy. I suppose they only show up on junctions, usually too faint and too late so, surprise surprise, you'll end up smacking into road dividers or onramps constantly. When you're a cop, the AI sometimes makes the same mistakes, especially on complicated highway junctions, which is pretty funny.

Edit - Won the cop career. I think poor F8 hit his head a little hard. Maybe he even hallucinated being in the VRT, and that's why all the cars have police livery at the higher ranks and not FBI. Also, the last boss was a much easier task than the 28 mile adventure as Zephyr. Just drive up to the guy and give him a bump, done.

What a weird empty game.

Need For Speed: Heat
It's Need For Speed: Heat! On the box and all over the place it says it's NFS Heat, but the captions still say Need For Speed Heat, so who knows?

Anyway, I'm not playing this one since it's brand new, so EA haven't decided to throw it into EA Access, which makes me raise an eyebrow or two, because condemning a publishers game rental service as a vortex of ancient (or, more frequently, just embarassing) junk is my job.

Also the origin.com store is HELL. It's a bunch of Web 3.0 information-sparse SHIT, with screen-filling renderings confusing the senses, when they're not overlapped by cookie notices flying in from every side. And when you find the actual information, it's a real trial to find what you want - they're deliberately being assholes about everything; the tiny tiny tiny Buy Now button (£31.89 for the Standard Edition) is hidden behind no less than TWO different screens trying to convince you to subscribe to something. To hell with you, sirs.

So I could only watch a friend's friend's bro's bro's bro play it. Here are my notes:

Sexy bike woman and some cops, ooh they sure are angry about something. They let a mask guy go as a warning, he's so miserable. He's wandering aimlessly through the night without his car, giving up street racing despite random woman's incredibly persuasive argument of "We're a crew!". This intro is making street racing look like such a fun thing to do. Way to get your players psyched up after spending SIXTY POUNDS on the game.

The cutscenes are shuddering like hell, what is up with that. Even if the console is downloading other games or updates, the console itself ought to be designed to give priority to the damn game...

Hey we're driving into some garage guys place to get out plot mandated first car. And the camera pans over a cabinet full of trophies... that, presumably, were won by Forza Horizon.

The ingame graphics look worse than No Subtitle. Ugly ass character faces. What's with this? The character models were probably the worst part of Payback why did they bring that back?

Pick a character? That's a first for a Need for Speed if you don't count Porsche 2000. Which insufferable listless hipster poser do you want to be? Her name is SELECT.

Shitty assholes in designer clothes. It's lowered itself to the level of Test Drive Unlimited. Ew.

Character is voiced, woah.

Really heavily based on Payback's interface, icons, map.

As you drive around, huge chunks of background scenery and shadows appearing and disappearing randomly. More obvious than Payback.

Gee whiz, it's that trendy cyan and magenta; The Crew 2's colours and swooshes. Whats the matter? Ran out of imagination, brother?

In the race we've got blocked off city routes and big flashy signs. It's useful but kinda soulless. I'm getting ProStreet vibrations from it. The bad kind.

At the end of the race during the tedious dead time with captions and things, you get to watch your awful in game self stand around and take selfies. That's exactly what I want, yes sir.

No subtitles? Probably an option but how can you possibly keep track of the ENDLESS FUCKING DIALOGUE while there's music in the background. Oh yeah, the horrible hiphop is back. This is seeming more and more like a mod for Payback by the second.

The player character is very eager to try to get Nitro from the shop, hammering on the door even though it's clearly closed. A horrible woman with negligible facial animation and a permanent grin tells me that the snooty ass parts shops aren't selling because there's a shortage and they want good racers to use their parts. Uh-huh. Excellent money making strategy there.

The world looks like a depressing flat L.A. hellscape. Reminds me of Driver 3.

Tiny tiny fonts and interface, the whole thing is designed for a 50 inch screen. The NBA and MMA games were the same. Am I that far behind the times?

At the day-night transition, the camera rotates 180 degree and it looks like the Spore Drive from Star Trek Discovery.

Such a poor racer, shops refuse to sell car parts. (I guess thats one excuse for the plot-gated progression.)

Endless fucking dialogue everywhere you go oh my Lord and its not even funny like in payback its just yackety yack uhhhhhhhh.

The guy playing says the driving model is barely allowing him to turn at all, to my complete lack of surprise. I'm envisioning a very No Subtitle driving model.

Super wide headlights at night. Without No Subtitle's FMV, the game just looks so damn CHEAP.

Don't have to win races to advance plot. Again. Like in No Subtitle. UGGHHH. Boring waste of time.

There's a list of the oppponent names during a race which I think some of the games were missing but it doesn't tell you the relative placings of all the drivers in terms of distance or time, so you can't catch it out when it cheats and zaps them forwards.

"You gotta join tha leeeeeg" player avatar just instantly goes along with everything everyone says. It was funny in No Subtitle because you were just a fist on legs that bumped everyone, but here its just UGHHH. Ugly as sin characters. Did I mention that? They haven't changed.

Rain at night looks good. Darker, shinier. It's almost looking as good as that one game that game out four years ago.

Boring ass upgrade system with lots of sliding side-to-side menus. I'll stand up and say it. I LIKED SPEED CARDS.

"Daymn lost visual" angry night cops dont sound as professional as your normal NFS cops. That is interesting.

Nifty pause screen. (Is it a pause screen?) The game is really leaning on the Saints Row 3-style transitions that slide away the scenery and replace them with a backdrop. Cool, but I'd rather the loading times were just shorter.

Part descriptions on the upgrade screen are tiny and unreadable on my 32" T.V.

Character customisation! It's atrocious and embarrassing! You can wear your favourite ugly branded top and tracksuit pants! For the knockdown price of $2000. No previews for the clothing types, just and endless row of the same brand symbol as you scroll through trying to find something that looks like clothes. Also, what the hell. While scrolling through the hairstyles and hats, the characters and cars in the background are randomly appearing and disappearing constantly. This wasn't a case of the camera panning left and right and them just not appearing in time, the camera was stationary!

Fancy loading screens and they'd better be because there is a lot of goddamn loading in this game. Ugh.

It offers fast travel as a caption... not sure if they're lying or not.

The bloody voiced avatar agrees to everything the other characters propose so now we're appearantly in a crew, "yay". BORING I want to make some decisions of my own.

Gratuitous use of magenta in various places. Thinking it has a design style when it really doesn't.

Oh yeah, the soundtrack is almost 100% more awful hiphop. The EA Games Trax captions appear and disappear in an instant, possibly because they're afraid I'll swear at them if I have time enough to read them.

So much dead time before and after races with captions and whatnot floating around. I'm running out of disinterested ironic 'yay's.

Boring city three lap twisty race with lots of corners.

---

I was thrilled. Thrilled!

I'd totally buy it for 50p. Or blast through it if I had an excuse to use someone else's copy. Otherwise, no. The Xbone-era Need For Speeds really have gone a bit awry since Forza saw NFS burning the barbeque again and again after Good Most Wanted and decided to kick their entire reason for existing off a cliff and set up their own pleasant eatery on the site.

Is this all some kind of perverse act of public self-flagellation for crimes past? I mean, I admire your spirit; but there has to be a less punishing path to whatever redemption you're after.

It's not called 'I'd Quite Like Some Speed'. It's a need. A need!

Ah, it's a sexual thing. Gotcha.

As far as fetishs go, it's not that bad.

As long as all the game discs are over 18 and consenting; who are we to judge?

Horizon Chase Turbo (PS4)

My pal says 'hey you like racing games', and I do, and he says 'you like demos', and I do, and he says 'here's a demo of a racing game' and I say 'bravo'.

From the title, Horizon Chase Turbo sounds like it ought to be a crap mobile microtransaction spinoff of the Forza Horizon series, but it's actually not. It's still a mobile game, but it's not that.

Horizon Chase Turbo is the console version upgrade of a mobile game which wants to claim the 16-bit stripey-lines-down-the-screen sprite racer crown, except for the 2020s.

Anyone whose played Lotus will feel right at home: the cars don't drive like cars, they just whoosh forwards and inch left and right a bit, the enemy cars are all just rolling obstacles that trundle along at a fixed speed after shooting into the distance from the starting bell. The graphics are in the shiny-with-shadows polygonal style that's hip these days, and it all works. The cars and scenery are 3D objects, but the track isn't. The scenery distorts and grows as it comes towards you like a sprite racer, and the track curves around but only in an OutRun style. The whole thing runs at a billion FPS, as a 2020 game bloody ought to.

I 100%ed all four races in the demo (pick up all the tokens on the track AND place first), and enjoyed it, but I think perhaps the game was just letting me win to get me to buy it.

All the races in the demo were lap races, which aren't my favourite, but there'd be no way to do the token challenges otherwise.

GRAVEL (ps4 demo)

Crappy slow incomprehensible menus, a terrible frame rate... well at least it's not chasing the fluorescent late 2010-s trendy highlighter pen style. Instead we get snow. Snow in a rally game on an uneven track. It's more controllable than you'd think. If you can get in front, dancing to the finish is no problem, but the enemy cars love to give you a shove.

Whenever you bump (OR GET BUMPED) into a wall, one of three things will happen:
- You'll flip onto your roof real quick, then pirouette on your front wheels around and around while everyone passes you.
- You'll immediately be reset in the middle of the track like the game's director noticed your faux pas and politely but indignantly put you back quick hoping the audience wouldn't notice the error.
- You'll just stop.

What will never happen is a Need for Speed style rail slide - that fun thing that keeps the momentum of the race going.

For a game called GRAVEL in big capital letters with big cars with big types all crunching around the place, there's no extremeness to the experience at all. It's all very official and controlled, right down to the race announcer that sounds like he's from one of the later Tiger Woods golf games, the ones after they burned out or burned up all their talent with chemistry, and got some guy who's really good at saying words clearly and masking any charisma he might have.

Anyway. More like GRUEL, am I right?

Edit - It's always reassuring when I go on metacritic afterwards and see all the quotes that mention the wacky crashes. :D

This line from Hardcore Gamer made me boggle: "What makes the negatives more forgiving is that Gravel retails for $49.99, rather than a full-priced game." U WOT.


What you and Bumblebee get up to is your own business.

blur

Blur, Blur, Blur.

Let's get one thing out of the way. I resent Blur. I was interested in it before release because I love my cars-with-magic-powers. I don't dislike Blur for its premise. I -like- it for its premise. I dislike that it came out in competition with Split/Second and the collision between the two meant that neither Bizarre Creations or Black Rock survived. If Blur had just sodded off a little bit, then Split/Second could have succeeded more and gotten the teased sequel. Then Blur could have come out while Split/Second 2 was in development and everybody could have been happy. Of course, if Split/Second was good enough to get a sequel, it would have been able to earn one on its own merits rather than through Blur ceding the market, so I'm actually mad about Split/Second. But I'm still mad about Blur. Grr Blur.

Where should I start?

The start I guess.

The start of Blur is absolutely terrible.

The D tier cars are unbelieveably slow-feeling, and the game appears to work on the Need For Speed Carbon principle of low tier cars having a terrible handling stat, which means that they can't steer at all. I can't speak for real racing cars, but surely real cars can turn corners? Real cars would be able to turn corners at low speeds quite well, I'd guess?

The standard race at the start of Blur has twenty cars in the grid. Twenty full size cars trying to squeeze through the narrow streets of Hackney all at once. To say that it feels luck-based would be an understatement. Every time there's a launch or an impact, the screen turns funny colours and the music becomes distorted. Nineteen other goobers all shooting off powerups both forwards and backwards; the whole episode becomes an inferno in a fireworks factory.

The powerups feel strangely empty and weak, like they're all made of light rather than matter. They shake and discolour the screen and ruin the music so you're better off playing with SFX muted entirely (you won't miss anything), but they feel like they have no impact. The red powerup makes cars do a front flip, the pink powerup makes them twitch diagonally and the orange powerup makes them spin round. These deflections are pre-recorded, so get used to seeing the same front flip over and over and over.

The game has some banding assistance as far as I can tell - but only to aid the player. When you're in front in Blur, you're in -front-. The further you are in front, the less vulnerable to powerups you are. Blur has a Red Shell (it's even red), but it doesn't have a Blue Shell, which means that when you're in first, all you have to worry about is the guy in second. The guy in second has to worry about the guy in third, so he's no threat to you. This also applies to the AI drivers, so in the early part of the game, getting from 20 to 2 is a real struggle (for you always ALWAYS start RIGHT AT THE BACK OF THE PACK?!), and 2 to 1 is a matter of having enough race-time left to catch up to the driver who is way WAY out in front.

Because of the powerups and the number of enemy cars, the challenge of the game doesn't feel fair. It feels like it's constantly obstructing you and preventing you from doing the cool things that you want to do. When the enemy cars stop being bastards and things line up for you to properly race for a bit, the game starts to come together and you can slide through the pack due to skill rather than nonsense.

The whole experience from boot-up seems very impersonal and surreal. The menu is dark and moody. I do like the menu music, it makes it feel like the game is building up to something - it's not. The world is detailed but the palette seems to be squished up into narrow ranges, so London is presented by moody greys (every time Hackney/Shoreditch comes up as a track, I'm often heard saying aloud that it looks absolutely miserable and disgusting) and Brighton by moody blues. The music seems otherworldly in a way I can't describe. It's not 'different' in any respect, it just feels like obscure techno and dance stuff that isn't quite finished. The songs feel very repetitive. The starting races in Blur are so slow and dull looking they feel like they're from another planet.

There's an option to toggle 'Licensed Music' but it doesn't seem to do anything? I'd have thought it would be like the Cinematic <---> Licensed slider that Need For Speed The Run gives you so you can customise how dramatic you want it to be.

The timed checkpoint races without other drivers are especially special because you can finally experience the driving mechanics without being blasted off your feet every five seconds by bastards. The driving mechanics feel Need For Speedy in a good way, unlike Split/Second which doesn't.

There are enemy boss characters in the Career mode, whose entire existence is a single illustration. They're not voiced or rendered and they don't seem to have a driving style of their own. The only expression of their personality is the nature of the tasks that you have to complete in order to face them. Most of these are different varieties of grinding based on events that are entirely out of your control, which is great.

The one-on-one boss races are quite fun because you can be more deliberate with your powerups. Every time you defeat a boss, you acquire a new 'Mod' that acts as a specialised enhancement to one of your powerups. There's eight in total, but they all feel completely useless except the shield enhancement which pushes enemy cars away. The rest either affect powers you never seem to get or do something that's of very little use to you.

Other than that there's no car customisation, vinyls, styles, etc. The inclusion of licensed cars means nothing to me. To get anything other than block coloured normal paint you have to play Multiplayer... and the servers have shut down so ho-ho-ho to you. There's also a few achievements that are unobtainable because of this.

When you get to the end, you finally get cars that feel like cars, and wide open tracks, and the game becomes hilariously easy. The number of cars in the pack drops from twenty to ten, meaning you have to fight a lot less to get to the front, where your win will kick in. At the end, the tracks such as SanFran Sususliolossosolo are wide open, pretty and so much fun to drive around in, and you get the game's single point-to-point track, the Initial D style Mount Haruna which I'm informed is also in Grid! On these tracks, which have nice colours and aren't twisty cramped messes, you can get up to some real speeds, leaving the AI drivers far behind you.

The camera is uncomfortably low, unless you're driving one of the Stupid Trucks That Appear In Racing Games For No Reason. I wish you could have the higher camera as an option for the standard cars, but it is not to be.

Comparisons to Split/Second are inevitable, but in this case they're taking the piss. Well, not really since they were in development at the same time, but it feels like a piss take to me. There's a docks level where you drive amongst shipping containers and alongside a giant boat. There's a dusty old desert airport level. There's a city with a refinery in the middle of it... which is actually out of Need For Speed Underground when I think about it.

The achievements are split into three groups (on a menu that's a direct rip-off of Need For Speed Carbon's diamonds): grindy things that even after completing the single player I'm nowhere near finishing, smart tricky things that I'm quite fond of because they rely on skill and unobtainable multiplayer-only things that I can't ever get since the servers shut down.

I might hate Blur, but I won it. I won the heck out of it. There's very few single player acheivements I have yet to get - I've completed the Career, got 1st in every race, did all the fan gates, and I even did that one absurd achievement which wants you to use the unguided missile Bolt powerup to hit twenty consecutive cars without missing, without a reticule. The only things I haven't done are the Fan Targets which rely on you pulling off specific stunts chained together to score enough to trigger the award. I had a few goes at these but the targets are very high and rely on the AI drivers being in the correct positions every time, so, like, no.

The second weirdest thing about Blur is that not only are the driving mechanics very Need For Speed-feeling, but despite the powerup gimmick, it doesn't have WRECKED!!1. If you enter a drift and slam into a wall with the intention of rocketing off parallel to it using a Nitro powerup, you CAN. You're ENCOURAGED to. It's so SO bizarre to be able to throw the car about and not have to worry about being ripped out of the game. There is a 'wrecked' screen that appears when you run out of health, but it's just like an ordinary reset. You have a lot of health and there are repair powerups everywhere, so you hardly ever see it. If you hit a wall and stop, the game quickly fades to black and back and resets you with a rolling start.

Another difference between Blur and Need For Speed is that Blur powerup flashes mostly occur around the outside edge of the screen or to black, whereas NFS MW ACG's Speed Cameras flash the entire screen, ruining the experience entirely and placing the player at a very real risk of epilepsy.

So the weirdest thing about Blur is that it wasn't bad enough to eject me from the game. Some games I play for a bit and then I'm done. I wanted to defeat Blur, which is worth something. It was more interesting to me than finishing A Link To The Past. And BOY is it better than Burnout Paradise.

Hotshot Racing for the Xbone

Hotshot Racing is a retro styled racing game that wants to be this generation's Ridge Racer. And why not? Together with Horizon Chase Turbo, the faux-retro brightly coloured arcade racer is officially a genre.

The game takes FOREVER to load the first time, but by now I guess I should expect that from Xbone games.

HR has very arcadey odd mechanics, and feels slow as heck. It has checkpoint timers which are way more generous than the other racers' speed (unlike some racing games) so either they're there just there for the mood or the developers are angling for a quick arcade port. Playing the game feels like the lower difficulties of a kart racer, where everybody zooms up to their terrible maximum speed and then buzzes around the track uneventfully at walking speed for a few minutes. The game says you're going 160mph but it feels more like zero. I say the mechanics are odd because there's slipstreaming and it's very very strong. If you're behind a racer, your top speed shoots up by 30%, and you also earn boost for yer boost bar. There's no Mario Kart-style items, the only trick at your disposal is a boost that charges off slipstreaming and drifting. This means that if you're in first place, you've got the bozos in second and third place constantly blasting ahead of you and there's nothing you can do about it. The best thing I've found to do is to deliberately stay in second place, which is easy since you're faster than them, and blast ahead of them right at the last second. On the two easiest difficulties, the enemies bunch up together, forming a wall of cars taking up 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, slipstreaming off one another. Sometimes using a boost like this is the only way to win the race.

There's plenty to like. The tracks are very pretty and colourful (and it runs at 60fps - it'd be embarassing otherwise). There's even hot air balloons in the distance. It reminds me of Lego Island, and it's a lot easier than Lego Racers, which I was just playing last month coincidentally. The music is fun, reminds me of Jazz Jackrabbit 1/2's set of tunes (kind of - I'm terrible at comparing music). Electronic dance stuff that sounds like squeaky clean modern tracker modules. When you get to the last lap, the music gets faster. NFS Heat really ought to have had music like this. I don't like that you can't listen to the nice ingame soundtrack when paused. It's swish that it fades to a more ambient thing, but what if I just want to listen to the race music, man?

I'm pretty good at racing games. I'm no hyper racing god, but I've won Grid fair and square so I think I'm pretty good. I can't agree that this game is fundamentally fair at all. On hard mode, Hotshot Racing game becomes unfathomably hard. I looked in the achievements list, and saw all the "Win any Grand Prix as X character on the hardest difficulty" completion percentages were around 0.2%. The CPU is very aggressive on Easy, going to super fast and fearless on Hard. They'll splat right through you and smack you into walls like they're kicking a pile of leaves. Your acceleration never seems as fast as it ought to be, so if they hit you it's very difficult to recover. The drift mechanics are easier and more sensible than Ridge Racer's (I'm remembering the mechanics in the N64 game where you can do a 360 spin during a drift and still follow the curve of the road properly), but the boost mechanics are dumb, and the more I think about them the more I dislike them. When you boost, you get an extra 60mph pretty quickly, but it stops there while the flames keep going. If you boost, you go from 100 to 150, it feels like you should continue to accelerate up to you boost max speed of 220 but you don't. And generally, I can go full speed and do drifts around hairpin turns and it looks like I'm doing everything right, but then the CPU cars will just fly off into the distance ahead of me anyway. They don't tend to bunch up on Hard, so when they're in front and seperated, that's that for you. Or perhaps they're bunching up and slipstreaming together in teams. If you can somehow win a GP on Hard, you get the easier trophies, which is how it ought to be.

I noticed that the race standings in the GPs were unusually random - when I won a couple of races in the easy and normal difficulties, I managed to pull a bunch of points ahead of the others. I was expecting a Mario Kart-style situation where I'd have a designated nemesis who would win every single race if I didn't. Even though my performance wasn't at all stellar in the final Boss Level GP, I found myself consistently and suspiciously always within two points of the top position, which makes me wonder how much finessing the game is doing behind the scenes to make things artificially Thrilling (TM).

The races themselves and the GPs are very short, so it's not a big problem to try again - but it did wear thin fast. After I got one win on Hard, that was it for me. No more Hotshot.

There's a bunch of racers to pick from who all look like they're out of Interstate 76. They never shut up during a race with their Hilarious Personalities. It has more cars and tracks than Ridge Racer (Which has ONE if you don't remember), but despite that it feels like 'less'. You get the same ending for a character regardless of which GP they win, so don't be afraid to try the different characters as you go through the five championships. The characters have four different cars each, all of which seem to have a huge glaring flaw that makes them unusable in Hard mode, and each car has a bunch of customisation option. Just the one. But a bunch of it. It's hidden behind a few layers of menus, but you can turn some pieces of some cars green! And some piece of some cars white! It's really bad. Too bad it's the only unlockable thing the game has - there's no extra tracks or characters or anything.

My bro pointed out that it was made by the same people that made Sonic And All-Stars Racing Transformed (apparently), which explains why the excitable race announcer guy sounds exactly the same.

NFS Heat (Again)
It's time to bring my amazing Need For Speed thread up to date by playing the current main console Need for Speed game: NFS Heat!

It's thanks to a strange confluence of circumstances regarding Microsoft's Game Pass that I'm finally able to play Need for Speed Heat (or NFS Heat, as almost all sources name it, except the achievements panel that comes on during the console screensaver).

What do you mean I've already written about Heat before? I'd honestly totally forgotten, hah! I thought this was the first time I'd played it! I have no idea when I would've played Heat - there was no save game on my console. Well, anyway, I'm going to write about Heat again because I kept all these notes for a reason, dammit.

It starts kinda okay, I guess. Takes an age to load. The title screen music is kinda dull. It doesn't blow your hair back like the way New Hot Pursuit does, or The Run does. I've written here it reminds me of Turrican's loader music, which would be a good thing, if true. There's lots of (deliberately) glitchy video, camera angles, cars, things that are magenta.

We're playing as the mysterious entity known as JOE, who has a voice, and a car. His nemesis is a cop named Mercer, which is not to be confused with Alex Mercer from [Prototype] or voice actor Matt Mercer. He's racing, and we're controlling him! First: the car engine noise is wayyy too damn high. And there's a camera option to set the pitch in the chase view, but it doesn't lock the pitch in place, so it lets you set the range of the momentary tilt of the camera if you touch the right analogue stick. Yeah, that's mega-handy.

Joe gets owned by the Super Hyper Corrupto-Cops who almost shoot him dead on camera, but are told not to because that would be very stupid. Joe has been demoted from protagonist status and instead we must pick a new player to replace him.

We get a dozen insufferably trendy assholes to pick from. They look like they should be lounging around on a beach under a heavily filtered sunset strongly implying that if only I had perfect sneakers like them I would be able to live a more fulfilling life. I hate all of them and their pudgy, ugly, Mass Effect Andromeda faces. There's only one White American Guy and he looks like a prick with his tattoos and whatnot. Okay, mostly I just hate him.

I don't know why you can't have a completely custom man. Perhaps EA thought that would be... fun? and swerved away from it at the last minute. Later on you can 'customise' the man with a Test Drive Unlimitedish selection of reskinned shirts, hoodies and shorts, technologically placing the game firmly behind Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and the entire wrestling game genre. I bought a new T-shirt with my hard-earned Bank, but the texture never fully loaded after the next race so my character's tiger emblem looked mostly like a ghostly fried egg.

First of all, and you really really must do this to get anywhere in Heat: use the horrible and unintuitive, stupid D-pad menu that's taken the place of the EasyDrive TM (TM) menu from the earlier Ghostly Games Needs For Speeds and go into Live Tuning and set the steering sensitivity to maximum. Trust me on this: you will not be able to race if this is set to anything other than the maximum. By the way, this setting, together with the Downforce setting, comprises the entirety of car tuning customisation in Heat.

Now your car can move like a car and not like a battleship, giving you a fighting chance at winning the (actually really bloody difficult) starting race. Of course, I kept restarting 'cause I'm not losing the first bloody race. The computer cars are impossible to shove out the way, and, yes, when you're in front you're in front, and when you're behind, you're behind. There's no solid barriers like Underground, just street furniture and barricades that slow you the heck down and make you lose the race. :( It's better than the nothing you get in A Criterion Game. Blink and you'll miss it: various parts of street furniture, toll gates and so on get magically reset every lap of a lap race.

Heat exists in a world where car parts are so rare and prized that no stockist will dare sell to a drive unless they have proven themselves on the underground racing scene. We're not talking some sketchy garage here - we get an overlong cutscene of our guy driving up to a huge commercial car parts stockist and pounding on the door to be let in.

We've got a plot going on with family drama and this woman making a crew or something, and I just don't care. There's a hilarious cutscene between what's-her-name and what's-his-face brother-sister duo (the real main characters of the game, perhaps?), where she's stolen their father's prized car to do some Underground Stuff in order to express herself, resulting in the dialogue:

"I'm trying to make something of my life! I'm actually really good at this!" she says, gesturing to their legacy.

https://imgur.com/a/Vi9QWIs

HE HAS A POINT. THE CAR IS COMPLETELY BLOODY TOTALED.

My character has such little conviction that he immediately goes along with everything. He's really not into any of this. He's got a little mocapped dance he does when he wins a race but it's so unenthusiastic I can't help but laugh.

I'm not really getting along with NFS Heat as much as I ought to.

The audio design and implementation in this game is terrible from start to finish: the mixing of the effects and music together is messed up to the point where if I want to hear the music at all I have to turn everything else down to nothing. Which I don't. I do not like the music in this game. Call me an unadventurous sod, but all this modern rap where the words pour out with the same pitch in a rapid, regular rhythm so they sound like a woodpecker just doesn't do anything for me. I miss the electronic music from early NFSes. I miss Pendulum, and I miss Teddybears. Hell, I even miss Muse from A Criterion Game, and I hate Muse.

Don't think about letting go of the controller for a second during the plot cutscenes. If you've got your xbox screensaver set to trigger after five minutes of inactivity, it'll blank the voices for the rest of the scene with no way to get them back, and the subtitles will also go out of sync or disappear entirely.

There's a different set of music for daytime exploration, daytime races, nighttime exploration and nighttime races. It's a very, very small set. I like to play games for hours upon hours at a time, but even a harried player who can only steal half an hour here and there for racing would get sick of the repetition in this soundtrack even if they liked what they were hearing. Also the music changes when you restart a race, which is kind of annoying and dumb. Double also, I thought the game had added some intricate effects to the music to blend one track with another - intermittent cuts and repeats of sections, like a radio advert, and matching the pulsing lights in the Pause Dimension. But no, it's just the game engine struggling to play an MP3 at the same time as racing.

I tell a lie, the garage music is quite nice, and so is the music for the loading screen from the garage to the world. I'd rather race to that music than the crap the game gives you.

The pursuit music is the best music in the game, firstly because I love pursuit music in general, and secondly because it's instrumental. But this pursuit music is the mildest pursuit music known to man. It's about as spicy and dramatic as a cup of decaf Tetley. I'd turned all the music volumes except pursuit to zero pretty quickly, but the game code isn't set up to handle that. Whenever you get seen by a cop at night, the currently silenced song will blast at full volume so it can transition to the pursuit music. It's stupid.

It's time to talk about Heat's signature feature: the pursuits!

The pursuits in Heat are really tense! They're the best part of the game... for about twenty minutes. The more you know about them, the less fun they are - the various pieces only fall into place in a satisfying fashion for a brief moment before the police become either too annoying, invisible, impossible or absurdly easy to defeat.

In the King of Need for Speeds, Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005, cops clung you to pretty hard, but it was possible to evade them with pure speed. You also possessed magic powers, allowing you to plow through roadblocks and make impossible turns if you had the reflexes and foresight to pull the moves off. For less eldritch-leaning racers, the city was filled with incredibly fragile things that would smash up your pursuers, or at least make them slow down politely to have a look and shake their heads.

Heat doesn't give you either of those things. You're just You. There's no pursuit breakers or magic powers: all you have is your own improvisation and speed. And speed is useless, you can never, EVER outrun the cops unless you're in a Koenigsegg. Don't even try.

At the start of the game, when you don't know how things work, the cop chases are super tense. You'll be forced to get really good at the driving (or at least as good as the unresponsive driving model allows) just to last five minutes against the cops. And if you don't break the pursuit, the heat level will rise and you'll get smothered, fast.

The game feels nothing like the pursuits in Criterion Hot Pursuit - they're all linear and arcadey. These are a lot like Rivals - frantic sandbox battles to the death, with a health bar and points on the line. In Rivals you earned 0 for dying, but Heat lets you keep your score but only at 1x multiplier. Rivals lets you have infinite repairs, Heat only lets you have three goes per night. Ghost really tried to put together an original-feeling, difficult but possible, exciting pursuit system. You don't have to be perfect, and you can't ever lose progress. It might (might) even be in my top three pursuit systems of NuFFses.

That's the good part.

The bad part is that some races require a certain level of Heat to get into, which means deliberately getting into and out of a pursuit just to start the next race. And there's no fast travel at night, and there's no quick restarting a dangerous night race since getting from place to place intact in or out of races is supposed to be the challenge. And when you've finally gotten the Heat you need, don't forget that some races have an entry fee in Bank, which you can't earn at night - despite the plot characters saying that there'll be prizes!

What is lovely is how flashy and genuinely mad (in every sense) Heat's night cops are. The asshole night cops are pretty funny. They're constantly showing off to one another and trading jabs with the despatch officer. It's nice to know that I'm ruining someone's evening. Miles above the copy-pasted chatter in Carbon and Undercover.

The extra bad part is that Heat's pursuits have pursuit breakers after all. And once you know this fact, the glamour around Heat's pursuits will be completely ruined. A dozen hours in, I started to figure it out. I thought going off-road would be the key, but the cops don't mind that. It's hills they don't like. Chicanes and cliffs. But especially ramps. Any time your car hits a ramp or a hill, the pursuing cops will self-destruct. That's it. There's a part in the centre of the map where there's a long riverside road with several jumps in a row, and it's an instant win against any pursuit.

Now that you know that cheat, all that's left are the tedious day races with their annoying music and the 'Campaign Missions' with their unskippable character prologue things. Blah.

It's really bizarre how the main progression works in Heat. I don't know if I've completely figured it out. Day races get you money and there are some tedious character things where if you listen to some butthead talking about how you're a promising novice racer he'll give you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win a Level: Terrible car part, Night races get you Rep which seems to control absolutely everything else. Rep gets you more car parts in the shop, which in turn seems to advance the difficulty of all the races on the world map.

As I played the game, races I thought I'd won became un-won. It was very confusing. After about two hours in, I didn't unlock any new races, but the older races' prerequisites started to shoot up in rank. It makes sense that each race would have difficulty variations, but there's no way to choose which difficulty you play. It sucks if you've managed to get the game to think you've got a super fast car when you in reality don't, especially when you move onto the off-road races and need a whole new car with the zero money you have left after upgrading your main one. I ended up winning all the off-road races in a Lamborghini, because trucks 'r' dum'. (There's like four off-road races in the entire game, unlike Payback. Payback had a completely separate character class type thing for off-road cars, didn't it?)

Whatever happened to good old, simple Quick Race, I ask you? And race replays?

Heat doesn't have car tuning. Or DOES it?

It does, but it's absolutely awful and you'll hate it, probably. I can see what they were trying to do, but it's just not good.

Some earlier Needs for Speed let you customise your car's performance characteristics in confusing and difficult to perceive ways through a dozen or slow sliders relating to the suspension, steering, gears and so on. As I mentioned above, Heat gets rid of all of those except for two: Steering sensitivity (MAXIMUM) and Downforce (does nothing). I pulled a ruse on you there - there are in fact a bunch more ways to customise your car!

Payback's speed cards (which I liked, dammit) are gone for good, and the car customisation menu is back to the style in Underground - a horizontal bar of meaningless icons that you'll navigate mostly through muscle memory rather than understanding. Underground's parts were straight upgrades for the different pieces of your car: better engines were more engineered and better tyres were more tyred. Heat goes one better and combines these with the Mods from A Criterion Game. As well as straight up upgrades, the different car bits bias your car along two super sciencetastic axes.

Heat's cars are classed on two axes: Race vs. Drift, and Offroad vs. Road. Here's a quick guide!

Race ▣ □ □ □ □ Drift - Congratulations your car will probably steer like a car.
Race □ ▣ □ □ □ Drift - Your car is frustrating and useless.
Race □ □ ▣ □ □ Drift - Your car is infuriating and feckless.
Race □ □ □ ▣ □ Drift - Your car is aggravating and worthless.
Race □ □ □ □ ▣ Drift - Congraulations your car will probably remain in a drift for more than .5 seconds instead of snapping to the road.

Offroad ▣ □ □ □ □ Road - You can do off-road races on a level playing field.
Offroad □ ▣ □ □ □ Road - No.
Offroad □ □ ▣ □ □ Road - Don't.
Offroad □ □ □ ▣ □ Road - Do not.
Offroad □ □ □ □ ▣ Road - Your car works.

Because you can only get the extremely biased car parts right at the end of the game, be prepared to spend most of your time driving a substandard car that can barely compete with your opponents.

At the end of the game, I was going for the achievement to hit 240 MPH. Innocently, I decided to buy the 'Elite' Drag Tires that were rated for maximum speed (since I requirement for it). But since the resulting car bias wasn't firmly Race-Road, you guessed it, I couldn't bloody steer and the part was completely useless. There aren't any Drag races in Heat btw. In fact, there's hardly any different types of race at all, the game is incredibly unambitious compared to NFSU, NFSU2, MW, Carbon and especially Undercover. I loved Undercover's highway battles with the dramatic music! Ghost have made a huge city with big roads and highways and things, but all you can do is go round and round and round (PARKLIFE). If I ever meet Mr. Circuit, inventor of the Circuit Race, I'm going to knock his block off.

There are Drift challenges in Heat, but there's no magic 'drift physics' like in the Underground games where the car becomes magical and soapy just for that one race. If you want to change your car from being a zoomy dog-noser to being a bar of soap, you have to go through each category of component and replace it with the corresponding Drift-compatible part. You can't save your car customisation set-ups. Sucks if the next races you've got to do alternate between regular races and drifting. Also, doing a drift challenge at night will almost certainly end with you being chased by the cops with your drift pants on, which is... original.

Drift scoring in NFS has been all over the place since it was introduced, usually erring on the side of too easy. Here, it's difficult because it's difficult to get anything but the fastest, extreme-Drift car to stay in a slide more than a second. There's no off-road penalties or barrier penalties, or going back a mile to take a second run up to a turn penalties.

Car upgrades are compatible between cars, if you really want to detach them from Barry to give them to Bob one by one. Also you can do full engine swaps, which is underexplained and confusing.

Remember in Forza Horizon where the game would offer to tune your car for you with one button press based on the requirements for the next race? Yeah.

Because cars are so expensive and parts are so expensive, you do a lot of grinding in Heat. Or you can stick to one car for most of the game, like I had to. You grind for money and upgrade your main car, then go to night and end up paying huge fines and having no money. But at least you might end up with some rep and new parts to buy, so it's back to grinding during the day. Maybe it isn't grinding, and it is gameplay. The line is hard to draw in a racing game since these races aren't Zubats, they're the proper races you're supposed to be doing anyway. It would -feel- less grindy if the races themselves were rewarding or fun, but they're not fun since the music is bad and the physics constantly work against you until you get a fully-biased car. Unlike Carbon, it is possible to repeat races for decent money. There's a penalty for repeating the same race during the same in-game day, but you control time so it's no obstacle. At the end of the game, there's four well-paying races that begin and end at the crossroads of a highway so you can get much money with limited fuss.

The garage menu's nice music doesn't make up for the terrible menu. I'm not the only person who had to look up online how to sell cars. It turns out that there's (at least) three different car lists in the game, and by default the game will show you 'your crew' in the background of the garage. I have absolutely no clue what the heck that's all about. I think they're going for a bit of an MMO+Carbon type thing where you can connect to other players and have them join you in your garage and have their non-customisable identical avatars playing canned animations in the background while you mess with your car. For some reason. New Hot Pursuit and A Criterion Game made a HUGE detail about the Autolog thing automatically comparing scores and times between races and making league tables and showing you how you compared to your opponents. Despite this 'crew' thing making car management a complete headache, I couldn't find any Autolog influence in Heat at all. I couldn't tell how good or bad I was doing compared to others - this might be because the auto-scaling difficulty of the races makes everything a moot point. It's almost like the world scaling was a DUMB IDEA.

Also the visual customisation is barely improved from Undercover - moving decals one by one with a super confusing syste that seems to use every button on the controller for things that aren't consistent from stage to stage. It's Not Forza.

Basically picking races, choosing cars, upgrading cars and customising cars are all fucking abysmal in Heat.

But apart from all that, is it any good? Well, I can't really give a fair appraisal of that, since the game's difficulty balancing is, scientifically speaking, busto.

Unless you're constantly upgrading your car, you'll be falling way behind. But, if you save up just a small amount and switch to a better car, that'll be it. It'll become very difficult for you to lose. And that's when the performance of your car is appropriate for the race. After a small upgrade, you'll show up to a lot of races with a car that's 20% better than everyone else, and that's just sad. A Criterion Game and Hot Pursuit New might get rid of the satisfying, player-empowering career in favour of the PS2/Xbox Hot Pursuit 2 mission tree style thing, but at least they're fair.

I only started to properly enjoy Heat after I'd completed the 'Campaign Missions' and got my fast, fully-biased car. There was no more world scaling since I was at the end, everyone was equal at last, and I could just knock the remaining achievements down and be done with it.

What does Heat do well? It's pretty! Really pretty. Got some nice weather effects going on. But that's not unique to Heat. Since I had The Pass, I could try all the other Ghostly Games Nuffses, and they're all really pretty, even Rivals. Especially Rivals. It's so weird comparing Rivals to Heat, since Rivals is a horror movie with your cars being trapped in this insane labryinth dimension of narrow roads that all lead nowhere and the cops constantly on your back trying to kill you. Also Rivals' audio is much better implemented all round. Rivals has a mood. So much mood. ON THE EDGE.

I really miss my hanging out in the midnight diner with my FMV pals from No Subtitle. And somehow I miss the chemistry of the Payback protagonists despite not being able to really remember anything about that game all that well. They must've had at least one good line between them, surely. Heat seems like a more polished/finished experience all around than Payback. Maybe. That plot isn't fabulous. It's no The Run.

The game really does feel like it tries to make a Best Need For Speed out of the bits of the other games. There's pieces of Payback all over this game. No Subtitle, too. Icons, and things. Heat has very boring unskippable sequences on Campaign Missions where you have to drive beside plot characters and listen to them talk about their lives for a few minutes. (Yes, the story is comprised of 'Campaign Missions' and information about the characters is stored in the 'Codex' in a jarring clash with the fancy hip styling of the rest of the game, which makes me wonder if the only other game the surviving Ghost Games gamers have played is Halo or something.)

There's a couple of annoying bugs on regular xbox one: the 'Busted' caption sometimes gets stuck in the wrong state, so you can sometimes get Busted while 'Escaping'. (Would've been a lot angrier at this if I wasn't very clearly in a bust situation.) Sometimes you can drive so fast the level can't load, which is a very retro feeling bug (like in The Getaway on the PS2). Uh, I dislike the way you can't stop the on-screen tacho from vibrating constantly. Boo to that.

One thing that is very neat in Heat is that when you go into and out of the pause screen, the game seamlessly cuts without loading to a pocket universe where your car is surrounded by pulsing neon lights that throb in time with the soundtrack. There's so much loading (so much loading) in Heat they really ought to have come up with more loading dimensions than just the two (striplights for Day, neon lines for Night). There's so much loading in Heat that after starting a race there's a loading screen, then a second extra loading screen with the SAME DAMN GUY (or at least the same damn animation applied to a random NPC) posing next to your car and running away that you can never skip and have to watch for every single race in the game.



There's hardly any traffic at any time of day or night. The 'Showdown' festival is the most lifeless thing I've ever seen, and I've played the awful motorbike racer Ride. The whole game seems to be building towards some kind for epic capstone race, with the car upgrades, and challenging the various discipline-specific folks for their stupid useless car parts, but as far as I can remember there isn't anything like that. The game sort of just ends when you stop The Evil Cop Conspiracy (which admittedly is a fun sequence, despite being riduckulously simple), as if that was the real plot the whole time.

Oh yeah, here's something I noticed only after I won the entire game. There's no CRASHED. You're always in full control of the car, even when you tumble off a cliff and the interface disappears as if you had crashed. If you land it, you're good.

If you want a game that makes sense, just play the original Grid. If you want a game that does everything this game does except better, Forza (your choice of flavour depending on whether you're a NERD or not). If you really want tense pursuits and you've got the self-control to not -cheat- constantly, then maybe you'll enjoy this. If you like what you get and you want to play something that's properly difficult, Rivals is waiting for you.

Until EA de-list it with absolutely no warning preventing people from buying their cool games. But why would they do that? That would, of course, be highly absurd.

SEEEE-LECTAH!
Bo! Bo! Bo!

Is mrd doing a PhD in need for speed? Because it feels, right now, no one else on the planet has a deeper understanding of NEED FOR SPPED

I wish I knew aught about Need for Speed. Then I could tell EA what they're doing wrong instead of experiencing consistent disappointment once every two years and yelling at whoever's in range. It's like being a Sonic fan except with faster releases.

Grid: No Prefix (2019)

Hey everyone! I'm back! My Game Pass shenanigans continue, and a new game has just slid onto Eeeh-Ayy Play which I was interested in trying. Yes, it's Grid! Or GRIO. [Grid In A Box]. Not to be mixed up with Race Driver: Grid from 2008.

Heck, what should I call it? The Toca series goes:

1) Toca Touring Car Championship
2) Toca 2: Touring Cars
3) Toca 3: World Touring Cars
4) Toca 4: Race Driver
5) Toca 5: Race Driver 2
6) Toca 6: Race Driver 3
7) Toca 7: Race Driver 4: Grid
8) Toca 8: Race Driver 5: Grid 2
9) Toca 9: Race Driver 6: Grid 3: Grid: Autosport
10) Toca 10: Race Driver 7: Grid 4: Grid: Autosport 2: Grid In A Box

Screw it, I'm going to do what I did with Need For Speed and call it Grid: No Subtitle... uh... well, more like Grid: No Prefix. Sure. Whatever.

The original Tocas were kinda nerdy ish racing games. I've never felt the need to seek them out. I want thrills and music in my racing. I don't want rallies and I don't want people reading out directions.

Race Driver: Grid was the semi-reboot that sanded away the nerdier tendencies of Toca and made things a bit more slippery and action packed and arcadey. It was like a Need For Speed without what these days would be called 'cringe'. A game for Proper Adults. Just not the kind who'd buy racing chairs with steering wheels and all that middle-age dorkery. Grid had dramatic music (when it felt like it), a whole bunch of race types, real world locations, real cars and was Rather Good and I recommend it.

Grid 2 was annoying and different, with stupid penalties and absurly unfair Touge rules and a dumb framing story that... actually only got more relevant over time come to think of it. I bet if kids played 2 as their first Grid, they'd find its social media theming kind of quaint.

I've never played Grid: Autosport. They un-did Grid 2's swing towards arcadeness and made Grid But More Nerdy, and I don't need that. I'd play it once and then forget about it. I can feel the dullness radiating off the box. Grid has always had horrible, horrible box designs - I don't like it when games don't look like what the box looks like. Need For Speed: The Run looks like its box. The Grid series look so fucking dull. As does A Criterion Game. And, well, I probably wouldn't have bought Split/Second: Velocity based purely on its box, but it HAD A DEMO, which was absolutely lovely and it's on sale all the time really you should all play the demo of S/S: V and then buy the game god dammit.

Anyway, I'm here to play [GRID], which I also know nothing about. Is it a reboot, having gotten rid of its subtitle and number? I fear it's going to be just a sequel to Autosport though.

The pre-rendered intro videos with the bank of TV screens and announcers all talking over one another are stuttering like crazy. C'mon, I've played Deathtrap Dungeon on this thing, I know the system can play video. Ugh. Because of the broken audio, I can't make out what they're saying and there's - a-ha-ha - No Subtitles. Really. I thought that making a game with voice samples but no subtitle captions was a submission failure on the Xbox One. Shows what I know.

The game opens with a car crash in reverse? Why. I really have no idea why. It's not like rewinding is a special feature any more. You were one of the first to put a slick rewind feature in your games, Grid, sure, but Forza has hopped, skipped and jumped the fuck away with it while you were sucking your feet or whatever it is you were doing between Autosport and now.

The intro video is showing very chaotic contact racin'. Lots of bumps and scrapes. It's not what I expected - I was expecting Autosport; I was expecting 'you dint this car, you sit there and do 100 lines'.

The Flashbacks (rewinds) are in this, and they're the Grid 2 style rather than the highly controllable Grid style.

The racing itself is fast and sloppy, which is good. And rather difficult.

I'm looking through the options menu trying to find the subtitles and the game isn't very configurable. Can't get the camera any higher off the ground.

There's lots of difficulty-type things, but I don't want to change the overall difficulty to 'custom' and possibly ruin some achievements. I just want to turn off everything except normal car-assists. Some games have default-on automatic braking at corners... for some reason? This game doesn't have that thankfully. I feel like this game should have some more useful options.

We're having a bit of a Need For Speed: Payback intro I guess with leaping between three races in progress (one of them with the player having been pre-spun-off the track because... uh?) and winning them in order to qualify for the Grid World Series. One of them is on a NASCAR-type circuit with one car losing control and being hurled into a somersault in the air directly at the player as they take control. (Isn't this RobotMan's backstory in Doom Patrol??)

So where's my chirpy producer/manager/team owner person to introduce me to the world of Grid? That was a big thing in Grid 1 and 2: having a guy or gal tell you how the season works, telling you what you'll need to do, and debriefing you after the races. I was expecting to be able to enter my name and team name and pick a nickname for myself to be spoken during races and things. ('Good job... HOTSHOT... you're leading your class!' - 'You're a little banged up but it's nothing serious!') [GRID] doesn't have that. Why. WHY.

Hey, guess what, everyone? There's still no fucking music. Well done, [GRID], you dullard. All we get are the sounds of a dozen identical engines all parping in unison like a world-class nose-blowing choir.

The game wants to interrupt my race to give me a team-mate command tutorial. Like I give a Kentucky Fried Shit. Seriously. I'm here to win, as me, alone. Team mates can go home. I killed you in Original Grid, and I swear if you get in front of me in a hairpin I will kill you here. The caption makes it seem like there's all kinds of complicated things you can do with the D-Pad, but you've got:

Up: Command team-mate to go ahead. Why the hell would you want them to do that, unless they're going to fire a grappling hook on an elastic rope at your car and propel you into the lead afterwards.
Down: Command team-mate to maintain their current position. Well, yeah, I assume that the team-mate is naturally going to attempt to do this, or get ahead. "Hey, team-mate. Continue racing." "Will do, boss." ??
Left: Tells the boring race team radio guy to tell you what position the team-mate is in in the pack. You could also look at the leaderboard that's shown in the top left of the screen. (You can turn the interface parts on and off individually in the options, if you want to see more of the blank, featureless sky. This Grid's special new feature (seriously) is rain levels, which weren't in previous games, so now you can have gloomy grey races with rain. Great.)
Right: Tells the boring race team radio guy to tell you what position your Nemesis is in. Yes, it's just like Shadow of Mordor!!! (?) If you bonk a car, they get a little red emblem next to them. That means they're going to be more aggressive towards you for the rest of the race, and you'll get a hilariously cowed dressing down from your radio guy telling you to 'wind it in' or 'give them space'. Lol, like, no. The Nemesis thing doesn't persist between races, so it's completely pointless.

Anyway, there's no way to tell the team mate to do anything useful, except to take the direct approach and ram them off the track at hairpins when they refuse to cede first place to you, ruining your event.

Yeah, I did a lot of restarting.

The Career mode appears as a huge grid of tiny boxes, 13*7 events + 5 boss events. That's a lotta events, and they're all mini-tournaments too. There's also three other tabs labelled 'Season 1', 'Season 2' and 'Season 3' which you have to buy separately. That's weird. "Head into the store to unlock this season." No.

Time to buy a car. Only two stats??!!? Power and Weight. That's really... basic?

Now that I have a Scooby, I can customise it. In Original Grid I think you could only change the colour, if that. In [GRID], you can pick a predefined livery and customise the colours of the layers. It's... I dunno. I find it disappointing because I've played a lot of racing games that all had their own ideas on how to do this. Going back to something as basic as this feels like a throwback to 1999. You don't even get to pick your number plate. (There's no plates at all in the game.)

Instead, the game is really, really keen on its Call of Duty-like customisable flags. You pick a flag background, and a banner, and some symbols to go on top of it, and you have to sit through a carousel of all the racers' flags while the races are loading. (There's no tense loading screen music. Grid 2 had long loading times and tense loading music to go with it...) And also when the camera pans down the aisle of cars while they're parked on the titular Grid. I really, really, really don't care.

There radio guy is nowhere near as chatty or helpful as the original Grid, which sucks. Instead, most of the race chatter comes from Alex and Kristen, the two Highly Australian race announcers presenting the race. You can barely make out what they're saying a lot of the time as their voices are blasted out of speakers on the track rather than being played in your helmet, so as you turn corners they'll suddenly cut in or out. Alex's voice through the tannoy really reminds me of the announcer in Pokemon Stadium - DOUBLE-SLAPPIN' AROUND!

The race tracks here seem really tiny, tiny compared to the cars, somehow, like either the track has shrunk or we've all grown to giant size. There's barely enough space for one car, let alone twenty. The announcers should be less surprised that there's a pile-up on every hairpin. And they definitely shouldn't be surprised that I'm going to take the opportunity to hurl myself at the pack like a bowling ball and razz off into the distance chuckling to myself while everybody wonders what just happened. ("You may have hit him one too many times there. Best keep your distance.")

I recognise these tracks. I think this one is the Nurbegberbgerbgergring. And this other one which calls itself Brands Hatch is very familiar too. Both from Grid? I think BH was also in Need For Speed: Shift, but unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the Shift version was like four times as big in every dimension. I'm going to have to look up the typical lap times for a BH lap, because fifty seconds seems rather short.

I'm cutting across the grass like a maniac, as is my style, and I'm not getting dinged, or auto-slowed by The System. Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. [GRID]'s version of the Fun Police is the Stewards. Unseen and unheard, the Stewards exist only in a text caption that appears when you begin to enjoy yourself and clip the grass on an exciting turn: "Stewards inquiry may trigger penalties." How ominous is that!

It turns out that if you trigger the ire of the Stewards, you've basically the lost the entire race and should restart. Oh yeah, nothing will happen during the race, except your timer will turn red. But that timer turning red means that after you've put in tons of hard work clinching a fantastic, satisfying victory against the heartless AI racer hordes, the game will flick up a dialogue box saying 'Nah, you didn't actually come 1st like we told you, you came 16th.' and that'll be that. Fuck you, the Stewards.

You keep the $ winnings if you get penalised but... hell, I don't even know what it all means. Basically, just restart if anything goes wrong. The loading times to repeat a race aren't so bad.

It might be that the money I won after my penalised race was actually from the incredibly pointless (ironically) and distracting faux-Forza Horizon score combo thing that appears during the race whenever you do any damn thing. I don't know what that score is for, it doesn't seem to link to anything. It's definitely not as clear as how Forza handles it.

After the race, I'm rated on Speed, Technique and Bravery. Yeeeup, I'm Bravery all right.

The third race of the third event really tested me. No matter what I did, I couldn't get past the first place guy. I couldn't even get close to him. It's like being in first place means he doesn't have to worry about the losers in the pack and he can focus on executing perfect lines and gain an even more inassailable lead. Who'd Have Thought.

I tried customising the car and the difficulty again. There's five pretty coarse sliders that manipulate the gear ratios, the driving sensitivity and the suspension stiffness, but changing any of these from the default tends to make the car impossible to drive on anything but straights. Brands Hatch opens with a really harsh right turn downhill, and if your car isn't stock, you're going in the dirt no matter what you did.

So I reset my car to Mega Default and tried again. And again. The announcers have a tough job trying to narrate the race, but also keep the narration focused on what the player is doing, even if they're doing nothing interesting way down the pack. When I came up to the finish line in second place right behind first, the announcer decided to say "We've got second place looking to finish now!" and I thought "you patronising little shit" and immediately restarted out of spite.

In the end, I did something I never do, and did the qualifying hot lap. You get one attempt (unless you restart, then you get infinite attempts) from a rolling start to set a best time that sets your starting position on the titular Grid. I never do qualifying because ugh what a boring chore, but I couldn't pass up the ability to actually start at the front of a race in a Grid game for once. So I did. I set an amazing time, because I'm good at cars, and earned the right to spawn in 1st. And believe it or not, being ahead of the other cars by twenty metres resulted in me winning the race by twenty metres. Wow. Astonishment. So on.

My starting-in-1st race netted me a bunch of achievements, like taking a whole race clean (since naturally I had no need to smash into other cars to seize the advantage), among other things. For some reason, having 25 consecutive Clean Sections and winning a race without damage doesn't count as 'Technique' points. What?



Time for the next race. I hope it's something different!

Wait, what the fuck, looking through all of these events in the Big Rectangle of Events: race race race race race time attack race race race.

Where are the other events?


WOW. I can't believe it. They really did remove all of the events other than circuit race and time attack and it wasn't just my imagination. That's really bloody cheeky.

I was going to say that the experience so far felt like how some Xbone-generation incarnations of EA games do - where the game modes, levels, features and cosmetic gimmicks have been slowly tossed or freemiumised from year to year until you put on The Latest Game and it's an unrecognisable shadow of whichever one was Your Favourite Game, with only one game mode and half a car or something. I don't know if you've played Rory McIlroy PGA Tour (2015, Metacritic 61), but it's a horrible shitshow compared to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 (2004, Metacritic 91). [GRID] isn't quite there yet, but it's definitely feeling a lot closer to the feature-free world of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters (2011, Metacritic 80).

I couldn't believe that nobody's uploaded the [GRID] OST to YouTube, but of course nobody has because it doesn't fucking have one. I'm not even going to bother completing the rest of the race race race race race time attack races necessary to get up to the boss race to see if the dramatic music is still intact, because I've got better things to do than listening to the already-repeating announcers and the useless radio car guy's quivering voice telling me I've angered the other racers.

Yes, the physics are fine, and the races are probably okay. But it's Grid-but-worse. No, it's more like Grid-but-pointless. The career mode doesn't feel like 'real' progression at all. It's just... boxes to fill up. Ugh.

It feels like a rip-off of Need For Speed: Shift, like a free-to-play Need For Speed: Shift, except it costs money.

Burnout 2, and the original Burnout, are my two favourite in the Burnout series - and they are pretty close together in my affections.

Any of the ones that came after that didn't really grab me much at all. Paradise didn't click with me, it felt a bit unfocussed and I never took the time to find my way around the city.

Everything I've read has said that BP:Remastered still doesn't have a rotating minimap, so that's a no from me.

I can get lost and crash my car in an unfamiliar city in real life, why would I want to do that in a game. My sense of direction isn't brilliant TBH.

Seriously though, I think I just preferred the more focussed tight style of the earlier games - I knew where I was going, and I just had to get there quickly.

Ridge Racer: Unbounded (The Full Game This Time)

I traded in some DS games and saw this on the shelf for a... somewhat reasonable price so I decided to finally get my own copy of Ridge RUB after a decade of dithering. (Of course the shop reduces the price by 20% a few days after I buy it. Rascals.)

I played the demo and wrote about it here once upon a time, but I'm going to write a whole new set of notes about the full RUB anyway without referring to my demo post, and see how closely my enlightened won-the-whole-game-nyah reactions marry up to my peasantly looking-longingly-through-the-shop-window demo experiences.

Wouldn't you know it, the full RUB is surprisingly like the demo, except it has an intro with a plot! I love my racing games with plots, and I hate my racing games without them.

The game starts off with a moody, edgy cutscene where you're introduced to an underground anarchic street racing league called The Unbounded led by a gal in a nifty leather coat (not FMV like the NFS trilogy, sadly) who wants to destroy the decadent city of Shatter Bay (named after Captain William Shatter (yes)) by doing incredibly destructive racing over and over until the city is a smoking wreck. The loading screens say things like "If the roaring engines don't wake up the citizens on this side of the city, then the bent steel coming through their kitchen window will.". So we're probably not the good guys. For some reason. I mean, it's cool that we're the antagonists - antagonists usually have the cooler tasks and cooler motivations, but Shatter just seems like... a normal city. The Unbounded must be really pissed off with them all for some reason. Every time you complete a district you get a little animated background of the city with buildings all crumbling and on fire with Kara standing over them. The total lack of acknowledgement that there are probably people in those buildings we're blowing up and almost certainly people driving those cars is fascinating. Every so often a level will put you in a semi truck cab and challenge you to 'frag the cops'. There's no police radio like in NFS Most Wanted Good Edition where 'taken down' cops report in from their busted up cruisers like it's The Blues Brothers. Kara Shindo wants you to kill everyone. And the player character goes along with it, 'cause.

I remembered her name because her moody anarchist manifesto intro ends with 'I am Kara Shindo. Remember my name!', so I did, since it's only polite. I was expecting her to show up again and say something, anything, as I went through the game. Nope. The game's plot only appears at the beginning and at the end, and -spoiler alert!- The Unbounded want to destroy Shatter Bay because it's decadent, like they said in the intro. And now you've done it. That's it.

I looked Kara up on the RR Wiki, since I know that RR likes its CGI race idols, and it had this to say about her:

That's the entire article. Not quite Reiko Nagase levels of marketing going on there.

My overwhelming memory of the demo of RUB is the whole world looked like it was kept on a smoker's desk. That was playing on my brother's PC, which is an important distinction to make, since the PC version of Driver: San Francisco has very picky shaders which results in the entire game being displayed at half brightness on every PC I've seen it on, so I thought maybe it was the case here. It is... maybe... I can't really tell. I'm playing it on a proper suitable TV for the 360 so it looks as good as it's ever going to be. Yet, the whole world still is somewhat dark even in the daylight levels and with the brightness turned up a few notches in the options. Some levels look hyper overposed like a bad photocopy, but some levels (in daylight) look somewhat normal and pleasant... again with a strange caveat that the game looks horribly upscaled and speckly a lot of the time (and runs at perhaps 20 FPS if the in-game timer is anything to go).

The game's various coloured lighting presets are all very nifty, to tell the truth. I started off hating it and sort of grew to respect it. Slightly. The game just puts its worst foot first. And second. And for most of the game. They must've gone to some effort to draw day and night variations of every building texture and make sure they all looked reasonable under all twenty or so of the lighting styles. It's just a shame that the game is damn near unreadable under anything but bright sunlight. The only fully day district (the preset is named 'Cold Day' in the track editor, and you're very welcome) is Williams Way, and HOLY HELL it's so much more pleasant than the rest of the game you've played up to that point. It feels completely different. Well, it feels like a last-gen remake of the not-so-great bright city from NFS: A Criterion Game, just less crinkly and over-detailed. But then the game punks me again by setting all of the Williams Way races -mostly underground in tunnels-. I laughed. The final city district in the game uses a Deus Ex: Human Revolution-ish pitch black world with golden highlights, so go ahead and whack that Brightness slider up to max in the options if you want to stand a chance. Even in Cold Day you might want to put the Brightness on max since some of the shadows the skyscrapers throw across the track are full-black otherwise. I love how all the screenshots on the Xbox 360 store interface are of Williams Way in Cold Day. It's as if they know that if they showed how the game looks the majority of the time, nobody would buy it. (As if anybody looks on the internal 360 store thing anyway...)

I'm sure you all know RUB's gimmick, but I'll explain it here anyway. RUB doesn't have shortcuts like typical games, they're all hidden through buildings and are only accessible if your POWER gauge is full. The POWER shortcuts come in two varieties. The main type is a totally flat wall like a garage door plonked in the middle of the road. If you're POWERed, you go through it like it was cardboard, if you're not, then you get CRASHED. Unfortunately, another thing that looks like a flat grey rectangle is the road itself, so on your first go at the track you'll be constantly making 50/50 choices as to which dark flat cube in the distance is the real track, and which is a cunning fake Wile E. Coyote painted tunnel waiting to kill you instantly. Sometimes the POWER shortcuts aren't in the middle of the track - they're at 45-degree angles to it, totally concealed so you will never ever see them while you're in motion. Like you would be if you were racing, say.

POWER is incredibly capricious to get. You get it by drifting, drafting, etc, but the draft range is basically NONE. Not that you have very much depth perception in this game because all three camera angles put the camera very low to the ground. The developers must have known that their lighting and graphical design meant you COULDN'T SEE A FUCKING THING because when you have POWER, the game constantly picks out 'Targets'™ with HUGE screen-filling HUD elements labelled DESTROY SHATTER PD, DESTROY CAFE, EXPLODE TRUCK with arrows pointing to the offending object. Now not only can you not see a thing, but the things you could possibly see are obscured by the text. Also what is funny is that the duration of POWER is slightly shorter than the typical range that the HUD hints appear, so if you POWER immediately upon seeing the hint, you'll blast enthusiastically into the object and obliterate yourself.

The game has a mini-achievement system which it calls 'Awards'. They're like little achievements you can earn once per race for doing special stuff, and each time you earn an Award you get almost a full POWER bar reward. Against other cars, POWER works like a Mario Kart star. Now imagine twelve racers all smushed up activating stars at will. Given that you get Awards for things like 'going moderately fast', 'drifting a little bit' and 'hitting some objects', the start of every race turns into a blinding whirlwind of glowing red POWER trails and exploding twirling cars. Most races start with half the pack exploding in the first ten seconds, and with the player either in 12th place completely beyond hope, or in 1st place. And being in 1st place doesn't guarantee victory like in some games, you will be CONSTANTLY harangued by bastards coming up behind you unless you pull out your best moves and POWER away from them - POWER's nitro is actually really potent and boosts your top speed by 20mph for longer than the visual effect lasts, so definitely POWER if you can. Close combat racing amongst the pack is a real hassle in RUB. Totally luck based and bananas. Stay away! All of the races in game were made with the block-based track editor, and as a result there are a LOT of straight lines. Which made me wonder what the heck I was supposed to do to defeat the enemies. You can't really be creative, and the drafting distance is microscopic. You have to just accept whatever you see (or not see as the case may be) and -do yer best-. The game is really difficult and arbitrary, especially at the start. Don't expect to breeze through RUB. These cars are gonna make you earn every success.

I restarted a lot, which is fast, but there's still way too many layers of glowy swooshes you have to sit through to get anywhere. You might be tempted to complete races just for the XP points, which is a good idea if you're collecting the mini mid-race awards since they don't 'click' into your save file otherwise, but it means sitting through lots and -lots- of text swooshes and things filling up while your eyes roll into your head and none of it is bloody necessary at all. It's like the game wants you to get sick of it in a controlled manner so you don't either burn through the limited number of races too quickly, or burn out on the game entirely.

And, yeah, RUB has CRASHED. Joy. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it is NEVER EVER your fault. Usually, and infuriatingly, it mostly consistently occurs during a drift if you clip the -inside- wall. You can slam your broadside into the outside of the track and trundle right on (as is the Correct Way for a racing game to be), but if your front corner touches the wall twenty irreplaceable seconds of your precious life are stolen from you as you are banished to cutscene land. It doesn't tend to happen for many other reasons. But boy it sure is fun to have a rival racer POWER up your backside and one-hit-kill you with no warning. I mean, you can (and must) do the same to them, but fair doesn't mean fun.

On that subject I also suggest turning off the Event Cam in the options. It doesn't stop CRASHED, but the shoddy looking slow motion destruction cutscenes you get when you POWER through a building are not that exciting the first time, never mind the hundredth.

RUB is anything but fair. There are plenty of instances where the game does something egregious and I either yell 'WHAT' at the screen or just stare the Crashed screen repeating 'Nope. Nope, you're lying, stop it.'. If you go into it expecting a normal racing game, you're going to not enjoy it. And if you go into it expecting the weirdness to be in the car mechanics, like Ridge Racer 1's VERY weird drifting, you'll be upset too, because RUBs car driving great and it's the buildings and opponents that are bizarre here.

Traffic cars, concrete columns, plants and lampposts are all fair game to be sliced through as if they were made of dust. Buuuut... how do you tell the difference between a traffic car that's been tossed onto its side onto the middle of the track, and the aftermath of an -e-p-i-c- -f-r-a-g-f-e-s-t- that's left one of the enemy racers paralysed in the middle of the track? You can't. You'll slam right into it expecting to knock it away like bowling pins and you'll get caught on it and it'll SUCK.

As you smash through items or through the front and rear walls of a POWER shortcut, chances are large pieces of debris will get lodged on the front of your car, completely blocking your view, even when in third person. That's great.

In the Old Town district, there are more than a few POWER shortcuts that will dump you out facing a brick wall. Most of the POWER shortcuts elsewhere lead to ramps - you're supposed to use them to gather even more POWER from the airtime from the jumps hidden inside - but RUB isn't very good at simulating landings. One in ten times, your car will land awkwardly on its front and start twirling about in every direction at once, ruining your race. It's lucky the races in RUB are short.

Now that I've won the game, I can confirm that CPU players will never, ever deliberately trigger a POWER shortcut. Sometimes the CPU players will POWER through an explosive truck placed across the road, but only if you push them into it. You will never encounter an opened POWER shortcut that you didn't open yourself, which is the strangest dang thing. It means that you're playing a different game to the CPU players - it's asymmetrical, like Pac-Man VS. I can't think of any other racing games that have rules like that - the closest example that immediately comes to mind is the original Super Mario Kart, where the CPU versions of the characters all use their signature weapons freely instead of being restricted to the item boxes like the player is. I'm not really sure what the consequence of this is - I never figured out for sure whether it was best to open up every shortcut as soon as possible or to save them for later. They don't really help you anyway...

The CPU drivers never have names, which is sort of strange I guess. There's no tournaments or race-to-race persistence so I guess they never thought the need to give them names. It adds to the sensation that the rest of the pack exists purely as a unified opposing force versus the player. This was before Forza's awful horrible inexplicable decision to use random gamertags from your friend list as CPU names.

One really cheeky thing the AI drivers sometimes do which always racks me off is to activate their own POWER the instant you do, rendering them invulnerable to your attack. I get that a real player would naturally try to activate it in self-defence if they realised they were at risk, but there's no way they'd react flawlessly like the CPU players sometimes do. They wouldn't have any way of knowing you'd done it.

There's some other types of races in RUB which weren't in the demo. Exciting new stuff! Except they take place on the same cities as the rest of the races, so they don't feel all that new. First up, there's stunt tracks. The stunt tracks are very Trackmania-like - someone's gone and put half-pipes and floating platforms and spinning Ridge Racer coins all over the place and you've gotta dominate the district by being a crazy, gutsy fool and driving megafast. It's like you're some kind of... stunt... car... racer. Hmm!! They're actually pretty fun since the tracks seem ridiculous and impossible at a glance, but a few goes will let you easily pick out the line the game wants you to go for and they're never ridiculously long or difficult. Shame there's only about six of them in the entire game.

In 'Shindo' racing, which I think was in the demo, you have BOOST instead of NITRO which is BLUE instead of RED. And doesn't LET you GO through buildings. I thought there was going to be some kind of special skill involved here, like the fun Touge racing from Grid 1 or the horrible Touge racing from Grid 2 or the non-existent Touge racing from Grid In A Box. But the different kind of power bar is the difference, except, for some reason, Shindo BOOST racing is phenomenally easier than POWER racing. Once you're in first, you tend to keep it. I dunno why. I have a little theory though - I think that the player gets a vastly improved kick out of BOOST than POWER, but CPU racers don't get the same benefit. There's no other reason I can see for my effortless victories.

The other main type of racing in RUB is the 'Frag Attack', which I'm sure Ridge Racer fans had been begging for since the series began. In this mode, the enemy cars swarm around you and you have to use your quickly regenerating POWER to despatch as many as you can as quickly as possible. These modes by far are the worst in the game, and they're the only ones that I couldn't figure out any way to get a perfect score on in my post-game grinding spree.

To frag an enemy, you have to touch them while POWER is on. But it's also based on your relative speed and angle. And you'll usually be trying to drive at your top speed naturally anyway so trying to nudge a car that's just out of reach in front of you can be agonising. And in half of these Frag Attacks you're driving a truck cab that can barely steer. And your score is based on how many cars you kill, but they're not at fixed locations on the track - sometimes they'll decide to not show up when they're meant to, and there goes your run. I think I managed to figure out a knack to do Frag Attacks 'properly' by getting the enemy cars to land in the right places for me to nudge them diagonally but if you told me I'd just gotten lucky and I was deluding myself, I'd accept that too. You can earn extra time in Frag Attacks by going through POWER shortcuts, but since there aren't any enemy cars to smash inside the secret passages, it seems like a trap unless you're very sure there's no cars on the regular route and you'll earn more time than you'll spend in there.

The other type of race is point-to-point 'escape the cops' type races. Yeah! The cops from the intro actually do show up in Time Attacks and Frag Attacks as the antagonists. I was shocked! I didn't think there would be any actual cops in the game. But when there are cops, they don't really act agressively - they drift around you like fairies and make a little chevron in front of your car - I get the impression that they're really there to give you something to draft behind to recharge your POWER, or to slam into using POWER to get additional replacement POWER from the awards. I wasn't very good at these. Even more than the stunt tracks, the Time Attacks seem focused on getting and using POWER perfectly over and over and not having any dead time. The one-star score is reachable, and I'm glad there's individual achievements for perfecting each discipline separately.

Oh man, I wrote all five and a half thousand words of this post and published it and totally forgot about the drift challenges. Yeah, it's got drift challenges, of a really arcadey sort - long drifts get you time extends, and all that. I liked this; I usually like drifts in general. It's much harder than most other games' drift modes, like GRID or NFSU, but it's also shorter. It's focused around trying to keep the car drifting at all times, even in straight lines. -There's no multiplier- which is super duper weird for a drift mode. Still, the time limits are so tight you really do have to race flawlessly to get the max rating. I had to go accept a two-star rating until I'd unlocked some of the better cars. It might not seem like it at first, but there is a knack to the drifting - the game tells you to use the B-button E-Brake to start the drifts, but I've found tapping the E-Brake and the regular brake simultaneously to be a lot more reliable. The drifts are more like NFS than Ridge, which is a VERY good thing. I've played Ridge Racer 64 and its drifts are bollocks and bizarre. They come from another planet. It's Ridge's defining feature and it's -TOTALLY- inapplicable to RUB, which makes me wonder why it has the name at all. But anyway.

You unlock cars as you go but there's only about six in each class, and they progress from 'lame starting car' to 'good at most stats' to 'AWD slow mess' and that's it. The only time you'll get properly fast cars with 5/5 in acceleration and speed is the drift races, for some reason. The cars themselves are a bit of a non-entity in the scheme of things. They're all made up, which is neither here nor there for me, but I don't like that RUB does the NFS: HP thing of only giving you three or four pre-set colours to pick from for each car. Would it have been so much trouble to let the player compose a signature colour they like and have that added to the list? Most of the cars in the game only come in black, red, silver or orange, and everything looks the same anyway especially under the coloured lighting. The -one- distinct car is the Mustang rip-off thing, which dutifully slides all over the place, if that's how you like to roll.

I hit a (ha ha!) roadblock when I completed all the races I could but didn't have enough points to unlock the later races in one of the series. The game still let me finish the career mode and get the end credits without finishing every race, which is nice, but I still wanted to finish every race so I had to come back and figure out what I was supposed to do. It turns out that, get this, to get more points in a race, you have to score more points in a race. I thought it was going to be mega-difficult, but it was only a case of smashing all the 1,000 point POWER targets at every opportunity. It's doable.

One thing I think is clever is in the intro when it ends with a hint that after we've conquered Shatter we're ready to 'conquer the world'. That might equally apply to a hypothetical sequel (which never happened), or the online mode with the track editor where you can make your own cities and put them online. In fact the whole game sort of seems like an introduction to the multiplayer. (A bit like Metal Gear Survive! Except with less plot. I liked the plot in Survive. Ugh. Why couldn't Survive have been cool?).

RUBs editor is semi-slick, semi-annoying and mostly pointless. You put prefabricated city block pieces (from a huge selection that takes ages to scroll through) down onto a grid, and that's it. It's nothing like Trackmania or Re-Volt, despite looking superficially similar, and definitely nothing like ModNation Racers. RUB's pieces are city-block sized, though you're really putting down the roads between the blocks. The game does a flawless job of making all the city-pieces connect together in such a way that it looks like a natural city, with a huge facade of a city just out of reach beyond the main track roads.

Unfortunately (well, maybe), RUBs main campaign is composed entirely of these city-blocks as well. As you're racing, you'll start to recognise gimmicks and scenes repeated and thrown together in new combinations in different levels, which is a weird experience. That sounds like a roguelike dungeon, and it feels that way a lot of the time, except unlike a roguelike, the levels are constant so you can learn them like proper tracks. And you'll need to 'cause of the way you can't see a thing. It also means that all of the stuff flying around you as you drive is all fake and there is no real city and no free-roam mode. When you get into the roguelike dungeon mindset, it actually kinda improved the experience for me, and I started feeling like I was playing the races one room at a time. The game also reuses city blocks in different districts sometimes, which is kinda lazy. The districts supposed to be on completely opposite sides of the city, I'm not supposed to be having random flashbacks like that. Some corners with POWER targets seem to be used over and over again, but looking at a walkthrough to see what targets are on which track, most of the targets are only used in one track each, so I don't know how I'm getting the impression that they're being used constantly. The game feels so samey sometimes it tricks me into thinking it's being samey when it's not, which isn't a great result.

RUB's weird track block system means that there isn't any Quick-Race-type thing. There's no tournaments in the campaign, no persistent racers or scoring, just nine districts with seven individual races each, so all the races are quick races, kinda. There's no way to set up a race under your own terms... except that's exactly what the track editor lets you do, you just have to make the track yourself first and then you can pick whatever options you like. It's a strange thing. The game very agreeably allows you to get any of the normal achievements on a track that you've designed yourself, which almost gives RUB a construction/puzzle aspect where you have to figure out how to make a track that'll let you cheese the achievements you've yet to get. The 'Creative Destruction' achievement requires you to hit more POWER targets than there are on any pre-set track, so it's definitely not cheating.

Too bad the servers are all down now... we'll never know how popular RUB's multiplayer and city-sharing was. At least one review I've found has mentioned that they had trouble finding people to play multiplayer games with, but that's not really a fair comparison if it was pre-release. Still, at least you can still play your custom cities with your pals today, right! Except the game has no split-screen multiplayer whatsoever. I'm sure there's very, very good reasons why racing games don't include this, but they're all bullshit, let's be real. If a racing game has multiplayer, it should also have split-screen multiplayer. But nope. No RUB with your pals. And with the RUB servers down you can't play online in any way whatsoever. Again, bullshit.

One thing I was hoping for in the full game was a much bigger soundtrack. There's only so many times you can see a suggestion on-screen from Mr. Skillrex that you should Kill Everyone before you start to wonder if the idea has some merit. The verdict is... not great. The soundtrack is good. All the poundy woobly dubstep and some hard electronic fast race music. It starts off mega strong with some cool tracks that are labelled as being from Ridge Racers 6 and 7 as if the game was going to pour in a whole load of older games' music in the name of nostalgia. But I was only 22% of the way through the game before it started looping enough for me to notice. It felt like there was only like eight tracks total in RUB's soundtrack, which was god-damned maddenning. But I didn't cave and turn it off until I'd won! The end credits would have you believe there's a lot more songs, but that seems kinda implausible to me. And the way that there are RR6 and 7 musics included rused me and made me not realise there are no RRUB-specific -new- tracks until I was done! How frickin' cheap is that?? (Also I had a snoop at the complete RR6/7 soundtracks and the tracks they stole for RUB seem like the only good ones from there. Hmm.)

And man was the experience vastly improved by turning the soundtrack off. The game is set up for grinding, with a really half-baked, blah, dull rank up system just like the one in NFS Hot Pursuit (complete with You've Unlocked A New Car! except much much less flashy), but getting three stars on some races means restarting them enough times that you'll hear the entire soundtrack multiple times through before you make it. Driving about the place enjoying the satisfying and solid driving physics and chunky car sounds without the music is so much less stressful after you've gotten the end sequence and know all of the CPU drivers' sneaky tricks and don't really have to worry about nothing no more.

Though there are some really silly inexplicable sound choices that I can't ignore. When you reach your car's maximum speed, the game will continue to have the engine revs rising and cycling through an infinite set of gears to nowhere, and sometimes the same thing happens when you hold the brake and accelerator simultaneously too. It's really silly. It reminds me of a proposal I read once where electric cars would have to have artificial engine sounds fitted - so maybe all the RUB cars are electric?

Don't hold out any hope that you'll be able to get the max level achievements unless somehow you're a RUB freak or want to put the time in to make some high-scoring custom tracks. At the end of the campaign I was level 27, and hit 28 with my here-and-there grinding for achievements. The XP requirements to get from there to 30 are GIGANORMOUS; I think I'd have to win the entire game all over again to get there. Or do the non-existent multiplayer... yeah.

The HUD is plonked around in all corners of the screen, unlike the tiny car-hugging display from the marvelous Split/Second: Velocity and the game feels really different with it turned off. It made me appreciate the effort that must've gone into making the 'bonk woooooh' sound that occurs when you fill up the POWER bar, and the way it cuts through whatever song you're listening to. Too bad I like knowing where I am in the race and stuff though. There's no mini-map while racing, which is kind of a trend in this generation. Boo.

My ultimate judgement on RUB is... actually I really enjoyed it. I liked the strange asymmetric rules in races, and the physics worked for me, and with the exception of the hyper-capricious FRAG challenges the game and I got on well. In the grand scheme of things I'd recommend playing RUB as late as possible, if only because it's kinda difficult and requires patience and focus. But it's not too long and not too nerdy.

The elephant in the room is that there's not a lot of Ridge Raceryness here. Obviously. I'm no expert in RR, I only own the first two on the PS1, but I get the impression that that's what people would like to see in RR - cheesy music, bright colours, race gals. Kara Shindo would kind of be the race gal, but she doesn't start the races, show up at the end of the races, or appear at all except at the start and at the end. There's no daft Pac-Man or Xevious themed cars... oh, no, wait, they're DLC. Oh boy. And the card I got with my preowned copy had already been redeemed. You just have to accept that RUB is its own thing. Having looked at some RR6 and RR7 footage, Ridge Racer's racing mechanics really were kinda deliberately wonky. Unbounded should've stood by itself. But then maybe it would've fallen into the murky void of wannabe also-ran (also-raced?) racing games like Crash Time and Full Auto. Now, if it was called Need For Speed: Unbounded... maybe that would've worked. But then the developers would've had to have put a bit more effort in.

Compared to NFS: HP, it's ugly, dark, really restricted in features and sort of 'discount'. It tries to wring a lot out of the few things it has, but it just ends up feeling somewhat limited and low effort. NFS HP is just so gorgeous and slick, even if it is 'just racing'. There's nothing like the graceful sweeping rollercoaster highways and turns of NFS Underground 1, 2 and Most Wanted and every other NFS ever in RUB, which is really strange. You'd think Ridge Racer would be all over giving you nice turns to ride. All you get here are 90 degree blind turns, and awkward chicanes that are 90 degree turns with sometimes-destructible sometimes-not obstacles you have to memorise how to defeat.

I've been comparing RUB to the NFS games in my head, but maybe I ought to be comparing it to things like Burnout Paradise. I HATE BURNOUT PARADISE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY so RUB gets an automatic pass, but it's also an earned pass because RUB is actually pretty cool, despite the impression I got from the demo. So there.

And the sample I heard over and over throughout the game which I thought said 'SKRILLEX OH MY GOD.' was from this gal's cup stacking video, which is dang cool.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing With Banjo-Kazooie (Demo)
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (Demo)
"Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed!"

I've been downloading random garbage on my 360 because I realised that it's by the grace and mostly forgetfulness of Microsoft that the demo system on the 360 still works in this hellish future year of 2022 A.D.. Do you remember when the 360 first came out and almost every full game (and every XBLA game by order) would have a demo, and you could download them all right there in the dashboard without having to get a demo disc from magazine? It was fantastic, and good. Demos are always fantastic, never a problem. DEMOS DEMOS DEMOS.

So I downloaded some demos to take round to a friend's place and realised that I'd only every played Transformed on my bro's PC briefly a million years ago and didn't like it, and I'm pretty sure I've never played All-Stars. Wait, they're both All-Stars aren't they? Like that shitty minigame compilation on the PS2? And the inexplicable tennis one? Is this a series then?

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to call these two games Sonic Racing 1 and Sonic Racing 2 because they're hard enough to tell apart and remember the titles of in my head as it is. They're the Mario Kart clones. 1 is the first one, 2 has the planes. Got it? Let's go.

The one with planes in
I played the second one first when I was going through the demos mostly because I was curious if the game was going to be 60Hz. It wasn't. Huge HUGE disappointment, to be honest. What's the point of making a Sonic game that isn't 60Hz? It seems like the definition of doing it wrong. Sonic Generations was unpleasantly crunchy on the 360 too.

Anyway, yeah this game works. The announcer is kind of dull. He reads out lots and lots of things, mostly the captions acknowledging the stuff you're doing like it's Killer Instinct or something.

I was worried I'd get messed up when the game changed from Car to Boat to Plane - as if there was a button I had to push to make it happen - but no it just happens when you go through magic things on the track, and each lap within a track is slightly different like you're playing Split/Second (which is constantly on sale for £2 BUY IT!!) - sometimes you're on the track, sometimes you're on a river, sometimes in a plane. The boat is like a car except the moving water means you're kind of all over the place and the steering is kind of delayed. The planes are like boats that go in the sky. The controls are really heavy, which is... good? I can't tell. It makes it difficult to do fast, clever things, but you shouldn't be doing that anyway. Does anybody remember the plane racing game Plane Crazy for Windows 98 that came out around... 1998? The controls in that were really loose and twisty, whereas SR2's planes feel really weighty and slow. Which is probably what real planes feel like. In fact, everything is really slow feeling in SR2. You just sort of glide through the experience at a moderate pace, recognising and respecting the level but not having much input on where you go or what you do, and if you win you win, and if you lose you lose.

There's two races in the game, one in Panzer Dragoon world, and a boost challenge where you have to go from pink boost pad to pink boost pad perfectly or you run out of time. I thought I was doing rather well at it, but I couldn't even finish the course, so I felt really lousy. It kind of put me off buying the game entirely - I was already on the fence, but not being able to do challenge-type levels means the game is going to be a big, unfinished lingering sore on my mind forever if I buy it. So I won't.

The one without planes in
I find it kind of amusing the focus given to the Virtua Fighter cast in the intro to SR1. Look, it's... eyebrows guy! And guy in the karate gi! And they're doing kicks and things!

In my own very limited (yet definitive and inassailable) experience as an English kid born in 1987 who doesn't play fighting games unless they're about cats and has never owned a (working) Sega Saturn, Virtua Fighter means absolutely jack to me. At least I've played Golden Axe on the Amiga before. And I did win Shenmue. My bro bought Shenmue 2 when it came out, I remember.

Whenever I put the SR games on (which is incredibly infrequently, given that I don't own either) I'm always pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of Beat, B.D. Joe, Vyse and so on. That's the kind of thing I WANT in a compilation mash-up racing game. But they always pick rubbish characters I've never heard of or don't like. Sega has so many properties, and they just... don't... ever... do anything right.

SR1 has smaller tracks and runs so much worse than SR2 does. At the start of the race when everybody's bunched up and heading for the first corner, everybody drifting at once, semi-transparent water all over the place, the game just gives up entirely and spits out a few random frames like it's an anime fight montage, and when normal service resumes maybe you'll be in front, who can even say.

There's an announcer in SR1, but he's different! And he's got a lot to say - he even properly narrates the race as it goes on, though most of his comments for me were "Where'd you guys learn to drive, a farm??" I don't know why he was being so abrasive, my karts can only kart as fast as they can kart!

After playing the pair, I was wondering if SR1 was even released on other platforms. It's possible that it could've been on the Switch, though it predates the Switch by a million years so it would be the DS in this case. I was surprised to see the N64 Banjos on the Switch Online Thingy when I took a peek at a friend's device - I wonder if that's some really long-term grandfathered contract being honored there, or if Nintendo are licensing it from Microsoft (which would be funny).

It turns out SR1 is on the PS3 and the DS, and what is also funny is that the cover is barely changed between platforms, except when your eyes pass from the Xbox 360 version to the others and Banjo & Kazooie have been annihilated from existence. No doubt Kazooie was cancelled for her humour. Or maybe people took one look at their Nuts & Bolts selves (we've got the rectangular nose Banjo and the sassy eyes-ed Kazooie here) and decided that they had to go. They're not in any version of SR2, which SUCKS balls. I REALLY hate it when characters disappear between different games of the same series. When Smash Bros included all of the DLC characters from the previous edition like Cloud etc. as base characters in the next edition, that was fabulous.

What I don't get is why B&K have full marks for Speed. They're faster than Sonic. Sonic might be the fastest thing alii-ei-ei-ve only when he's on foot, sure, but Banjo is driving a rickety home-made car like out of N&B. Makes no sense!

There's only one track in SR1's demo, which is 'Lost Palace' - otherwise known as Seaside Hill from Sonic Heroes. And it's a fine track. It tracks. Though the damn Sonic-legit robo-fish that leap up at you between the jump gaps in the track that you never avoid are annoying as HELL. It turns out that the only bad thing about Sonic Heroes was the controls and the gameplay. Steal the music or graphics and put them into other games, and everything is fine.

Seaside Hill's music is really weird. It sounds like -fake- Sonic music. Like they wanted to do something in the style of Emerald Coast, and that's what they got. It's like the fake movie parody music you get in the Stuntman series (except much higher quality of course).

I liked SR1 more than SR2 because all of the new things that SR2 added weren't really that much fun. So much boring empty space and wasted time. SR1's track was really tiny and was over before I knew it.

Also there were items. I had no idea what they did. Felt like when I was playing WipEout for the first time on MS-DOS. They were just ... stuff.

WipEout 2097: Accelerated Adrenaline Rush For Future People
Never dwell on past days. Leave those damp brown days alone.

2097 was/will be a heck of a year. Not only will the next generation of WipErs be WiPing up a storm, but in the universe where Epic Games stayed Mega, giant anime-wannabe robots will be beating seven shades out of each other in the One Must Fall 2097 tournament.

Today, it's the year 2023, so compared to 1996 I'm definitely Future People. I found this game in a shop for £2.99 this month but they knocked 99p off because neither of us liked WipEout. True story.

I don't know whether or not I like WipEout to tell the truth. I've barely played it 'properly'. (Though, fun fact, I'm in the credits for Wipeout HD 'cause I was an intern at Sony, so disclosure or something. I wonder if the barrel-roll-off-the-track-then-respawn-incorrectly bug is still there.) The only times I've played WipEout in the past were probably maybe a dodgy copy a hundred years ago with no music and possibly even no sound effects, so the whole experience was a bizarre, quiet, mysterious cyber-shambles where occasionally I had weapons, occasionally I didn't and I didn't understand a thing that was going on. By complete coincidence, that's exactly how I ended the previous post about Them Sonic so this works out super neatly.

I never had one before, but this is my copy of WipEout. My very first and my very own. I played this copy on the PS2 first, but then moved onto my brother's PSone because the PS2's CD laser wasn't up to streaming the CD track music without glitches, sadly. But the little bar-o'-soap PSone was a super trooper and everything was dandy.

WipEout 2097 is the second game in the series; Psygnosis decided to skip the intervening 2095 numbers and go straight from 1 to 2097. Except in America where this one's called WipEout XL which makes it sound like an expansion pack to the first game. The third game has a regular edition called Wip3out, which I'm sure retailers and suppliers loved, and a separate, later Europe-exclusive Special Edition which was an expansion pack/replacement and included stuff from earlier games, and the PS2 games onward ditch the numbers. Except the Vita one which puts a year in again, setting it before this game, as if that matters.

After I prised open the well-worn box (an overnight stay in a bowl of Lidl's finest dish suds for you I think), I spent some time admiring the sticky, kid-used manual's gratuitous use of fluorescent orange and silver inks. And chuckling at the way the German manual gives slick translations for all of the sci-fi weapons, but the French version goes for 'Le Electro Bolt', 'Le Turbo Boost' and so on. There's some deep WipEout 2097 lore in the manual to get you in the mood.


The menu is confusing and looks cheap but at least it has one, since WipEout had some static screens that looked chucked together at the last minute. The horizontal panels of the screen scrape apart and slam together and waitaminnit isn't that the same as Rollcage? (Which is also Psygnosis? (Published at least? (And on the back of the CD for 2097 there's a 'Psygnosis Racing' brand label, which doesn't appear in the game, so it was a 'thing' was it? (Or was it? I wonder!))))

The intro has some flashy but awkwardly animated ships flying about and then one explodes. There's no FMV pit girl telling you to fasten your seatbelt or slick sonofabitch telling you to prepare for the future regions of outrageous. You're on your own, and the menu gives you absolutely no clue what you're supposed to be doing (yes, racing, I know). The manual isn't that much help. There's Arcade mode and Time Trial and that's it. The manual says there's a championship mode with lives, but it's just not there. I guessed that you have to get a gold medal in each race win the WipEout and be crowned The Most WipEst, and that was correct!

This game is sponsored by Red Bull! (This post is not. It is sponsored by our lynx overlords who will reclaim their planet in due course.) According to the loading screens, Red Bull increases your reaction time, but I doubt the medical authority of that statement. The first game didn't have Red Bull sponsorship, it had adverts for other Psygnosis games like Krazy Ivan and Tenka, which is really sweet and cool tbh. It makes total sense. And apparently WIPE OUT is a disaster movie in the WipEout universe?

Progression is clunky and awkward. You have to manually go into the menu and select the track and flick through all the pages to find what you want and what you need. When you get golds in each race, a prerendered text animation shows up and congratulates you for qualifying to race in the F5000 Phantom! Doesn't that sound swish? Because I'm a complete WipEout noob, I spent a couple of minutes perplexed in the ship select menu trying to find the F5000 Phantom so I could race in it before my cat mind worked out that the F5000 Phantom is the name of the racing league we're participating in.

The progression is:
- Six tracks are available. Play each of them in Arcade individually and get 1st to get a gold medal on the track select screen.
- Challenge I is available. Play through all six tracks back to back with three lives and get 1st to advance. Non-podium finishes or destructions lose a life.
- Eight tracks are available. Play each of them in Arcade individually and get 1st to get a gold medal on the track select screen.
- Challenge II is available. Play through all eight tracks back to back with three lives and get 1st to advance. Non-podium finishes or destructions lose a life.
- You get the secret ship. It's a secret because the manual says there are rumours of a prototype super ship, but there's no information available - except on the front of the game case where the hidden fifth team is shown along with the others. Oh well. The back of the case gives away that there are supposed to be eight tracks too, but you will never ever get to see them unless you're a racing GOD. Or you buy OPSM and get the cheats.

When you first get into gameplay in 2097 your mind will be obliterated with purest unadulterated 'Holy Shit! This Is Fast! This Game Is Rad! But it's a HOME CONSOLE GAME! I can OWN THIS and HAVE THIS IN MY HOUSE!'.

WipEout 2097 is some clever shit. By modern retrospective standards maybe it doesn't look like it will blow your mind (say, the draw distance is a bit obvious sometimes), but when you're in motion this game is the absolute business. WipEout 2097 shows up to the gaming year of 1996 throwing five aces on the table and holding a knife to your throat.

Received wisdom says that Golden Grahams are too tasty for geeks and Yorkie bars are not for girls. WipEout 2097 is not for humans. There's no map, except on the track select screen, which is annoying. No rally copilot or warning symbols. Not that you'd have time to look at anything like that since everything is whooshing so fast even on moderate difficulty that your face is planed flat by the power of the game. There's sudden corners that I have no idea how you'd navigate, and some of these are in pitch black darkness or over ledges.

You have to learn the tracks. You have to go beyond learning the tracks. You have to become the tracks. You can't trust what your eyes see because what the game shows you isn't useful enough. By the fifth race I was on the edge of my chair peering forward at the middle twenty percent of the screen flying by pretending my ship was twenty meters further ahead than it was so that by the time I reached that position I'd be turning sufficiently to make the turns. On the last race I had repeated it enough that I became a being of pure energy and won it by a marathon. Which is a far cry from the multiple times that I'd gotten into second and gotten tangled up with what I thought was the first place guy only to find that he was the twelvth place guy (no HUD position markers) and after passing him and the first place guy I end up crashing into the eleventh place guy and dropping back into second and then third. Oh how I laughed.

This game is from 1996 and it doesn't support analogue sticks, and there's no mention of it supporting steering wheels on the back of the case. You're stuck with the regular original gamester - the PS1 controller's digital pad. And MAN it hurts your thumb after a while. That thing is stiff. One race is all it takes for you to get a serious case of the Nintendo Thumb - numbness and painness and flatness all over. Kiss your nerves goodbye.

It does support the Namco NeGcon (that's the controller that looks like a SNES pad but the two halves twist like you're wringing a flannel dry to let you turn in racing games) if you have one. Which I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I wonder if those things still work after thirty years. I'd be worried I'd shear the thing in half within minutes of getting my hands on it.

I don't know if I like the controls in WipEout 2097. I've not gotten used to them at all, and I can't really say I've gotten any good at the game. The accelerator doesn't feel like it applies acceleration, it instead temporarily sets your throttle to a higher value. If you release it after applying some, you'll accelerate a little more (either that or -every single time I tested- I was on a slope) afterwards. Turning feels like the awful acceleration-applied aiming that console FPSes FOOLISHLY love to attempt in these 2010-years where the turning becomes more severe the more you hold the control down. I say foolishly because the control in question on a modern console would be ANALOGUE ANYWAY. I get there's no other way to do analogue turning with a D-pad so OKAY just give me goddamn digital turning; I'll feather the button if I want something less than full intensity for two seconds if I hold Right for two seconds. Let me input what I mean, dammit.

There's no brakes. No wait, there is brakes. I got all the way to the final race without using them. The brakes are split into a left and right brake. Both at once slows you right the heck down, one at a time turns your ship into megasoap and hurls you into the outside wall. Strange how using the brakes makes you more hovercraft-ish than just driving.

The walls in WipEout 2097 are clingy sticky velcro nightmares and the collision regions are gigantic cuboids despite the ships being all pointy darts. If you touch a wall once in this game you might as well sell your console. If you're incredibly, incredibly lucky, your contact might be interpreted as a scrape and you'll get some sparks and be permitted to go on your way. Otherwise, be prepared to say hello to the last three places you passed. Some guides suggest that pitching the ship nose up will help (is that what the pitch controls are for??), but my poor hand is worked hard enough already by this game.

Reviews comparing WipEout 1 to this game said that Psygnosis had vastly improved the wall collisions so they're not as sticky. To which I say what. I can only imagine that touching a wall in WipEout 1 scrapes your ship into polygon fragments instantly and causes your hometown to fall into a crevasse.

Despite this, the insta-slow barriers appear to be very shallow in height. Too many of the games generous boost pads are directly before ninety degree turns, often on ramps, so unless you crush the shoulder buttons to brake you'll be shot into the sky through walls and off the track.

Except for one specific wall, the front hoarding of the Potempkin building, which is a fucking joke. You WILL hit this building, no matter how prepare you are. And if you DON'T hit the front, you'll hit the INSIDE as your ship hits the ground, bounces up into the air and then smashes against the interior ceiling.

Speaking of which, there's some large jumps in the game which send your craft into an uncontrollable self-destructive tantrum where the craft's nose slams repeatedly into the ground and losing tons of speed. Even in longplays of people winning the Challenge modes they scratch the walls sometimes and go into the ground slamming tantrum. So.

Despite the game letting you/forcing you to fly off the track into the jagged polygon laden darkness, there's no shortcuts in WipEout with the exception of one probably unintentional one in the penultimate level. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you like shortcuts. I like it when racing games' physics are coherent and predictable enough and the rules are lenient enough that I can pop outside the track for some milk and rejoin it later if it looks like I can plausibly get away with it. Like Grid. Need For Speed Most Wanted -doesn't- do this since its rollercoaster-spiderweb world is a series of very strict wide tunnels for you to race around in. Forza Horizon on the other hand lets you carve Scotland in two with a single handbrake turn if you choose. Anyway Grid is cooler than WipEout 2097 is what I'm saying.

The game is old enough to have password saves but also memory card saves. It has the nifty old-fashioned spinning 3d models of a controller/memory card in the options, which is always welcome. (EDIT - WAIT, NO, SHIT that's WipEout 1!) The passwords are the PS shapes but you enter them on up-down reels rather than typing them in, which is just nonsense.

The intro is okay but not great. The best thing about it is there's a cat. It has the stupid awful horrible unbelieveable probably deliberate but stupid error of having a decrementing checkpoint timer (like the game does) but the deciseconds place goes up rather than down... 4.7 4.8 4.9 3.0 3.1 3.2... it looks sloppy, is what it does. I saw an AI upscaling and upframerating of it that was pretty clever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sRsXfpnQFE

The opponents are a Pain In The Arse. They're the type that has a set speed and route and nothing will make them deviate from it. Never ever expect them to make a mistake. I don't think they can. They work on completely different physics from the player, if they run on physics at all, taking turns you can't and accelerating in ways you can't. They have a lower top speed than you so you can catch them if you're an absolute master at the tracks. But being an absolute master probably means you're doing crazy things like braking for turns and so on, and you're gonna be upset that they don't have to do the same since they'll just magically glide through you and shove you aside while you're in the middle of playing the game properly.

Shooting the opponents is risky too since you can only shoot opponents that are in front of you of course, and stunned opponents that are in front of you tend to slow down in front of you and get tangled up with you thanks to the huge collision boxes and then you're both slowed. Except then they can accelerate back to their magic Scalextric speed while you're stuck in 12th.

There are weapons in this game and they all suck. They're impossible to aim and impossible to use. You'll just use what you're given when you have it and do your best. Or turn off powerups entirely if you get sick of the constant threat detection voice telling you you're about to be shot and there being nothing you can do about it. Not that the AI uses the weapons all that much - they never use quake or plasma or boost and they act as if they're on autopilot all the time anyway. That doesn't stop them from driving over the panels milliseconds before you do and deactivating them, giving them the advantage. (Assuming (unwisely) they play by those rules too.)

The weapon icons don't have names and they're hard to decipher (doubly so when the threat voice is reading out the name of different weapons). I never knew what was going on when I played a dodgy copy a hundred thousand years ago and I barely do now. Pop quiz: out of the Rocket and Missile, which one is the lock-on one and which is the triple-shot one?

The shield powerup lasts too long, doesn't help you against wall collisions, and prevents you from using other, more useful things like the boost and autopilot when it's active.

The quake one says in the manual to just try it and you'll laugh your arse off. The effect is pretty cool - it sends a ripple down the track like a wafted carpet distorting the geometry and throwing the enemy about. The wave is so tall and slow that it blinds you for a moment, so, uh, don't.

The powerups do seem to have a handicap weighting: the autopilot that doubles your top speed and takes all the turns for you appears a lot when you're ninth or below. So... that's good? But the autopilot also tends to disengage automatically when you're about to encounter a turn that you really needed a year or two to prepare for but the autopilot didn't because it's a cheating robot. So... that's bad.

The five tiers of car feel very difficult to drive to each other, which is not something all games manage. Every time you get used to how 'whoosh' your current preferred car is, the next one down is always 'waaaaaogh!!'. The final secret reward car for completing the entire game is hyper zoomy and very hard to race with. You need to be a hyper-evolved next level humanoid to even try.

I had to manipulate the options and try every car to find combinations that worked for me to win golds. The fastest car is too fast to turn and has worse turn stats. The slowest car is too slow to race in. Haven't got the hang of drifting properly. All I can tell you is that I know how to do it in other games pretty well, but these flying darts ain't cars no matter how often I refer to them as cars.

I don't think I ever got better at the game as I went through it. I got six golds and my congratulatory cutscene and then the game asked me to get 1st place on six races consecutively with no breaks, no saving, no reselecting the ship between, and no chance to even view the map beforehand. I decided I'd won enough and stopped. Because I'm not getting much better over time it feels like just luck. Well, not just luck. I am amazing, but I'm not on the level of amazing that WipEout 2097 requires.

There's not a lot of 'content' in this game, as the kids say, I think. Four cars and a secret one, six tracks and two extra tracks nobody's ever going to see, and nobody who's seen them will ever complete them, and nobody who's ever completed them will still exist in time or space as we know it. There's also no mirror mode, which is a strange omission: it's the most arcade/playstation gimmick ever.

The game reminds me of a quote I saw in at least two places in Amiga Power (possibly referring to the Space Crusade expansion disk, or more likely Cannon Fodder 2, or even more likely now that I think about it the Timekeepers expansion disk) where the reviewer said the sequel was meaner than the original which is 'as it should be'. I think both this and WipEout are probably equally mean...

The races are mercifully quite short and have fast restarts with no loading. No loading. NO LOADING.

If your racing game has long loading times before restarts, you're getting docked 20%. I don't care fancy your pulsing neon panels are or how goofy it is to see the player racer dancing in a Santa suit. I'm already in the race. Just do what you already did!

And, man, whatever Burnout Paradise did? I forget. I hated it. Just get out.

The graphics are cool and you go to a jungle place and a snowy place and an industrial place and a city. It feels like a realistic future, but that's probably because of the constant advertising billboards. There's a big maneki neko in the intro which I was looking out for through the entire game, and he appears in the last level, so that's fine. (The flashing alternating backgrounds in the intro however can go in the bin.)

Don't expect sweeping vistas - like I said, these tracks are confusing bendy nightmares, mostly to hide the draw distance (mostly successfully except the poor 'you're outside, ooops no you're inside' cave in the jungle. The last two secret tracks are literal nightmares that take everything I hate about 2097's tracks way too far, mostly pitch black with deadly drops obscuring ninety degree turns onto detached track segments underneath that you have to just learn are there by recognising the fragments of billboards and signs that lead up to some of them. I'm sure WipEout gods love it.

In every game mode there's an arcade-like checkpoint system where you lose if you run out of time. It's completely pointless, except to punish newbies who are having trouble getting to grips with the controls. You can run out of time in Challenge II, but if you do then you're in sixth or seventh place anyway and you'd lose a life regardless.

I -do- really hate it in games where the player has to qualify or beat a time or perform some other feat in order to be allowed to continue but the computer players aren't subject to the same rules. If I have to come in third or higher, then so must they! I want the computer players to be able to lose!

I didn't try time trial mode. There's apparently ghosts. Spooky.

I looked up a longplay of the game and DANG the game looks swish to watch. Watching someone who is good at WipEout play WipEout is a special experience. But I don't think I'll ever bother with gambling with my time on the Challenge modes - at thirty minutes an attempt and back to the start if I fail? I'm fine, thanks. I wish the game had the end credits after the first six golds and then escalated things beyond 100% with an invitation to the 'Insane' league, then the 'Impossible' league, so regular mortal players could be satisfied they'd 'won', and insane or impossible players could continue on their quest to eliminate all the feeling in their thumbs. The most interesting about the Challenge mode is that the lives indicator when you lose lets you see your racer's face! It's a very Amiga-ish sprite.

One thing that's confusing and nonsense is that the game has four speed classes that dictate the crafts' maximum speed and number of laps, and each class has two courses associated with it. In the Arcade mode, you can play the two Easy tracks on Easy only, the two Normal tracks on Normal only and so on. But around the point you get the Challenge, the game silently lets you play any track on any class. When you go into the best times records screen, you can see that you can play every course as every class, but the game sneakily prevents you from picking 'wrong' combinations until that point. I do not know why they do this.

WipEout 2097 has a two player mode! But it's link cable only! Grrr... that's a shame. If you're releasing a kick-butt super 32-bit 3D console with arcade quality gameplay and TWO CONTROLLER PORTS ON THE FRONT, then make the game split-screen, Sony!!! (I did have to check if in 1996 Psygnosis was fully Sony, and yes they were in 1993.) You even need two copies of the game, unlike Ridge Racer's fancy shenanigans. It would've been lovely if more games, both handheld and console, did the Game Boy Advance multiboot thing.

According to the manual, the computer voice was played by 'AMIGA 1200'. Which is exactly the idea I had for Gravity Beam! (Because I was reminded of Thunderbirds - which was also the reason why Starfox has puppets on it.) So the Gravity Beam count-in and the WipEout 2097 count-in are identical! (Except I used punctuation and post editing on 'one' to get a different inflection. And they're a little bit different.)

I chuckled when I was reading through the guides on GameFAQS and the one by Matthew Sephton says 'What a game! WO2 is easily on par with Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 as the best game on the Sony PlayStation.' I gotta agree. Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 was the very first Playstation game I ever played even before I knew what one was! And I thought it was pretty cool. I remember winning it for my cousin.

I still want to get the rest of the WipEouts though. There's another catue in Wip3out, so I gotta get it.

The music, the legendary music! It's... music. It's what it is. But because it's 1996 this is the first time people would be able to hear stuff like this coming from a game with this fidelity. Unless they had a Sega CD (but all Sega CD is supposed to sound like J-pop or a midi played through a Roland Sound Canvas by law) or a 3DO. It's got the instrumental of Firestarter, though given the bonkers difficulty of Wipeout 2097 maybe Breathe would've been more appropriate ("Don't play my game, I'll test ya.").

There's bios of all the artists from the soundtrack in the back of the manual. It's funny to me how all the dangerous, edgy underground menaces are all described as 'bill lives in a bin in London with his two cats. his destructive brand of music continues to devastate london. none will survive' with a picture of a bald bloke in sunglasses. Also, also, finally, on the subject of sunglasses. It blew my mind, really really blew my mind, when I discovered one day that The Bitmap Brothers weren't actually brothers. I mean, what's the fucking point. But in this manual, I had an even more devastating revelation - The Chemical (née Dust) Brothers aren't brothers either! What in the everlasting fuck!

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Also WTF! Ridge Racer: Unbounded... NFS: Unbound...??

Also at the time of writing Sonic With Planes In is on sale for £3.xx digitally. I re-read my post and remembered it was vitally important to continue to not buy it.

I remember in my first year at university, a friend had just bought Wipeout 2097 and was reading the instruction manual in a lecture (cos back then, it was cool to not be paying attention or doing the thing [learning] that we were actually meant to be there doing). He really liked the Japanese-style aesthetic.

I remember the design, the logos of the teams, the iconography (is that the right word?) all seemed exotic, modern and cool, neat and generally kind of building a cohesive experience. I was also impressed that it had music by dance artists I had heard of. I don't think I ever played the game though. Frankly, the original MSDOS version of the first wipeout game was too hard for me anyway, so I probably would have sucked at it.

The Crew

Or to give it its full (self-claimed) name according to the title screen, The Crew: Calling All Units, with cop sirens and dramatic cop music. Hooray!

I didn't buy Calling All Units, I bought Wild Run Edition, but the single use code had been singly used, which, as always, is bullshit. Dick off with single use codes forever, thanks.

Anyway.

The Crew is a driving-thingy game that's been on my Xbox One shelf for perhaps six years, untouched. I played The Crew on my bro's PC, possibly as part of a free weekend, a very long time ago. I didn't get on with it because I thought the graphics were dark and gloomy, the cars were unresponsive, the map was empty and surreal and various other things I'm probably mis-remembering. It was long enough ago that I'm pretty sure I was playing it with the keyboard, which couldn't have helped. (I won Split/Second the first time on PC with keys though!) I still bought The Crew despite those things, intending to come back to it Another Day.

And as fate would have it, the Todayth of December 2023 is Another Day, because Ubisoft has decided that in a hundred days time, nobody must ever be allowed to play The Crew again.

Which is, you know, harsh.

I've said some nasty things about Blur (the car game) in the past (especially in real life), expressing how humanity would be much improved if the entire game were to just fall into a history-erasing crevice and remove the stain of its presence from time, but I eventually came round to it a little tiny bit. I'd still trade it for a Split/Second 2 in a nanosecond, but I wouldn't any longer erase Blur and accept -nothing- in return, which is what Ubisoft intends to do with The Crew. I'll tell you all about what I mean later.

First, let's plop the actual factual retail disc I soon won't be able to use into the drive and lets get to racin'.

You start off in a horrible shitty race truck of the kind that became trendy in games sometime in the late 2000s. Good start. (By that I mean bad start.) You're barrelling around the hazy muted landscape, gliding through bizarrely intangible bushes and trees, but it's fun I guess. It looks slightly lastgen whenever some unreactive water comes up, but the dirt on the vehicle looks nice.

Then a phone slides in from the side of the screen and you get talked at by some Half-Life 2 looking potato faced idiot you don't care about. I'm some guy who wants to do races, and my brother is the boss of a street race gang, but my guy wants to race in a gang but not that one, or perhaps my brother doesn't want me racing in a gang because it's too dangerous except when he calls me up and says I need to represent the gang or something?

This game is so damn slippery. I am in a muscle car though. But wheeee, these roads just give you no traction whatsoever. Maybe it's because of the rain. I definitely remembered the darkness and gloominess correctly.

Oh! Oh no! There's no rewinds in The Crew! I'm so used to Grid and Forza Horizon and The Run giving you rewinds that this feels quite a lot more tense to me. I'm just gonna have to be really good!

You know, I don't remember any of this plot stuff bumbling around doing odd races in Chicago and the surroundings. Have they rewritten the plot when it got Calling All Units-ised? Like how Immortal Unchained got a new intro with the big patch? I remember last time there being a prison plot about being hired out of prison by the F.B.I. to do ridiculous gang-related videogame driving challenges, because Only I Could Do It or something.


There's a big map of the United States! I'm in Detroit! Well, kinda. Do you remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Beverley Crusher gets trapped in a pocket universe that's shrinking and she asks the computer how big the universe is and it replies "The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter."? That's where The Crew takes place. It's a bizarre Content Aware Fill version of the United States which has been smushed down to just five states called Midwest, East Coast, The South, Mountain States and West Coast. It's 75 miles across and can be driven in less than an hour. But no doubt if I enter this flickering glitchy grey cloud that is covering most of the U.S. I'll be heavily penalised by a long loading screen and told to return to my Designated Racing Area. On cue, one of the very first things my idiot potato brother insists I do is drive to a satellite dish installation and 'sync up' to 'the 5-10 Net', which removes some of the grey fuzz from the map and reveals more icons. You get a preview cutscene of the camera panning over landmarks within the radius of the dish. I'm not gonna make Ubisoft jokes. It's video games, what do you want? Anyway, shut up, you don't have to activate another satellite dish installation for the entire game, and so I simply didn't.

The map is a nifty satellite imitation map like Test Drive Unlimited nailed, and like Test Drive Unlimited it swooshes up and down from orbit to ground level, except on an Xbox One it takes ages to load your destination and it stutters like anything so the effect is completely ruined. Also, ripping off T.D.U. is shameless, but it's the coolest possible map there is to rip off of so you didn't have much choice I guess. And also Driver: San Francisco did it a lot smoother.

There's so much loading in The Crew. There's no cool flashy loading screens like Need For Speed: A Criterion Game or Need For Speed: Heat. I want cool transitions where the car is moved from the loading realm to the game realm or something. (I'm pretty sure when you change cars in World there was some virtual reality effect where your car shimmered out and in again?) It even skips to black for a bit of loading when you're just trying to drive. What I mean is when you're driving around in the world, there are virtual challenge gates on the road which are difficult to avoid (oh how I tried to avoid these fucking things) and when you drive through them you're challenged to an impromptu dare to drive really fast or through some targets or around some obstacles, and then you get a rating and score and all that jazz and that's fine, but when it's done you have to sit through three fucking screens of scores and rankings AND THEN THE SCREEN FADES TO BLACK, LOADS, AND PUTS YOU RIGHT WHERE YOU WERE ANYWAY except at ZERO MPH with NO NITRO. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY. Sure, the game doesn't attack epileptics directly for massive damage like the speed cameras in A Criterion Game, but now it fades to black and stops you dead. You will constantly be driving from A to B because driving and listening to the nice rock station, even virtually, is a nice sensation, and then you'll be trapped in this goddamn challenge thing and then the screen will be full of words and then you'll be stopped, and this will happen OVER and OVER again. I got used to pressing Start (or Menu if you like) and using the menu and D-Pad to Abort the challenge every time I got sucked into one. Yeah, quitting the challenge doesn't result in a fade to black and a loading screen to put you back on the road you were already travelling down, but letting the challenge time out does. Yes, it doesn't pause while you're doing that so if you want to, y'know, drive at 230 in your Lambo and go places fast and have fun, you've got master all kinds of controller prestidigitation to keep unchallengifying yourself.

Here's a silly example of how strangely jammed between the multiplayer and singleplayer worlds The Crew is: you can't pause during free roam but you -can- pause during missions. Unlike Need For Speed: No Subtitle, in fact. Sorry for the long paragraph, but a full quarter of my time playing The Crew was trying to escape a challenge I'd blundered into by having the temerity to -drive down a road- so it makes sense for it to be a quarter of my review.

Travelling to a place lets you fast travel back to it at any time, but activating the dishes only reveals where the skill icons are. Defying videogame convention, Ubisoft has left out the barriers preventing me from exploring the U.S., but the game keeps telling me I can't redeem my free 'Metallic orange paint' until I complete the prologue so lets get these story missions down and then I can get to the tedious multiplayer part.

The game is really putting all of its worst feet forwards. You've got gloomy graphics, muted colours, boring cities you can barely see, slippery cars that don't want to turn or touch the ground, endless cutscenes, tiny fragments of being allowed to drive before you're yanked back into the next cutscene. There's a bunch of rough edges with the cutscenes, like characters and cars teleporting about and flickering into position, sudden lighting and weather changes.

You play as this fool, Alex. Wait, we're playing as a dude with boxy black glasses, and is name is Alex?

WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? You can't choose your character, like in Heat, but that's a blessing really because never seeing those horrible insufferable plastic doll people from that world again is just fine. Alex is apparently the more reckless and cocksure of the Super Cargame Brothers, with his brother Dayton 'Probably Nolan North' Potatoface being the leader of a street racing gang called the 5-10s. He needs me to drive him to some place so he can put one of his disrespectful number twos in their place.

BUT THEN GUN MURDER, NOOO. DEAREST LOVEABLE POTATOFACE IS DEAD. SOMEHOW I WILL STILL FIND JOY IN LIFE.

Cops swarm all over, and a dirty cop conspicuously picks up the murder weapon with his bare hands and practically smears it all over the inside of your television with how not-following-evidence-procedure he is being. Alex is arrested for the crime of kneeling over the dead body of his brother and yelling for help and goes to prison forever and ever.

Thank heavens, I thought we were going to be playing as Alex for the ... oh. At least we're not screwing around with that stupid gross 5-10 gang business with the tattoos and the rankings and the 'owning territory' and ... oh.

FIVE YEARS LATER.

So Alex is summoned to an interrogation room in prison where a helpful F.B.I. lass slams some dossiers on the table and says she knows the real story about Potato's death, which is really helpful and nice and could've been handy five years ago. She offers Alex the slim chance of justice if he agrees to become a videogame prota-

Alex: "I'M IN."

She doesn't even begin to finish the fine print before Alex agrees to go on a revenge spree. Except, because this is a car racing game and not Driver: Parallel Lines or True Crime, this revenge will take the form of endless racing and not so much shooting. She is offering Alex an all-expenses paid F.B.I. videogame protagonist undercover job where Alex can leave prison, get a free car, do whatever the fuck he likes, drive over whoever the fuck he likes, with no consequences, indefinitely, as long as he eventually comes back and does a story mission every so often. Alex's undercover life begins when Alex vows to infiltrate the 5-10s... using his own name and without even changing his haircut or signature glasses. Gutsy.

The F.B.I. lass says she has a car for me... but after we're sucked into a cutscene and a short driving section she then gives me $30000 and tells me to buy a car.

F.B.I. girl: 'There are Car Dealers like this all over the United States'. Shocking.

The cars all seem pretty the same. Three of them are muscle cars and the other one is a Nissan 370Z tuner thingy so I take that hoping I can stick to the road surface better.

There is a kind of customisation tuning in The Crew (unlike Need for Speed: Heat), where you can control Steering Sensitivity, Steering Linearity, Steering Speed Factor, Steering Dead Zone, Throttle Linearity and Brake Linearity. Which is hilarious because you're given no description of what these factors mean. Like seriously, 'Brake Linearity'? I'm not taking a driving test to be a bus driver, dammit. And is there any person on this entire planet who plays arcade-sim driving games and uses analogue braking as an actual analogue control? 'And just gliiiiidddeeee right on down, progressive progressive progressive braking... and there we are at the red lights.' No, when you get close to a curve you slap those triggers down hard and crush the controller in your hands like you're about to scrunch it up and throw it in the bin. Perhaps there really is some utter nerd who really wants more control over the linearity curves of their pedals, but you might as well whack these sliders about to the extremes and see if you can still drive. With everything on the minimum sensitivity, it's hilariously unplayable. (It's like playing a Ghost Games NFS fresh out the box in fact, ho ho!) Naturally I whacked everything to the most immediate and sensitive and I was able to drive the car in a way that felt like I was controlling the car. Great.

After a couple of hours of Crewing, I found that the slightly upgraded car I now had was in fact -too sensitive- so I moved those sliders down to about 60% away from centre instead of 100%. Crazy!

F.B.I. Zoe just keeps on goddamn talking. Alex is out of state prison, but now he's in the even worse prison of being processed through yet more tutorials as we're shown around the super secret headquarters of Alex's operation. It's weird hearing this character which I've seen in a rare mocapped conspicuous not-in-engine cutscene listing game mechanics and menu options. With each character Alex adds to the titular Crew, he gains access to another set of skill rows to put (respeccable, yay!) points into in order to customise his progression. I hope you're sitting down for this - every time Alex levels up I can put another point into F.B.I. Zoe's personal skill and gain an extra ONE PERCENT OF ENHANCED BRAKING. AND IT GOES TO FIVE! I KNOW RIGHT!

And if that wasn't enticing enough, you can spend ingame Bucks (what Need for Speed: Underground would call Bank) or multiplayer centric Crew Credits to buy additional park points!! I can't find any concrete information on whether you can buy CCs in Crew 1 but you certainly can in Crew 2, so if you are so very very desperate to get that 1% YES you can pay real money!! Faboooo!

Also there is a Hidden Car in the garage.

See?


Or not! Ho ho!

ANYWAY, for some reason we're switching protagonists to a Bri'ish™ police woman and my car has weapons now and I'm chasing down Alex who is playing the part of a mock badguy to demonstrate to this new officer how to do pursuits. Huh. Weird.

The pursuit was very strange. You have weapons like an EMP Blast and you can teleport to the fleeing suspect at any time, and there's no cool sound effects for the weapons and there's no cool OTT cop music, which is boring. It feels like a lame-ass rip-off of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit - like if somebody made a cheap rickety mod to put HP pursuits into Test Drive Unlimited 2.

The Crew has morphed into The Crew: Calling All Units on my system because it's The Crew is a live servicey type thing where when the new expansion (the cool kids would say 'season') comes out, the base game 'e-v-o-l-v-e-s'™ into that new game so it isn't 'dead' because heaven forbid a game just be a game and not be 'dead'. So I've got Calling All Units. Except I don't. These tutorial missions for the police chases as a racer and police interceptions as a cop? I get one mission and then the game says 'Wow! Time for your first free starter car as a cop!' and then I go there and it says 'Buy Calling All Units to get your first cop car!'. So it was just a bloody advert.

And now I'm doing a monster truck score trial for some reason. And now I'm doing drag racing for some reason. And now I'm doing drift racing for some reason. These tutorial examples are giving me no exp so they're a waste of my time. They're also putting me in class 990 cars so the rest of the game is going to feel like a slug by comparison. Ohhh, these are the 'Extreme' disciplines, and this is another damned advert. Grert. I wrote Grert and was going to correct it, but Grert is how I feel about this. I mean this is technically a game demo so I should be happy, but... sigh. I don't know. I couldn't buy either of these even if I wanted to since The Crew and its DLC was suddenly delisted last week. Oh no I'm devastated etc.

What I'm -supposed- to be doing is ingratiating myself with some entry-level 5-10s lieutenant in order to get my foot in the door with my late brother's racer gang so I can infiltrate the gang and get close to the guy who put my potato bro in the ground, as well as collect evidence about the crooked Fed. It involves lots of dialogue like 'own the streets' and 'earn your ink'. Sorta feels like a sort of sad power fantasy for middle-aged men having a mid-life crisis. The main bad guy is called Shiv. (Because he stabbed the protagonist's brother in the back with a bullet.)

One thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the story is that apart from the Bad F.B.I Guy being bad and the Murdery Bad Gang Guy being bad, the game has no moral code. It doesn't revel in the destruction and anarchy of being in an edgy drug-running gang where they give one another titles like being a 'V8', and it doesn't condemn or acknowledge that driving on the sidewalk at 200 M.P.H. through a herd of bison, bobcats and people might not be the most sterling demonstration of the protagonist's fiber. Everything is just accepted silently as ordinary - not even a necessary evil, just ordinary. Is America just like that? The FMV pals from Need for Speed: No Subtitle really made me feel like I was with a family of shady guys all hanging out in our cool midnight diner plotting our amazing schemes.

Here's some good things in The Crew: being able to fast travel to any discovered location or mission, being able to begin any mission directly from the map, being able to repeat any mission at any time, being able to swap your current car without going into a deep menu at any time, being able to make a custom radio station out of any of the tracks from any of the built-in radio stations (which I only discovered there were seven of after beating the entire game... but only the first radio station is worth listening to... and you can't import your own songs it seems, like True Crime on the original Xbox, wait I said I was only going to say good things about The Crew, oops.). Basically I like the game more than Burnout: Paradise. I've decided that BP's humour is just too stupid for me.

You get the option for a game soundtrack or the radio during story missions, which I totally approve of. Heck, the game soundtrack is even dynamic for last lap stuff. And cop chases, with alert and evasion phases. You did that bit right, Ubisoft.

The main quest levels are very self-contained instances of the games activities. They're not quite radiant quests (or Saints Rows' patented 'you must do X bullshit copies of this a-c-t-i-v-i-t-y before being allowed to proceed' crapola) but they sometimes feel like that unless the race proves unexpectedly pivotal to the plot. One race that was super Payback-y was when Alex infiltrated a racetrack as a test driver to steal one of the cars and you have to do the test race and then escape from the track while being pursued... but the only part you got to play was the three lap race around the oval track and the escape all happened during a cutscene. And it wasn't even a very good cutscene. There's nothing in the way of gimmicky one of a kind missions like Driver: San Francisco.

At one point the Dangerous Evil Unhinged Gang Leader calls the cops on us after inviting us to a closed race at Laguna Seca. But... you arranged a track day? If the entire 5-10s gang invaded the track the cops would've possible already noticed? So this must be a legal race? You're threatening us with the cops on the one day your drug-trafficking gang actually meets up to do some legal car racing? Um? Anyway, Ubisoft was a complete fucking moron and decided to let Alex and co. escape the post-race cops in a cutscene AGAIN instead of having the race segue into the pursuit like the good Most Wanted does. I say cutscene, what happens is that Shiv calls the cops, and then it fades to black, and then it cuts to Alex driving away saying 'wow, we sure escaped those cops'. Use this as a point of comparison for how much story The Crew can be bothered to give you in the general case.

I thought The Crew looked dismal when I began playing it, but that's just because it keeps its nice weather effects and nice colours well hidden for dedicated players only. Noobs must suffer Chicago and rain for five hours to see if the game thinks they're worthy to see the sun. Also for some reason the water looks awful throughout the game, and the shadows only appear quite close so the vehicles seem to be floating. The game has hot air balloons in and even has a special cutscene where Alex takes a moment to appreciate them. The game sometimes decides to spawn low flying aircraft above your head just for the cool shadow. Your car flattens trails of wheat (it doesn't look amazing but it looks nice). Later on you'll be driving and suddenly you'll be surrounded by giant awesome trees, or a valley, or a snowy Christmas wonderland or a wooden bridge or something. And not just because of the strange, inconsistent geometry pop-in where it feels like the game can't decide what shape the thing you're driving towards is supposed to be. Because you're travelling over the U.S., I recognised various landmarks... from The Run. And then I wished there was a The Run 2.

There's traffic and pedestrians in The Crew, but somehow either not enough, or too silent or something. Need for Speed: Undercover felt like it was constantly set at dawn in the middle of July so it was blazingly bright but nobody had gotten up yet - near the cities The Crew feels like a depressing Sunday, forever. I once triggered a bug when I was grinding for police cars to appear (triggering and aborting a C.A.U. race to spawn cops then attacking them to cause a FreeDrive getaway), where there were no ambient cars or pedestrians in the world at all. That was cool, I could finally blast around at 250 without worrying about snagging something.

You gather a 'crew' of sorts during the game with one new guy appearing on your team in each region of the US, but their contribution to the game is to tell you on the radio to speed up when you're not in first place and to tell you to keep going fast when you are in first place. They feel as if they have a plot going when you meet them, but only a couple of the characters' plots get resolved with a real ending. Everybody else just lingers around (not in any kind of visible tangible sense).

There's no rewinds unlike Grid or Forza or The Run, but the game is so horrendously easy, I never really missed them. I never found out what happens if you come in second or third or fourth in a story race; it just never came up. There's no huge marathon races where I felt like I was cheated at the last minute by a bad landing or some quirk of the game engine. Only a handful of times in twenty hours did my car slam to a stop on an invisible immovable Lego brick or get flung laterally across the track or into the air, but that's fine, games are allowed a little bit of that, especially now that the consoles let you record the hilarious results.

The standard crashes in The Crew are bizarrely forgiving. Throughout the entire game I only got CRASHED!!! three or four times and that was when I hit someone at a speed difference of 130 mph. The rest of the time you'll ooze around enemy cars and obstacles or politely slide across or around them. I am really, really not complaining. It does feel a bit like I'm inflatable though.

The game never penalises taking shortcuts and the collision detection for the checkpoint gates is possibly even too forgiving. Driving non-offroad cars off-road works just like Grid, so good! Crashing into opponent cars is a valid tactic, because they're inflatable too. A confident nudge will send any AI car whirling off into a corner pocket, and that's grand. You won't need to rely on dirty tricks like that, because the AI in The Crew IS FALLIBLE. Yes, my friends, you can race against opponents and then maybe they'll hit traffic or they'll hit a wall or they'll misjudge a curve. Believe it!! This does render most of The Crew pretty easy, but okay. In one promotional race, we were all in identical branded cars on a downhill mountain path, and as soon as the race begin they scattered and fluttered off into the air like someone kicked a pile of raked leaves.

There's lots of camera options in The Crew. You can be on the bonnet, inside the car seeing your interior (with customisable colours!) and your hands, behind the car, or with a chase cam view that's distant in the style of classic Need For Speed 1/2/3/4. Acknowledgement is due for that, because that makes it a little more comfortable to play in some respects than Need for Speed: The Run which might as well be called Need for Speed: The Bum because that's where the chase cam goes.

You have to go out of your way to get into a regular cop pursuit, and they're lame. The cops are nowhere near as aggressive as the wasps from Need for Speed: Heat. It feels more like Need for Speed: Undercover where driving moderately fast defeats them by default. And there's no cool cop music. Unless its a story mission cop chase. You only get abilities when you're doing a Calling All Units crate thing? Inexplicably you can still begin Calling All Units crate pursuits as a racer without buying it.

Cop chases (and enemy gang chases) involve you getting out of the 360 ring of awareness emanating from the police units, rather than the vision cones from Driver: Parallel Lines (and they go back to Driver I think) which is lazy. You know what had a cool gimmicky vehicular cop escape sequence? Watch Dogs. I remember that looking really cool.

There are takedown levels which work a lot like Driver: San Francisco where it's not about actually stopping the car but about hitting it diagonally in the butt at the right speed difference to cause HP damage. Don't even get in front of the enemy car or try to knock it off the road because that's just not how the rules work. Trying to knock a fast car off the road takes for fucking ever because you have to catch up to it, then you have to match its speed, then you have to boost into it to close the gap and have enough speed difference to cause HP damage. I like Driver 1 + 2 but these missions don't have the novelty value the PS1 games had at the time so The Crew's takedowns just wore me down.

There's hardly any circuit races in The Crew. Specifically, I mean lap races. They just don't seem to be a thing. Even when the game shifts tone from Alex being the odd-job guy for the 5-10s to being a regional leader who keeps arranging (or having the other story characters arrange on his behalf) other racers for meetings. There's a whole class (a 'Spec' if you like) of cars called Circuit, and you hardly ever use those either! And when you do drive a Circuit Spec car, it's only on an actual circuit twenty percent of the time. I think I only did some Metropolis Street Racing on closed tracks twice in the entire game. (Oh, so that's why it's called Project Gotham. Ahh.) I'm not complaining because circuit races can be pretty dull, but you'd think a multiplayer-centric driving game would have more of that kind of thing.

Oh yeah, there's a nitro button. I only noticed it accidentally as I was trying out the various buttons. I was expecting the tutorial to be more direct about the controller and not the mechanics, but the game is very hands off about telling you -how to play the game- despite punishing you with endless tutorials about the game.

It took me a long long time to find the screen which showed a diagram of the controller and what the button assignments were. ALSO also, fuck this game for calling the help screens 'the wiki'. They're not a wiki because a wiki lets you -edit it-. You're just making things more fucking confusing because now there's the -actual- wiki in the real world and your wiki in the game which is just the help system. And when you're inside this not-wiki you can also go to the... -actual- Xbox Help help manual for The Crew. The Xbox One system has a built-in digital manual app called Help (sorta like how Windows has Windows Help) and games like Lichdom: Battlemage have menu items linking to 'Help' which takes the player to the corresponding Xbox Help manual for that game. Except at some point in early 2022 Xbox Help was discontinued but none of the games referring to it were updated so now when you use Lichdom: Battlemage's help option, or the Help within The Crew's not-wiki, you get an error. Good job. Guhhhhhh.

Disciplines! I didn't write about the car slurping. How could I forget The Crew's signature feature, that totally isn't just a rip-off of Need for Speed: Payback! Here's some words about the car slurping.

The specs the game gives in the garage are confusing. What I thought was a bar graph of stats was actually a list of car disciplines the car can be slurped into. You don't just have Your Car, but each car has to take a Final Fantasy job crystal and morph through a flashy car assembly cutscene sequence into a discipline-specific specialised form. You buy your Nissan 370Z Full Stock, and then you pay 10% extra and receive a special copy of it for Street racing. Now you have two independent cars with different colouring. The Payback multi-headed hydra of multitagonists had to rebuy their a whole new car each time but Alex gets to dupe cars as if by magic. For some reason.

There's no car tuning in The Crew, just like in Payback. In fact, just like in Payback, winning races gets you random component part cards that attach to your car and upgrade its attributes, but there's so many attributes and the upgrades are so marginal that it's not even worth expending the molecules of sugar in your brain trying to push your sluggish cursor through the five levels deep of menu to figure out what you just upgraded and why. Your car just got a tiny bit better, confirm the menu and live with it.

There's absolutely no point swapping parts out to get to a lower rating. And it's a real pain in the arse to even try. Like I said, the parts menu is like a more fine-grained version of the cards from Payback but less fun looking. There's about a dozen slots, and the main distinguishing feature is the component's level. You never get a super duper special once-per-game part like in Need for Speed: Underground, which is dumb, especially for an MMO. It's nice to see your cars rating number go up bit by bit over the course of the game I guess, but I wanted to have to make decisions and compromises like in a real RPG. There's no wonky exaggerated component which gives you a huge boost in one aspect but reduces another, so you might as well never go into the menu. So don't. Car performance customisation sucks. Don't go in there.

If the idea of a tedious (in speed, not in detail) menu did attract your interest (perhaps you've never played a -good- game before), I'll let you down quickly - you can't even buy performance parts if you wanted to (for in-game money or even for Crew Credits - which I assume you get for multiplayer races or for real money). Every time I tried (Visit Street Tuner > Performance > Buy >) the game told me 'There's nothing to buy in this category.' -shrug of confusion-??

(I tell a lie. ONCE during my playthrough there were parts for Gallardo in the shop. ONCE. Somehow that's worse than never because I never figured out how to get the shop inventory back!)

It's all a moot point at the end of the game anyway when you're trying to get the 'level 1299 car' achievement, as you will surely find a race or a skill jump that you can complete in fifteen seconds and grind it for its Levelled Loot, bringing all your car slots up to maximum level in a few minutes, a bit like you're playing Pokémon or something and you find a guy outside the Elite Four offering infinite experience. It makes the game feel like it has two halves - the single player campaign where you're ascending the levels slowly, which feels nice even if there's no player input to it, and the post-game MMO where everybody's at the ceiling and there's no way to go back down to more sedate street-speed racing. If you're more interested in the latter than the former, then I imagine The Crew's story would be a twenty hour grind prison to you before you're allowed to get your -real hardcore gaming- on.

In my Heat post I mentioned that the way you customise the nature of your car is by buying and installing parts that shift the car's tendency within a 2D grid between two archetypes like 'Drift' or 'Road'. The Crew -does- have an equivalent of that, in the car-slurp system itself. You start off with a Full Stock car, which most people call a car. Then for each ten player levels you get another Slurp Type: Street, Dirt, Performance, Raid and Circuit. But, um...

So you start with your Car car, and then Street is like Car but faster and can do roads. Dirt cars do off-road and shortcuts. Performance cars are like Street cars but... Streetier? Raid cars have a big spare tyre strapped to the back so you know they're the -real- off-road beasties. And Circuit cars are like Performance cars except you should drive them on... roads.

You've got six category names of car here, The Crew, but you really only have two types, don't you? Road and off-road.

You might logically be expecting a Need for Speed style situation where you garage grows over time and your weapon of choice starts with street cars and escalates through tuners and sports cars to exotic hypercars. No. It's possible and highly probable that you'll win the entire game in the car Zoe buys for you at the beginning. You'll unlock its five alternate personalities over the course of the plot and that same Nissan 370Z will be on par with the Lambos and the Koeniggsegs and the Paganis and everything else because, well, they're just just pretendy virtual cars innit? Or something.

Maybe every car is designed to be identical in performance to the others to make the MMO endgame more fair or varied or whatever. Other, better, games use the performance tiers to achieve that goal. You know, like having the 300 M.P.H. italian hypercars that have names that sounds like that they come from space in a 'Hypercar' tier, and having everyday street cars like a Focus and a Golf and a Corsa in the 'Road' tier, so like cars can compete against like. The Crew doesn't do this, and my poor brain is boiling trying to figure out -why-. You might think that the different car-slurp Specs work like performance tiers in a good game, but nah. Street cars can go up to level 1300 just as well as Circuit cars can. Circuit cars might be faster when comparing identical numbers, but in that case WHY DO THEY USE THE SAME NUMBERS. Ugh.

You can only own ONE copy of each car-slurp combination, so you can't have your Drifty White Circuit Spec Nissan 370Z and your Grippy Black Circuit Spec Nissan 370Z with different parameters. THIS IS FUCKING STUPID. Excuse my language, but so these FUCKING MORONS know how car RPGs work? I want to collect cars. I want to collect liveries. I want to be able to make wonky duplicate versions of my owned cars with silly stats or silly colours or silly visual elements. But you can only have one car in each designated 'hole' and there's no way to load and save liveries. **THERE IS NO WAY TO LOAD AND SAVE LIVERIES.** If you accidentally tap the 'Random' button on the car 'tuning' select screen, it'll whip out a random item and colour from everything you own and apply it to your current car, overwriting what you'd already selected with no way to undo. So that's nice.

Visual customisation! The Crew's visual customisation is shit, and inexplicably so. Imagine a good game, then imagine a bad game trying to imitate a good game. The Crew's car customisation menu is all split up and slow and has transitions, like they wanted something as time-consuming as Need for Speed: Underground, but just a little bit worse to make things special. You have to slide through a whole bunch of icons that don't even show you previews of what the car piece will look like, and the camera keeps rotating around the car and the car components explode all like in Bayformers so you have no idea what the completed car will even look like, and there's ONLY TWO SPOILERS?? and aaaaAAARGH

You can buy new paint colours like items and equip them onto your car. You can even buy a second colour and have a two-tone car! And then you can buy one of seventy-odd premade vinyls and apply them to your car! And that's it. Ubisoft made a car MMO RPG where you're represented by your car but you CAN'T CUSTOMISE THE CAR FREELY. Come on.

You can't freely draw or place your own decals. Need for Speed: Undercover and Forza fans, commence your laughter: now.


[Sorry, the required Xbox Live services are unreachable at this time. Please check your network settings and try again.]

I turned my head to talk to my brother and when I turned back I had been booted to the title screen. Yay.

You don't get to freely customise your license plates, which really seems like Ubisoft either didn't want to make an MMO originally or had absolutely no fucking clue what players wanted. I found out after over a dozen hours of playing that you earn license plates by completing HUGE challenges made of dozens of fractional pieces. Most of these challenges are marathon game-lifetime duration challenges. You might get a pre-made license plate saying 'F4STC4R' if you get the fastest time on every single race in the game for example. If these were special license plates, fine, but they're the ONLY license plates. You can't just have one with, like, your name on. And you can't even pick your favourite state. The way they're rewards for completing fractional challenges is like the 'cards' in Carbon, so there's another thing they ripped off, except Carbon's cards are made of four pieces apiece instead of goddamn TWENTY.

I'm really stuck on this car customisation thing - as I was writing and rewriting these descriptions (sorry if I end up repeating stuff as I combine multiple drafts), I hit upon the comparison to the level up system you get in a Tom Clancy game or Call of Duty or something like that, where you have your experience points and your level, but what they do is give you more options for your loadout that are usually but not necessarily better. The Crew's level ups are an inevitable slow crawl, but what happens is your car just gets faster, you don't get to make a car loadout, which seems to me to be the single critical aspect that makes a car RPG a car RPG rather than a linear game where you car slowly increases in speed over time. Basically, what I'm saying is that The Crew is a shit RPG.

The game is thoroughly allergic to letting the player have lots of -different- cars. Throughout the story Alex Yiik will take down some nefarious badguy 5-10 in a tense all-or-nothing pink slip race and then at the end he'll say 'Think yourself lucky I'm letting you keep your ride.' and trade the opponents car for some stupid piece of information he either already knew or could've found out by some other means. I screamed at the screen, I really did.

What's funny is that about a third of the story missions have Alex deciding to jump into a different predefined car anyway. I guess it makes it fair for scoring? But only on specific missions? Because most of the time you can bring your own broken car? Whatever.

Maybe the game is stingy with its cars because there aren't that many cars to get? The statistics page (which you get by going to the map and pressing Left Thumbstick or by selecting your pulsing portrait, you're welcome) claims there are 341 vehicles. That's a bald-faced lie. There are fourteen pages in the Collections screen; subtract two because they're bikes; six cars along the top of a page: that's seventy two cars. They -cannot- be counting the Spec specialisations in this because they're literally the same fucking car. (Yes, when you buy a kit it says "IT'S A BRAND NEW CAR!" in capital letters. It's wrong.)

You'll never get to see any of these other amazing cars by the way because the game is abominably stingy. My 300000 B lifetime earnings didn't come close to getting me the Koeniggseg Agera at the top of the shop. I only got to drive the Lamborghini Gallardo because I spent the free multiplayer currency the game gave me on it.

Ubisoft isn't a stranger to telling porkies, of course. The Crew claims to be the first open world car racing MMO. And it was, it was the first open world car racing MMO to come out since the closure of open world car racing MMO Need for Speed: World.

Perhaps that's why The Crew doesn't feel like it has to try very hard, because it's actively pretending other, more well-established games don't exist.

You can use airports and train stations to travel across the U.S., but it's more fun to put on one of the radio stations you like and just drive in a straight line. Whyever would you play a racing game if you don't like the driving? If you want, you can drive from coast to coast (there's an achievement for doing so in multiplayer) and see all the different themed areas the game offers, like you're playing through Outrun.

When I was cleaning up achievements, I did ONE of the tasks to earn a hidden car and it took for fucking ever because it was about twenty pieces scattered on hills and it wasn't worth it, so I don't recommend you do that. I did all of the data station satellite things, which, believe it or not, made the map fill up with task icons. If you're in the mood to wander about in the darkness of dusk following the wibbly blue line of destiny above your head from place to place, then getting these dishes can be quite relaxing. But what you'll be doing is following the radar rather than using your senses and intuition which is more drudgery than gameplay.

It made me want to play a game where you were a detective and you had access to a huge state full of cities and you could drive around doing investigations and talking to people and stuff. I made up a whole new game in my head to play to distance myself from being aware I was playing The Crew.

There's a completely vestigial car damage system that the game sometimes draws attention to but has no effect whatsoever on gameplay. There's a whole perk row dedicated to allowing repairs while out in the world and reducing the cost of it, but not once through the entire single-player campaign did I ever need to maintain or repair my car. I don't quite get why that game mechanic was there.

Playing The Crew feels like it's a soup of all the other modern racing games from this time. It's hard to figure out what The Crew's special selling point is. Every Need for Speed in the last hundred years has had multiplayer racing and seamless leaderboard integration and challenging. They've had pursuits, an open world, car customisation, day, night, playing as the cops. FMV story characters, pre-rendered story characters, in-engine story characters, electronic music, live music.

The Crew's single player isn't longer or shorter than any of the modern Need for Speeds (okay it's longer than Carbon, but this sentence is longer than Carbon). Ubisoft seemed to have so much effort into the 'cinematic' voiced, modelled and written plot (65 missions) that they accidentally made a credible single player game when they didn't intend to. Or maybe that's just how it turned out and the MMO always-online thing was a horrible swerve enforced on an almost-complete ordinary single-but-with-multiplayer-mode The Crew at the last moment.

The Crew's story and cutscenes are as good as any other in the genre, because, well, it's a very small genre. What other games fit into the genre that Need for Speed: Payback calls 'action driving fantasy'? Only Need for Speed: No Subtitle really put in the effort, with the FMV guys who I will defend to the death. The Crew has a mixture of really nasty looking in-engine rushed cutscenes, and really flashy detailed cutscenes that you get one of per region, which look like the kind of thing that Ubisoft spent all the money on to show the game off at E3.

I'm not an MMO player, I guess it would be cool to play the game along with someone else and level up my cars alongside someone else so were gaining levels at the same pace. That makes sense. I have no idea if The Crew lets you level scale your car back down to earlier performance levels to replay story missions (alone or with friends) fairly. Every time I've tried to replay a story mission, I've shown up in my bleeding-edge car and the game becomes even more of a cakewalk than usual.

The Crew offers no replay value. I don't mean it doesn't -have- any, I mean it doesn't offer any. You can't begin a new slot and start again. Because it's an MMOoooo of cooouuururrrrrseee. Ugh. Not that the game would go all that differently on a new game anyway, the game doesn't have any set points where you're given a new car, like in The Run or Undercover. But I don't think you can ever replay old story missions in the car you would have had at the time, because as you level up your cars get new parts and other boosty stat upgrades that I'm pretty sure are permanent. You know how Forza Horizon offers to tweak most cars automatically to let you play them in faster or slower races? Imagine the opposite of that. Throughout most of The Crew's story you'll be blasting past everyone in your over-upgraded car.

There's a strange, probably unintentional power fantasy mood to the game. Alex is constantly told that every race record is unbeatable, and every racer is undefeatable, but you can beat everything and defeat everyone by aiming your car roughly in the right direction and putting your foot down. And that's with me tearing through the game fast travelling from objective to objective so I'm not getting any optional experience points or car upgrades, and with the driving assists set to Hardcore.

One of the MMO features that feels like a silly misfire is the faction system. You can associate yourself with one of the 'chapters' of the 5-10 that run each of the states in Mini USA, and the most successful chapters get (a teeny tiny feeble amount of) bonus money. But in order to associate yourself with a chapter you have to progress up to that chapter's territory in the main plot. If you suspect that this means that the starting chapters have a ridiculous advantage due to more players starting the game than finishing it, you are correct!

Because of the terrible stinginess with cars and car customisation, The Crew is much worse as a game than its Need for Speed contemporaries. But because its Need for Speed comtemporaries are -so bad-, the Crew miraculously looks pretty good by comparison. I don't regret buying and playing through The Crew. But I won't let Ubisoft forget that The Crew's worthiness isn't because The Crew was a great example of a good idea executed well, it was because it was an okay example of everybody else's good ideas executed at the minimum required level to make the game function, and nobody else is even -trying-. Except for Forza Horizon, which has earned its rightful place as the God-King of accessible sim racers from NFS, and repeatedly shown that it's possible to make games that aren't complete fucking embarrassments. ARE. YOU. LISTENING. ELECTRONIC. ARTS.

Forza Horizon was such a good game because it had a really good engine, really good graphics, really high quality of execution, lots of features, lots of options, and felt like an enhancement and a contribution to the genre.

Of course The Crew game doesn't -have- to have a special selling point in order to justify its existence. It could just be a Good Racing Game. It's not, but it could have been. The Crew has good racing mechanics if you work to find them. Perhaps its unique selling point is that it's Need for Speed: World except it isn't shut down.

But HO HO HO! This year, like an evil anti-Santa, Yves Guillemot is coming into your house and setting fire to your Christmas presents. The Crew is an always online MMO, and we were always only allowed to play it by his grace. But his patience has reached its limit and now the car racing must cease.

I was surprised, I have to say. The Crew, an MMO? But I own it! I own it on a disc! I wouldn't have bought an MMO, would I? Well, I would. I took out my Wild Run Edition retail box from the shelf and it says it's an MMO on the back clear as day, with the grey warning banner on the front saying REQUIRES INTERNET, like Ghost Recon: Breakpoint has. I looked up a photograph of a launch PS4 version of The Crew without Wild Run and it says it there too. To my complete surprise, The Crew being advertised as an MMO isn't an attempt at some cosmic rewriting of history by Ubisoft, it was always supposed to be an MMO. Everybody had forgotten because the last open world racing MMO (Need for Speed: World) had just closed down, and the Criterion-era Need for Speeds like Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted Crap Edition had integrated Autolog™(R)(C) so naturally that it had become standard in the genre and everybody had assumed that driving games, open world or otherwise, would have multiplayer modes and leaderboards and other things fizzing around in the background constantly alongside a full, organised single player campaign progression.

I say The Crew was 'supposed to be' an MMO because it's... not. It simply isn't. It is totally indistinguishable from the type of single-player-with-multiplayer-aspects gameplay that Needs for Speeds Undercover, Hot Pursuit and A Criterion Game and the Ghostly NFSes have. But Ubisoft seems to think it is an MMO. This came as a complete surprise to me, and indeed the entire rest of the human race. It has a single player story with a named, predefined character, lots of cutscenes, lots of interruptions dragging you into cutscenes, sixty-seven plot missions which only make sense if you're That Guy. Of course it's a single player game!

Need for Speed: World was an MMO because it was just a strange abstract city arena of races to try with other people and bots and you had a persistent player level and could level up and get cars. (Hah! Thinking of my time with Not Safe For Work, I think had more cars in that than I ever did in The Crew.)

So many people worked on this linear, scripted, acted, scored, modelled game that putting the MMO name on it demeans it. The end sequence credits take a million years on fast forward and show an image of the earth and moon in space, so I thought we were going to have a Blast Corps easter egg or perhaps a Saints Row IV awful twist or something.

When I mentioned the lack of car customisation and individuality in The Crew to my brother, he pointed out that if you can't customise your protagonist then that makes this an MMO where everybody has to play as Alex. This isn't a Metal Gear Solid V scenario where you make a guy but he's your multiplayer guy and your single player guy will look like Venom Snake always. All these millions of players are all exact copies of the same Alex. This is the incredible world of Alex Yiik. Maybe that's why it must be destroyed, for everyone's sake?

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Anyway anyway anyway. That was The Crew. I say 'was', because by the time you've finished reading all that, Ubisoft will have had the game executed and fed to the swine. It deserved better. But not that much better. Oh well.

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Bonus lap! I just saw some of The Crew running on a PC (my weapon of choice is an Xbox One) with a GeForce 3050 RTX. It had also magically became Calling All Units. It does look noticeably prettier than when rendered at 720 and blown up by a TV too stupid to just display it with borders. It still stutters all over the place no matter the detail level. Maybe it's the multiplayer stuff trying to keep itself in sync (since I'd naturally be playing offline without Gold)? It doesn't look like an obsolete graphical embarrassment that must be shut down at all. I can confirm there's no magic barrier preventing you from going into the sunny happy colourful Christmassy mountains before you've taken over the midwest, but you would be driving a naffo car. (You start at SINGLE DIGIT LEVELS and it goes up to 1300!) I wonder if it's possible to escape before Dayton dies and rewrite the entire game!

The game never pushes you into a multiplayer lobby or makes you wait for timers to expire or forces you to do any of the immersion breaking things that a nasty multiplayer-focused game would normally do. All the options in the game default to the single player - if you go to a mission and just jab the pad, you'll play the single player plot, alone.

And finally, I watched someone else play and to my confoundment they did a bunch of skill challenges without being zapped into blackness and reset to 0 M.P.H. ...!!! until the third time onwards, where they suddenly were consistently stopped by skill challenges. I had to chuckle.

Two days left to play the crew!