GRID 2Fucking Grid 2.
I'd heard that Grid 2 was one where They Fucked It Up, but I wasn't prepared for just how subtle and how consistently they had Fucked It Up.
Let's start with the big meme that most folks have heard about Grid 2. They ruined the physics and now it's a slippy mess.
Well, they're kinda right. There's three categories of car in the game: Drift, Balanced and Grip. I can't tell the difference between any of them, they're all slippier than anything you're asked to drive in Grid 1. Grid 1 was pretty solid and predictable, with the rule that on the road you can pretty much do what you like but hit a ramp or a patch of grass and you'll be moving in a straight line no matter where that takes you. In Grid 2, you're moving in a straight line all the time. Every corner is like trying to pick up icecubes in the sink with your bare hands. Eric Frederiksen of Technobuffalo summed the game up masterfully when he wrote it was
'Frustration around every corner.'The game doesn't help itself by starting you in the U.S.A. with a Mustang Boss, a legendarily wacky bar of soap on wheels. I say starting, I mean trapping. Grid 1 let you pick your favourite territory out of the American muscle car series, European tuner series and Japanese drift series whenever you liked, with a big friendly boxy menu.
And speaking of menu, Grid 2 seems to be missing tons of features from Grid 1 despite there possibly being more cars. I can't tell. Everything's hidden. I hope. Moving from screen to screen is a real pain in the backside. There's an achievement for upgrading cars, but I can't find that option in the garage I don't have.
Repainting your car is something you do ONCE, 'cause flicking backwards and forwards through the pages of colour layers is brain-crackingly awful. You have all these ideas of how you want your team's car to look and you can't do any of them because the designs are all terrible and you can't test things out and the colour you want isn't there and it's all so
slow. And it's pointless since, unlike G1's
optional bonus money challenges, the sponsors in this game are mandatory and ugly as sin, splattering your car with horrible logos from head to tail. Need for Speed: Undercover might suck, but at least it sucked fast and you could paint your car however you pleased.
There's a new plot, where you're hired as the poster boy (only male drivers allowed in Grid-land thank you) for a new racing league called World Series Racing. When you've suitably impressed all the drivers around the world by driving around the same three tracks forwards and backwards for forty hours, you can race in the WSR proper, which is exactly the same thing except the races are set at night and there's multi-race tournaments. Pointless ones, since the drivers know their Mario Kart places and stick to them like glue. For you, it's first, first, first or bust.
Since you've got an investor paying for all your cars, you don't have money in this game, you have Fans. You get Fans by winning races and completing optional objectives. It's basically just a score. You're given a choice of two cars to keep every couple of races and you can win the one you didn't pick by completing a time trial with it. Considering I'd never end up touching 90% of the cars in the game otherwise, this is actually really cool. It's like an enforced test drive, so you can tell whether or not you can drive the car in way that suits your race style. Cars come in two varieties: acceptable and completely useless. Something like the Corvette Z06 steers responsively, grips predictably into and out of curves when you finesse the triggers and goes nice and fast. Everything else: understeer. I always tried to pick the car with the best acceleration, but the stats are useless and trying to compare cars means using the menu and nooooo.
Every twenty hours or so, you'll get either a little cute pre-rendered-esque sequence of pages of the WSR website with 'NEW SEASON COMING SOON' 'lol :) my favourite racer is Your Name Here!' 'omg I love Your Name Here' flashing up, or some inexplicable
live action full motion video. I can have a go at explicking it though, it's all part of paid promotion from ESPN and shit like that. Sadly, they don't even try to refer to you by name despite the Grid 1 spoken nickname menu making a return for your friendly radio guy (without my own G1 nickname 'Hotshot', gits). They could at least composite in a banner or something with your name on.
And nobody at all finds it suspicious that the mascot for this new racing league who is funded by the guy who runs the new racing league wins every single race, year after year, without question.
But they say that success breeds success and that is nowhere truer than in the world of racing sims.
There's something magical about pole position in Grid 2 that makes it almost inassailable. Computer players in pole position get a crazy boost to their grip, poise, determination, flavour, charisma, everything. If you're anything less than flawless they will be a speck in the distance.
It does however work both ways. In normal races, the bad guys just don't know how to overtake. Maybe it's my unpredictable driving style, but when I manage to reach first place, I tend to hold it magnificently, building up a ten or twenty second lead without much fuss. The computer just can't figure out a way to pass me. It's the getting there that's the effort. You never, ever, ever, ever start at the front of the pack (random MY ARSE), and immediately when the race starts everybody from 3rd backwards will without fail coalesce around you like a police cruiser box-in on the first corner. Later seasons have them sliding around the track, deliberately hitting you, spinning you out. They're unharmed of course.
Of course.Flashbacks make a return from Grid 1! Woo! In Grid 1, you could trade in Flashbacks in advance to earn extra money (and unused ones got you money too!). In Grid 2, you always start off with five in every race regardless of difficult and damn you'll need every last one. Walls are sticky, cars are sticky. If an enemy slides up alongside you, steering doesn't happen, towards or away. If you try to slide across the walls like you're playing NFS: Most Wanted 2005 Good Edition you'll catch yourself on a stray Lego brick and end up getting flipped instantly.
And, presumably to stop online cheating(?), there's a new mechanic stolen from... let's say Project Cars. I can't remember which one. One of the ones from around 2013 that had an off-road racing demo. If you're playing on a proper race-track style level with loads of grass around you and all four wheels leave the tarmac simultanously the game flashes up a 'Corner Cutting Detected' message and slams you into 1st gear for five seconds (this deceleration would turn any human racer to mush but never mind). No more exciting Grid 1 ballistic hail mary grass shortcuts, the Fun Police are here. Does it affect the AI cars?
Ha ha ha ha.In Grid 1, you got a video editor style timeline and could freely re-enter the race at any point in the last ten seconds. In Grid 2, time whirls backwards by itself and you have to hit the button at the time when you think you're mostly likely to be of help. It's faster! Gets you in the game quicker! Keeps up the pace! Except the pace doesn't mean anything when you've crashed and
time has stopped, so why not just let me chill out?
You can't play on anything above Normal. Just try it. The magic of pole position becomes something to truly behold. First and second will shoot off, out of sight. There's no question of either of them being bound by realistic physics, or player-like physics. They are simply Perfect.
After playing it for a couple of weeks non-stop, I get the impression that you're supposed to be using drifts as your primary weapon to advance. But the game doesn't tell you this, there's no Need for Speed: Underground drift culture thing going on (you go to Hong Kong and do tons of drifts, but I was so unimmersed in the mood of the locale I honestly I thought those races were set in Slough until I caught a bilingual street sign), and it's not all floaty and weird like Ridge Racer can be. You just don't seem to slow down when you're sliding at all. The computer players never drift (not even during a drift race which makes them kind of easy), so if you brake slightly later you'll whizz past them. Except on Hard.
In Faceoff races where it's one-on-one the CPU is bizarrely aggressive compared to a normal race. And for some reason there's both Faceoff
and Touge even though they're both one-on-one, point-to-point races. Don't get me started on Touge. Crap, I got myself started on Touge.
There's a mode in Grid 1 called Touge, it's a gentlemanly race. One on one, you and an opponent, point to point. One leg there, one leg back. Each leg, one racer is the leader. The other is the chaser. The leader scores points based on the lead they have at the end of the leg. At the end, the racer who had the greatest lead when they were the racer wins the Touge.
If the chaser bumps the leader, the chaser gets a points penalty. You've got to follow the leader, but never attack them. However, if the chaser passes the leader and wins the race, you've all but won. So the idea is to either race smart and get right up your opponent's rear and get a good time O_O or pass the leader and rush to the finish to dominate the race.
Wouldn't you know it, They Fucked It Up For Grid 2. TFIU might as well be the prefix for this game.
In G2 Touge, there's a leader and a chaser still. There's now a Need for Speed Carbon-like 5-seconds-ahead-takes-all rule, which is nice. I don't remember that in Grid 1.
But there's a new pair of rules in G2 which change Touge dramatically.
1) If the chaser bumps the leader, the player loses. With me? Drastic, but sure let's roll with it.
2) If the leader bumps the chaser, the player loses.
See the sneaky trick? I'm not saying the
chaser loses. The
player loses. Regardless of which side they're on.
You can be driving a perfectly clean race and if the computer decides to PIT you, you instantly lose. And it's an irreversible loss. Unlike a 'terminal damage' crash (which KILLS THE PLAYER, there's a G force of impact statistic and everything) which you can rewind freely, a Touge disqualification permanently stops the race and you forfeit.
https://fat.gfycat.com/SmartEagerAfricanbushviper.webmI'm a horrible sportsman when it comes to Grid. I ram my own teammate off the road to prevent them from getting 1st if the leaderboard means we won't win unless I'm on top. I'll maliciously brake sudden, hard and late at corners during Touge to force the computer to crash into my backside and clock up huge time penalties. Some call it 'brake checking' and say its reckless. I call it hilarious and practical.
https://fat.gfycat.com/LivelyPointlessAnaconda.webmBut I never, ever cheat!
Now I have to win Grid 2. It's one thing to win a fair game by skill. It's another to join a game you know is rigged against you and win anyway. Just don't expect fun or fair racing.
Type in 'Grid 2 Touge' or 'Grid 2 disqualification' and see the misery curdling around every word. Even on other random non-game forums, if Grid 2 is mentioned multiplayer is often spoken in a low mutter thanks to 'the annoying bug where you got disqualified for being rammed'.
These replays were taken by propping a camera up on a stool and pointing it at the TV. Since this game is all Cool and Rad and Social (but not in an in-your-face, super-fast, challenge-your-friends today Need for Speed: HP/MW2012/Burnout Paradise way), you can upload your replays to YouTube from directly inside the game!!! If you buy the VIP pass voucher!!! (NO. DIE.)
I hope you like engine sounds, because you can't turn any of the various volume levels below 50%. I mean, who'd ever get tired of the same selection of tyre screeches and metal buckling sound effects over and over again for the rest of time. But hey never mind, at least there's the music oh no wait They Fucked The Music Up For Grid 2 as well.
Grid 1's music was awesome and also a disappointment. Electronic music with
absurdly dramatic, almost cheesy orchestral instrumental layers on top, all expertly mixed based on your lap, race position and speed. But you only ever got to hear them when you were about to qualify for a medal. Every other race was completely silent. And you can't replay medal races either, so once you've heard them, they're gone.
Grid 1 also had a villain in Ravenwest, the sneaky team of racers whose cars were ALL BLACK. At the end of every race block, you'd be challenged to a one-on-one race usually against a Ravenwest driver. Ravenwest are led by Nathan McKane; almost certainly a relation of the McKane from the first Race Driver.
A man you've made it your sole mission to obliterate from history by dominating every single discipline of racing one by one, THE CROWD CHEERING YOUR NAME WHILE YOU TAKE EVERYTHING FROM HIM, LEAVING HIM BROKEN AND ALONE..Grid 2 doesn't have jack. No antagonist. No tension of trying to get the 'most money in a season' achievement by taking on a series of back-to-back difficult races, trading in your Flashbacks for extra kudos with the Le Mans to look forward to at the end of the week.
And 90% of the music is slightly glitch-remixed versions of the Grid 1 soundtrack, which is just lazy. Grid Autosport does it again with even further glitched remixes of the Grid 2 music until it's almost entirely unrecognisable as either Grid or music.
If you're going to do music for a sequel, poke your head into the world of Intelligent Qube a.k.a. Kurushi.
Intelligent Qube (I.Q.) a.k.a. Kurushi is a 1997 puzzle action game for the PlayStation. The sequel, I.Q. Final a.k.a. Kurushi Final was released in 1999, also for the PlayStation. I.Q.'s on the left, I.Q. Final's on the right.
They are exactly the same game, except the latter has a few extra modes. Want to know why nobody minds?
Because IQ starts off with
this, The 1st Tide. And then gives you
THIS, Ecliptic, a rearrangement of The 1st Tide, because if you've gotten to level 2, you're clearly cut out to be humanity's saviour in an interdimensional mental battle for our right to exist. I.Q. Final starts off with
this, The 2nd Tide, to ease folks who didn't get a copy of Kurushi into the bleak world of stomping cubes and darkness. And then gives you
this, Theory, a rearrangement of The 2nd Tide, because if you fail the entire universe will never have been created.
You might not like it, but you can't deny that they at least made the effort.
(That's probably a bad example, since most folks familiar with Kurushi will have played the demo from the cover of OPSM which didn't include the music so they'd be used to the eerie silence and echoing footsteps and disappointed when there's themes playing. But at least those guys can turn the music off if they don't like it.)
And on top of the music being lazy, you hardly ever get to hear it anyway. The condition for music playing in Grid 2 is that you have to be playing a season final race, and this time it only appears on the last lap or in the last quarter section of a point to point. Thanks a lot for that thirty seconds of glitch remixed, barely audible music. Really gets me fired up.
Also the box sucks, like Grid 1's box. I hate over-stylized racing game covers. It makes it hard to tell what kind of game you're going to get. Grid 1's one's all carbon fibre and monochrome, Grid 2's one's all dark and moody, but they're both blazing sunshine and green grass for the most part.
Except the end of Grid 2, where it becomes WSR after WSR, tedious night race after tedious night race. Black and yellow flying at you at 200mph like you're bobbing for bumblebees in a vat of licorice custard.
Despite having won over 150 races and just reaching the fifth season (of five I HOPE), I feel like there's very little to actually do in the game! No memorable tracks, nothing to really root for. It's like a prototype of Grid 1 (though the graphics...
might be better?).