Masem’s Gaming Blog

Blackbox/EA’s Need for Speed series has been suffering in the most latest offerings by focusing less on driving hard and fast, and instead focusing on more technical driving, and most consider the last good title being Most Wanted.  The latest offering, NFS: Underground, does try to recapture the flavor of Most Wanted while ditching several modes such as drifting and drag racing that were met unfavorable by critics, the game still suffers both design problems that make the game too easy, and technical problems that mar its presentation.  It’s still a fun racing game, but just not a tight package that older NFS have been.

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I should know better about the NFS series - the series has really ventured away from its roots of being literally about the speed, but too many of the recent titles save for Most Wanted just went in a really weird direction.

To some benefit, Pro Street does not glorify the underground or illegal street racing scene nor tries to even provide a story.  Instead, it’s pure racing.  The career path is present as a branching set of “race days” consisting of 4 to 7 races each.  Within each race day, your goal is to win enough points to win the day, but you also want to consider dominating each day by basically crushing the competition on each race in that race day.  Both a win and a domination gain you prices outside of the usual cash and once in a while a new car.  (In this iteration, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of variances in the car models - you can customize them up the wazoo, but I think I’ve only seen maybe 6 different models so far).  A nice idea is that if you should leave the race day, you loss all progress in it, so you need to make sure you have all the cars that you plan to take into it for the different events up to the specs you want.  While you can repair cars between races in race day, a few race days don’t allow this, so you may have to abandon them early if you lack an appropriate backup car.

Races include Grip (standard circuit races), Drag, and Drift.  Time attack is like Grip save that its who get the best time for one lap, not position.   There’s a Sector Attack mode which is like a combined checkpoint/circuit, where you get points for getting the best time on specific sections of the track.  There’s also a Grip Class race, in which you are only racing against 3 other cars but there are another 4 cars from a different vehicle class on the track, making things get interesting in whether you try to fight for position against a car you don’t have to worry about beating or not.  Everything’s run in the daytime, and based on numerous configurations of tracks at the same setting.

Thing is, this feels more like Forza racing than NFS.  The game now has the same green/red arrow system to help with cornering speeds, and because it’s just pure tracks or roads modified to be tracks, it feels no different than a standard track racing game.  There’s no track that really mimics some of the nice hills and corners that were in either Hot Pursuit game or Most Wanted - so far these are mostly flat with “standard” race-type turns, which , when they’re 180 hairpins, sorta defeats the “need for speed”.  Plus it doesn’t seem like you can blaze through this: the career tree is broken into a series of  “knots” of races, and the core knot of one branch requires a number of wins and dominations from the previous knot branch, but even then you may not have the right car to enter it, or you cars may be pitifully sucky as to have no chance to win, requiring you to go back, earn cash, and upgrade the cars.  I’ve felt I put a lot of time into the game and am only at 15% of the career, so it seems like a long way to go.

The original Stuntman game was interesting: the concept of being a stunt driver seemed to fit the video game mentality perfectly, but the execution of the game was horrible; between long load times and very tight stunt requirements, it made it difficult to run through each stunt enough times to know the entire stunt ahead of time, and then repeating it to get the timing and actions down right, taking much of the fun out of the game. The original game was produced by Reflections Interactive and distributed by Atari, but THQ has taken over development of the sequel, Stuntman: Ignition, with development by Paradigm Entertainment. The sequel has definitely learned a lot of lessons from the first game, with stunt courses being a lot easier and a lot more forgiving to pull off, but with this improvement creates the problem of the game being almost too easy to clear (though presents a score-mode to challenge you to be perfect) and making the value of the next-gen title a bit questionable.

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Stuntman is one of those few games that really should be able to sell themselves from the concept alone, however, the game fails rather spectacularly due to a number of gameplay and performance features that seem to be easily corrected.

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I already had tried and stated some of the things about the demo that make this game about ten times better than the original Stuntman game.  Notably: there’s a couple ways that you can play through the stunt completely (not quite sandboxing it, but close enough) either by switching to easy mode which gives you the opportunity to miss more stunts, or as long as you don’t miss a critical jump or the like, you can continue even knowing that you failed.  In order to clear a stunt, you still have to play through the entire stunt without missing 5 required stunts, but getting there is much less of a pain than it was in the first game.  Playing through a few more levels, the timing feels a bit more comfortable as the game encourages you more to score more via chaining stunts instead of just finishing a stunt and moving on.  They add motorcycles that can wheelie and also slide under low obstacles.  You can still put together your own stunt courses as well as a challenge mode where you have to meet certain requirements with the course you built (similar to TrackMania’s Puzzle modes).  There seems to be a lot more ‘pick and go’ options as well.

The only concern I have presently is that there’s a total of 6 movies with 6 scenes in the game, so I’m hoping its not too short.  It does look like you can’t just wimp through all the stunts; movies don’t get unlocked until you achieve a certain ranking and that can only be improved by gaining better score ratings on individual scenes.  I haven’t had this problem yet of having to go back to do better, as I only got through the first movie last night, but I don’t expect this to be a critical show stopper (eg I doubt its the case that you can’t do the last movie if you haven’t 5-starred all the previous stunts).

So far, so good…

It’s amazing the type of variation that one can get with racing games still after so many years of development. Just recently was Forza Motorsport 2 with highly realistic track racing, and then there’s the Need for Speed series that does street racing. But DiRT, developed and published by CodeMasters, offers yet another bit of variety for racing, this time in terms of motorcross. The game is effectively a continuation of the Colin McRae motorcross series featuring himself helping you through the game. Most of the game is pretty well done and does a decent job of simulating various types of terrain, but otherwise it lacks much of the staying power that other racing titles have, in part to a rather weak online multiplayer aspect.

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I will say this, that while the demo actually came out before the game (what a surprise!), the demo only had a single race mode that really didn’t display the best of this game.

It’s NOT as graphically amazing as the PS3 Motorstorm, but it’s sufficiently pretty for a next-gen title.  And after play Forza 2 a lot, having two different in-the-cockpit views, including the safety meshing, makes for an interesting gameplay experience (there’s also bumper view, hood view, and two trailing cam views incase you need to see more of where you’re going).

There looks like there’s about 6 different single player modes, including a full-on race mode against other cars at the same time, “crossover” tracks against 1 other car, and then timed courses where you need to go as fast as possible on twisty terrain which can be quite harrowing.   Career mode is a large pyramid structure; you need to complete races and accumulate points going left to right and down to top to get to the single ultimate career race series.  Like most racing games, you earn cash to buy new cars, 43 in all.

Haven’t tried online yet.

I will say that the menu system/loading screens are the most interesting and beautiful ones to look at (same as in the demo)  in a long time, like floating panels within a large 3D environment, yet they move fast from one selection area to another.  Plus at the start of career mode, the announcer quickly (5 minutes) gives you a low-down of how everything works from the menus side, which is pretty nice as well.

Gran Turismo has been known to be the most realistic console racing simulator to date through its various incarnations. When the original Forza Motorsport came out on the original Xbox, it did make an impression due to its strong realistic physics and was given very positive reviews, but was still overshadowed, in the overall console market, by Gran Tursimo 4 for the Playstation 2. Now, Forza Motorsport 2, developed by Turn 10 Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios, has hit the market and may have flipped the tide for good in its favor. The game’s physics engine is even further improved, and allows for not only tuning and improvements of cars, but physical damage to cars (something that is generally missing in realistic racing games), and a huge number of options to adjust the game from a detailed racing simulation to a fun arcade racing game. It also sports one of the best Xbox Live implementations that ties in well to the single player mode. By far, Forza Motorsport 2 is a definitely must have for any racing game fan and may easily surpass Gran Tursimo as the best racing game ever.

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Played a couple races on this last night, though I have played the demo as well.

Most of the basic overall play (arcade, career mode, etc.) is left unchanged from the first game, which is good.  The realism seems good as well; a little bumper tap can be disastrous (or at least pull you out from the lead and into the grass), and I have always liked the little help of the cornering arrows that you can toggle off as you get more experienced.

Graphics seem fine to me; I know people have been complaining that this doesn’t look as clean as the Gran Tursimo PS3 tech demo, but it’s certainly far from looking like a last-gen game.    The core of the game is racing, and the physics seem to get it down well, and I rather have that for something that is a driving/racing sim than super excellent graphics and less-than-realistic physics.

My only nit is that you get penalized for off-track driving and bumper hits.  Sure, if I intentionally go off, or drive wrecklessly into the middle of a pack, this makes sense, but I had a couple of times where I’ve taken a curve close to the expected line to have someone behind me tap my bumper or the like, causing the car to spin out to the grass, all the time ranking up penalty time.   Sure, I love that the cars are more aggressive than I’ve seen in the GT series, but it seems odd that I’m double penalized for that.

Have not played online but expect to do so tonight.

I’ve heard people say that MotorStorm is going to be the system seller for the PS3.  Unfortunately, I really beg to differ, so far, despite it being one of the two better games for the system to date (along with Resistance: Fall of Man).  The concept is sound: dirt/mud racing in the mesa valleys of the southwest in 5 different types of vehicles (motorcycles, ATVs, buggies, stock cars, and trucks), and the graphics look really nice and all, getting the muddiness and griminess of the race down well, but…

Things seems a bit more sluggish than expected for dirt racing - while I wouldn’t hold the game “FlatOut” as a prime example of a great dirt racing game, I felt I had more control there.  And you can’t go too easy on the track lest you get overtaken quickly.  Of course, I’m just starting so it may get a bit easier, but I’m not impressed.  While you can switch on the Sixaxis to use it as a motion control (like with the Wii), it seems even worse — and here’s where the lack of rumble really screams out.

Add to this that the menus and other parts of the game are just really slow — we’re talking close to PSP loading times, which there is no reason for that here.

I need to give it more time to give it a more fair assessment but as it stands now, I’m not impressed at all.