MotoGP 08

Posted by Sishu / at 12:34 PM / / 0 comments

MotoGP 08

• Capcom
• Motorcycle Racing
• Release: Oct 28, 2008
• ESRB: Everyone

MotoGP 08 Review

MotoGP 08 is meat-and-potatoes racing with enough challenge to keep two-wheeled gearheads busy for weeks.

The Good

• Three different series of bikes provide some nice variety
• Excellent handling physics
• Great track list
• Fine sense of speed.

The Bad

• Game physics are sometimes haphazard
• Career mode only lasts five seasons
• Limited online options
• Very little bike/rider customization.

After snagging the official MotoGP license from THQ in 2007, Capcom released MotoGP 07 on the PlayStation 2; a promising, if far too difficult, rebirth of a game license that had previously thrived in the hands of developer Climax and publisher THQ. MotoGP 08 is Capcom's series debut on the PC (as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). While the game likely won't create a new generation of virtual racing fans, those who have some two-wheeled gaming experience will find a demanding driving model and plenty of stiff competition to keep them busy.

Hard-charging AI, three different handling settings, and multiple weather options are combined for a true test of skill in MotoGP 08.

There aren't any surprises in MotoGP 08's list of game modes--you've got the standard list of single-player modes you'd expect from a racing game: Single Race, Time Trial, Championship, Challenge mode, and so on. The highlight on the single-player menu is the Career mode, which gives you a chance to create a rider from scratch and work your way up through three bike racing series (125cc, 250cc, and, the pinnacle, MotoGP). As you enter races, any points you score by placing high enough in the final results will earn you attribute upgrade points you can apply to one of four aspects of your particular bike: top speed, acceleration, braking, and traction. You can then take your souped-up bike online and enter the competition in online racing events against up to 11 other online riders.

While Career mode is certainly the best single-player mode in the game, it has its quirks. First of all, your career ends after five years regardless of how many series championships you've won. Second, once you've selected from the game's various AI and handling difficulty levels, you can't change them for the entirety of your career. This is especially frustrating once you've maxed out your bike and can smoke the easy or medium-level AI opponents. It would have been more user-friendly to give players the chance to tweak options in between seasons to keep up the challenge.

This lack of career option flexibility is a shame because MotoGP 08 is all about the challenge. While the learning curve is a bit gentler than in last year's PS2 debut, even an experienced MotoGP vet will find some challenge at the default difficulty level. If you bump that up to hard or champion level, you'll face cunning, hard-charging AI opponents that won't give you an inch; you'll be fighting for every position and having a fine time of it (except when you're cursing out loud at your own lack of skill).

Fans of motorcycle racing games will relish the game's bike physics, which are excellent. There are three handling settings to choose from: easy, advanced, and simulation. With a little track time, MotoGP vets will likely be able to settle in at the advanced handling level with little trouble, but throughout every race, the emphasis on the racing line and careful acceleration out of corners is a hallmark of the game. The advanced handling setting is touchy enough; when riding in the simulation setting, even the slightest error on the throttle while deep in a turn will result in a spill. When running against the upper-tier AI opponents, any mistake you make is magnified by their unyielding aggression, and you'll find yourself in yo-yo battles for position at nearly every corner on the track.

While the feel of the bikes in MotoGP 08 is just right, the riding model is not without its problems. The developers have chosen to downplay the consequences of contact between riders. While it is possible to be knocked off your bike by an opponent (and only slightly more difficult to dismount him with some dirty driving), more often than not, you can run into a rider ahead of you with little consequence. In fact, once you've gotten used it, you can actually use this to your advantage by using a rider ahead of you as some extra braking when approaching a corner too fast. The tracks, too, have their quirks. For example, in some corners, the game will penalize you for cutting corners by instantly slowing your bike down to a crawl. It's a fine idea in theory, but its implementation is inconsistent; with enough experience, you'll know exactly which corners you can take advantage of and which you'll need to play straight.

As with the console game, up to 12 players can hop online to race in the PC version of MotoGP 08. Actually getting online is confusing, and neither the game manual nor the game itself does a particularly good job of explaining the process (you need to fill out a form on the game's loading menu). Still, once you're online, network performance is decent--even if the lack of features leave you wanting. You can only run races one at a time--there's no option for virtual championships where players can run multiple races for points--and can only bring your Career mode bike into a race if the host allows it. Even when using custom bikes, however, there's not much in the way of customization; you're stuck with the actual team leathers and bike paint schemes, as well as a series of unique helmets from which you can choose. In an era of customization in such games as Forza 2 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles, next year's MotoGP game simply must have more options for making your rider appear unique.

A fine sense of speed will have you tightly gripping your controller (or keyboard). Wait, can you grip a keyboard?

The game's system requirements are modest, and on the Intel 2.13 GHz machine we ran the game on, the frame rate was solid throughout. That said, the game has its graphical high and low points. Best of all is a thrilling sense of speed (especially on such long, straights tracks as Shanghai and Mugello) that really puts you in the seat of the rider. Unfortunately, decent speed doesn't make up for certain tracks that are simply a bore--with plain backgrounds and sometimes grainy asphalt textures that aren't impressive. New details, such as the night race at Losail, and the brand new Indianapolis GP track set at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway are great additions to the game. The hardcore fans will also find a lot to like with the game's audio presentation; not only is there a big difference among the 125cc, 250cc, and MotoGP bike engines, but individual constructor bikes have an engine sound all their own.

A slightly more approachable learning curve coupled with a great deal of challenge means that MotoGP 08 provides enough to keep you busy for months to come while not being as punishing on new players as the previous game in the series. Now that the series has moved to the next-gen consoles and the PC, the real work begins. Next year's game must primarily make sure that it has the same suite of offline and online features that players have come to expect from modern racing games. There's a lot to like in MotoGP 08's meat-and-potatoes approach to two-wheeled racing; here's hoping that next year's game offers a more extended menu.

Fuel

Posted by Sishu / at 12:20 PM / / 0 comments

Fuel

• Codemasters
• Asobo Studio
• Driving
  
• Release: Jun 23, 2009
• ESRB: Everyone

Fuel

This expansive arcade racer may be ambitious, but it doesn't nail all of the basics.

The Good

• Hundreds of different challenges and career races
• Cool vistas and weather effects
• Some of the courses are clever and satisfying.

The Bad

• A big open world with too little to do
• AI doesn't play by the rules
• Racing lacks thrills.

Fuel is an ambitious game that tries to do a lot, but it doesn't deliver where it counts. There's a lot to like in this postapocalyptic, open-world driving game. Some of the races are cool and clever, there are a mind-boggling number of different courses and dozens upon dozens of different vehicles to drive, and the atmospheric environmental effects make for some fun moments. Yet by focusing on the bigger picture, developer Asobo Studios didn't nail down some of the basics that make for fun driving. The racing doesn't feel as thrilling as it should, the artificial intelligence is fundamentally flawed, and the enormous world gives you precious little to do in it. There's a great game struggling to emerge here, but Fuel's strengths are too often overshadowed by its shortcomings.

Fuel's greatest asset--and biggest liability--is its sprawling open world. Every career event and optional challenge is carved out of the enormous, often gorgeous landscapes. There are hundreds of offline races in which to partake, and none of them are exactly the same. Some of these courses, like the occasional circuit race, are cleverly designed and fun to compete in. Circuit standouts include a bridge littered with ramps and debris, and a course that cuts a winding path through an abandoned farm. Some of the longer, broader courses are also designed well and are even exciting on occasion. Racing a motorcycle down the steep inclines of a rocky cliff and improvising a shortcut through a dense forest (and emerging unscathed) are terrific and memorable moments. It's a staggering number of races--and a healthy list of challenge types as well. There are checkpoint challenges in which you have limited time to get from one point to the next; helicopter chases that encourage you to look for good shortcuts; seek-and-destroy chases in which you need to catch up to and eliminate AI opponents that are given a head start; and plenty more.

Shortcuts are the key to winning most races, though you can't get too carried away with them, lest you miss a checkpoint or try to zoom into the woods in a vehicle that performs better on asphalt. Generally, but not always, the AI racers will stick to the obvious path indicated by Fuel's waypoint system (more on this later), giving you a chance to get creative. And creative you'll need to be when it comes to leaving the bizarre AI in the dust. Simply put, the laws of physics that apply to you have only a vague influence on your artificial competitors. The AI racers seem practically glued to the road at times, taking corners without much drifting and avoiding most obstacles. You may see a motorcycle get stuck against a cliffside and then leap dozens of feet in the air onto the path above. Sometimes, competitors will burst forward at insane speeds, or they'll run out of steam in the last mile of a race, letting you pass right by when they seemed capable of impossible speeds a moment before.

The artificial intelligence doesn't seem to be "rubber band" AI, where the competition is meant to stay close to you and provide a sense of competitive excitement. For example, in endurance races you might take an early lead and race 10 miles without glimpsing another vehicle. Rather, "cheating" seems to be a more appropriate term. As a result, Fuel's difficulty level is all over the place. An easy shortcut in the early moments might lead to a quick lead that you'll never relinquish. At other times, you might seemingly deliver a perfect race, yet still manage to lose. This isn't always because of the AI, however. A few checkpoint and timed challenges are too punishing, requiring not just perfection, but ultraperfection. Mistakes are made even more costly by one more element: To make progress, you must finish first. This inconsistency of challenge can be infuriating, because you might cruise along for a few satisfying races, only to hit a roadblock. You can choose the lowest of three difficulty levels if you're having trouble getting past a particular career race, but doing so earns you fewer stars, which in turn slows down career progression.

In races like this one, the AI lies down and dies. In others, it cheats its way to victory.

Ironically, the enormous postapocalyptic wastelands that inspire the incredible variety of courses and vistas also make Fuel's open-world exploration its least engaging feature. It's certainly a gigantic world--5,000 square miles, according to the manual. But it's a gigantic world that gives you very little reason to explore it. You'll discover liveries that earn you new vehicle designs and paintjobs, and vista points that will also lead to unlockable items. These are scant rewards, however, for the long drives through the lonely world required to get to these scattered locales. You can make things less lonely by taking your free roaming online, in which case you'll encounter other players wandering about in the vicinity. It can be a bit more enjoyable to group up with friends or even strangers this way and go hunting for rogue AI drivers together. However, even if you are able to find other players wandering about (a difficult proposition, given the PC version's small online population), you'll be struck by how little there is to do while free-roaming. It begs the question: Why bother creating such a huge wasteland, if you don't give players much reason to explore it? Certainly, no one would play a massively multiplayer online game if all you could do was jog around looking for new clothing designs.

Perhaps if the driving were more exciting, checking out the world would be a bit more interesting. Fuel's driving model isn't bad--it's just unspectacular. Some of the vehicles are really fun to drive, such as the cool-looking Deathwing quad bike or the bouncy Knightmare dune buggy. Yet while there are occasional exceptions (screaming down the side of a mountain in your Shuriken), racing doesn't feel fast or thrilling. You might glance down at your speedometer to see that you're zooming along at 90 miles per hour, but it doesn't feel like you're going that fast. This is due to a combination of factors: the way the AI vehicles don't bounce and drift around as you would expect, the minimal blur effects, and the passable engine noises that are too frequently interrupted by ticks and sputters. The circuit courses feature more clutter, so they offer a better sense of momentum than the more barren courses, because there are more objects rushing past you than just bushes and sand.

Nevertheless, Fuel does offer occasional bursts of excitement, many of them by way of its cool weather effects, which feature in a number of set-piece races. Sand- and windstorms not only fill the screen with gritty debris--and the speakers with authentic whooshes--but may also lead to scripted events, such as trees falling and partially blocking your way. In one of the most memorable races, an entire tornado weaves about, limiting visibility and toppling towers in your path. The environmental effects are highly atmospheric, which makes certain races much more enjoyable than they otherwise would be.

The driving model gets the job done, but there’s a distinct lack of energy to the racing.

You'll never worry about getting lost at least, even in the darkest and windiest of races. The GPS navigation arrows will be perpetually in your face, giving you a generally good idea of how to get to your destination. This moving trail of arrows looks rather disruptive at first, though eventually you'll get used to it and even occasionally appreciate its guidance, though you can turn it off if you prefer. Most of the time, it works well enough, guiding you down the path of least resistance (though hewing out a smart shortcut is the best way to win many races). Other times, the GPS just flat-out breaks, trying to lead you across lakes or up cliffsides that no vehicle in the game can navigate. It might even give up completely, pointing to one spot, then pointing back a few feet, and then pointing to the original spot again in an endless loop of inadvertent hilarity. These issues are memorable because they're so blatantly obvious, though to Fuel's credit, the GPS functions rather well considering the scope of the world. In free roam, you can set a waypoint anywhere, though it's odd that hovering the map's reticle over an exact target, such as a livery or a vista point, doesn't place the waypoint directly on that target as it does in most games with such a feature. If you want to be exact, you will need to zoom in on the map and be precise about waypoint placement, which just makes no sense considering that most waypoints you will want to place will be directly at these targets.

Environmental effects aren't Fuel's only visual standout. While there are a lot of plain-looking areas, the game as a whole looks great. You'll glimpse ruined cityscapes, race across snowcapped mountains, and navigate through fallen windmills, and it all looks extremely impressive. Vehicles didn't receive as much attention as the landscapes did; there is no damage modeling, and some vehicle textures and reflections don't look right. Yet the visual fidelity is high considering how much terrain is covered. The long loading times and occasional frame-rate jitters of the console versions are much less of an issue on the PC. However, antialiasing support on the PC is nonexistent; Although there are AA options in the menu, toggling them has no appreciable effect on how the game looks. You might also find yourself vexed by the day/night cycle. Transitions between day and night are abrupt and frequent, and it gets so dark that nighttime driving is an annoyance that comes with no obvious benefit. The cycle was likely meant to make free roaming seem authentic, but it just feels like one more reason to avoid the open world altogether.

Search and Destroy challenges are heavy on the searching and light on the destruction.

Free roaming isn't the only way to play online. You can play career races against other drivers, and it's a pleasure to leave behind the inconsistent AI and take on some real opponents. Playing online can be great fun, and it's also a good way to discover cool new shortcuts to follow in your next online race. Lag is an issue in Fuel, though, causing vehicles to teleport around on occasion and even disrupting the countdown timer. Also an issue is that you are bumped back to free roam after completing an online race. It's mind boggling that developer Asobo Studios didn't allow players to remain together in the race lobby, or at least drop them back to the online menu. Nevertheless, the number of online courses is impressive, and using Fuel's race creation feature, you can add to that staggering list. It's a cool feature, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Rather than dropping checkpoints behind you from within free roam, you place them on the overhead map. This makes it hard to gauge what the terrain is like, which in turn makes it difficult to make a fun and clever course to race on. Additionally, you can't practice on your course against the AI (you can test it all by yourself, though) or limit the types of vehicles available to the players who join. The idea of creating your own race is good, but as delivered, the feature feels half finished, and it's unlikely that most players will get anything out of it.

If you want to get the most out of Fuel, you should plug in an Xbox 360 controller. Other gamepads and wheels may work, but many players are reporting difficulties with their racing hardware of choice. But even given this drawback and others, some players will embrace Fuel's overall ambition. Nevertheless, if you're interested in racing--and there's a good chance you are--then you'll likely be disappointed by the game's shortcomings. Sure, there are a lot of races and vehicles, and there's a huge, unpopulated open world to check out, if that's your thing. Yet Fuel often seems to go out of its way to invite goodwill, only to let you down. If you're the patient type, it's worth checking out, but if you're looking for offroad excitement, games like Pure and Dirt are better choices.

Forza Motorsport 3

Posted by Sishu / at 2:34 AM / / 0 comments

Forza Motorsport 3

• Microsoft Game Studios
• Turn 10
• GT / Street Racing
• Release: Oct 27, 2009 »
• ESRB: Everyone

Forza Motorsport 3

Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is bigger and better than its superb predecessor in every way.

The Good

• Hundreds of desirable cars to drive, paint, and tune
• Great and varied selection of tracks to race on
• Presentation is uniformly excellent
• Superb online multiplayer options
• New storefront features make it easier to buy and sell your creations.

The Bad

• AI drivers occasionally fall asleep at the wheel
• Career bug sometimes lets you use cars that far exceed event restrictions.

Do you like cars? If so, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. In fact, provided you don't hate cars, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is an ambitious game that tries to be a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and the great news is that it succeeds at just about every turn. It doesn't matter how good you are behind the wheel; you can find a difficulty level and a handling model to suit you. And while there are plenty of options available for those of you who enjoy painting or tuning your rides as much as you enjoy driving them, you don't have to devote any time to those features to reap their rewards. Forza Motorsport 3 is a bigger and better game than its predecessor in every way imaginable, and while it's not flawless, it's certainly way ahead of the competition.

The Ladera Test Track is among the first new circuits that you race on.

Your first race in Forza 3 is spent at the wheel of an Audi R8 loaner, and by default, there are several driving assists--including the series' familiar dynamic racing line--turned on that serve as your water wings as you're thrown in at the deep end. From there, you're free to take your career in whichever direction you choose, though with limited funds at your disposal your first car is more likely to be a Scion than a Shelby. Career mode is divided into seasons, and each season you compete in a world championship that spans several races. You don't get to choose which championships you're entered into, so you start with relatively slow showroom cars early on and must get some miles under your belt before competing in thoroughbred racecars later on. With that said, championship races are generally two or three weeks apart, and so after every race you're invited to choose another, shorter series of events to take part in. You can also ignore the calendar completely if you choose, and just compete in whichever events you want to at anytime. Either way, the options you're presented with are determined, at least in part, by the cars that you own, so if you manage to get your hands on an Enzo Ferrari or a Porsche Carrera GT early on, you don't have to wait around before putting them to work. You might even find that you can use one or two of your cars in events for which they far exceed the maximum performance restrictions, though this bug doesn't rear its competition-trivializing head very often.

Regardless of what you're driving, you're free to pick and choose which assists you want to use, and you have an opportunity to quickly alter your settings before every race. This is definitely a welcome feature, because while you might not feel the need for antilock brakes or stability control when you're driving something modest, you might not be nearly as confident climbing into a Bugatti Veyron supercar for the first time. It's tempting to make things easier by keeping all of the assists turned on, but there's a great incentive to turn them off, because every time you do so, your potential earnings increase. For example, turning off the autobrake (which you'll probably want to do right away) increases your winnings by 10 percent, and if you opt for "simulation" damage, fuel, and tire wear as opposed to "cosmetic" or "limited," you can add another 15 percent on top of that. This setup ensures that while anyone who picks up Forza 3 can spend their entire career feeling like a winner, better drivers will earn more money in the process, and rightly so. Similarly, you get to keep more of your winnings if you don't have to spend them paying for damage incurred during a race, so although it's possible to win some races by driving aggressively and using opponents or walls to slow you down for corners, you won't be doing yourself (or your opposition) any favors in the long run.

Ever wondered what the interior of a Ferrari FXX looks like?

That's especially true if your opponents are other online players or a friend that you're playing split-screen with, because retaliation is likely to cross their minds at some point. Forza 3's AI is more focused on the finish line than on forcing you off the track, which makes it superior to some of the players you're likely to meet online, but it's not an intelligence that's going to pose a threat to its human counterparts anytime soon. At times, AI drivers are superb: they jostle for position, they look for openings when other drivers falter, and they know when to back off if their attempt at an overtake starts looking perilous. Occasionally, though, these otherwise believable opponents will make such silly mistakes that you'll swear they must have fallen asleep at the wheel. At Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya, for example, it's not nearly as uncommon as it should be to see opponents accelerate toward the Seat hairpin and fly off into the gravel without ever appearing to touch the brake pedal or the steering wheel, and it's not unheard of to see different opponents making the exact same error on consecutive laps. Race incidents like these aren't something you'll see often, especially if you're spending most of your time at the front of the pack, but if you're in a closely contested race, it's less satisfying to win as a result of an opponent's incompetence than it is to beat him out of a corner or slingshot past him on a straight.

It's also slightly less satisfying to cross the finish line first if you've felt the need to use Forza 3's new rewind feature during the race, but it's a great (if unoriginal) addition to the game regardless. If you consider yourself a purist, you might feel inclined to look down on this new feature and on anyone who uses it, and that's fine, because you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and nobody is ever going to have the option of using it while competing with you online. Furthermore, if you're from the no-rewind school of racing, your leaderboard times will always appear above those of drivers who have used the rewind to correct any number of their mistakes. The leaderboards also clearly display which assists drivers were using when they recorded their posted lap times, which might ultimately end up being a better incentive for you to turn them off than extra winnings are.

With so many cars to choose from you're sure to find some of your favorites.

As in Forza 2, your winnings in Forza 3 can be used to buy new cars (more than 400 different models are available at launch), either direct from manufacturers or from other players via an auction house. However, it seems unlikely that Forza 3's auction house will be the hive of activity that Forza 2's was, not because it has changed for the worse, but because unless you're looking for a bargain or want to offload a car that you've been awarded, there are few reasons to go there. In Forza 2, one of the main reasons to buy a car from the auction house was that it had a great custom paint job and/or because it had already had money spent on upgrading and tuning it. You can still buy and sell cars this way if you choose to, but in Forza 3 you can also deal in tuning setups, paint jobs, and individual vinyl designs without having to attach them to cars. For example, if you re-create a favorite video game character on the hood of a car and you want to earn some credits selling it, you now have two options. You can either sell it as a vinyl that other players will be free to paste onto any car that they choose (safe in the knowledge that they won't be permitted to resell it subsequently) or incorporate it into a design for a specific model of car so that players who own one of those cars can apply it to their vehicle. It's a vastly superior system to that in the last game, and because potential buyers can search for designs either by typing in keywords or by using presets like "retro," "anime," and "realistic," there's a good chance that players who are interested in the kinds of things you create will find their way to your in-game storefront.

Forza 3's car models look fantastic in their showroom and real-world race liveries, but it's the designs being created by the community that are really making them pop. That's no mean feat, because the tools that designers have to work with, while clearly powerful, don't make life easy. If you're familiar with the design tools in Forza 2, then you might be disappointed or at least surprised to learn that they haven't changed much in Forza 3. You still work primarily with geometric shapes and generic-looking icons, you still group large numbers of them together to create race team logos or photo-realistic images of your favorite Brazilian supermodels, and it still takes a lot of work to create something worthwhile. It's time well spent, though, and because there's now an option to create designs on a perfectly flat surface before applying them to a car, you no longer have to use the roof of a Mini Cooper for a canvas. Would this aspect of the game be better if you could import images from Photoshop or just scan them in? Absolutely not. Sure, it would be easier, but it wouldn't be as rewarding, and more importantly it wouldn't be fair for players without access to the necessary hardware or software. It's also unlikely that the end results would look significantly better. Spend some time checking out the top designs, as rated by other players, and you'll realize that just about anything is possible with Forza 3's design tools; you just have to get good with them.

The only problem with the cockpit view is that you don't get to check out your own paintjob.If you're more inclined to spend your time racing than playing with geometric shapes, there's still no reason you can't have great-looking cars. Just make sure you win enough credits to buy all of the designs you want. Whether you're racing in your single-player career or online with up to seven opponents, all of your winnings go into the same pot, and so do your experience points. Leveling up in Forza 3 doesn't benefit you in the way that you might expect it to in other genres, but every time you reach a new level, you're awarded a new car, so it can be a strong incentive to keep playing long after you've told yourself "just one more race." This is especially true later in your career, because the cars you're given are among the most desirable in the game--assuming you haven't rushed out and bought them already.

Just as you would in real life, it's not a bad idea to test-drive cars before you buy them. None of the cars in Forza 3 handle poorly, and all are delivered to your garage with perfect bodywork and spotlessly clean, accurately re-created interiors. Inevitably, there will be cars that suit your driving style better than others, though, and if you don't know much about tuning, it can be tough to tame a car that's proving problematic for you--even if you take advantage of the new quick upgrade option that optimizes your car for the class of competition that you want to use it in. In Career mode you're only able to use cars that you own, but every car in the game (as well as those in your garage) is available to you from the outset for use in single races, hot lap events, and multiplayer.

Even if you don't win, using custom car designs in online races is sure to set you apart from the opposition.

Online play was one of Forza 2's greatest strengths, and the same is true of Forza 3. It doesn't matter if you're looking to enjoy a private session with friends or hop into a race with random opponents--getting your car onto the starting grid couldn't be easier, and it's hard to imagine how the subsequent races could be any better. Even in multiplayer, detailed environments from all over the world fly by at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour without ever posing a threat to the frame rate, and the game is very smart about knowing when to "ghost" players who have tried to take shortcuts or are in the mischievous minority who think it's hilarious to drive the wrong way and try to crash into other racers. In addition to regular races, online options include Drag and Drift events, as well as three different Tag variants, Elimination races, and team-based Cat and Mouse competitions. As the host of a session, the options that you have to customize these game types number in the dozens, and you can even force players to turn off certain assists or use a specific camera angle.

Those camera options include all of the usual suspects: bumper, hood, cockpit, chase near, and chase far. Another great feature of Forza 3, which will be familiar if you played the previous game, is that at any point during a single-player race or during a replay of a multiplayer race, you can pause the action to take a photograph. The in-game camera has more settings for you to tinker with than the cameras that most of us use in real life, and if you're good at photography (or even if you're not) it's possible to create some impressive images. This is especially true at new tracks like Italy's Amalfi Coast, Japan's Fujimo Kaido, and the United States' Sedona Raceway, which are great additions to the sizeable roster not only because they offer very different and enjoyable driving experiences, but also because they're set in some quite beautiful locations. If you choose to share photos by uploading them to your storefront they'll also appear on the official Forza Website, from which you can download them for posting in forums and the like.

The new tracks offer some very distinct driving experiences.

Other than some load screens that stick around long enough to outstay their welcome before each race, the quality of Forza 3's presentation is uniformly excellent across every aspect of the game. The menus are clean and intuitive, the in-game visuals never fail to impress, and the default audio options prioritize the satisfying roars of the cars' respective engines over the 30-plus licensed tunes playing in the background. Artists on the soundtrack include The Hives, The Fratellis, Fall From Grace, Alkaline Trio, The Qemists, DJ Drunken Master, Logistics, and many more. Regardless of whether or not they're to your liking, there's no denying that the vast majority of the songs on the playlist make good driving tunes.

There's also no denying that Forza Motorsport 3 is a truly special racing game. Not only does it make simulation-style racing accessible to anyone with the inclination to give it a try, but it looks and sounds superb doing it and manages to foster an unusually strong sense of community along the way. If you have any interest whatsoever in racing games, even if you've never played one before, you'd do well to pay a visit to your local video game showroom and become a member of the Forza Motorsport 3 owners' club at your earliest convenience.

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Need for Speed Most Wanted

Posted by Sishu / at 11:57 AM / / 0 comments

Need for Speed Most Wanted

• Electronic Arts
• Black Box
• GT / Street Racing
• Release: Nov 15, 2005 »
• ESRB: Teen

Need for Speed Most Wanted

Most Wanted is great fun, from its hysterical cutscenes to its extremely tense police chases.

The Good

• Outrunning the cops is extremely exciting
• Outstanding sound effects
• Sharp graphics
• Tones down some of the over-the-top product placement found in the previous NFS games
• Mindblowing full-motion video cutscenes.

The Bad

• Racer AI isn't too bright at first, gets wicked smart later on
• Not enough mindblowing full-motion video cutscenes.

EA's long-running Need for Speed series took a trip underground a couple of years back when the developer refocused the game solely on illegal street racing. While the nighttime racing series was certainly successful, the lawless world was always missing one key factor: cops. This year's installment crawls back into the daylight. The actual racing hasn't changed too much, but the ever-present police make this game a whole lot more interesting.

Need for Speed hasn't had cops for awhile, and they make a welcome return in Most Wanted.

The game's career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor, who's definitely the sort of dude that lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. He's at the bottom of the list, but a few races later, he's sabotaged your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, you're carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, who's using your old car to wipe out the competition.

The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early segments is awful...awful good, that is. You'll scratch your head and wonder if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs or if they're just unintentionally funny. Either way, they're great. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences, and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, "Mia, I am a cop"? Or is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? You'll have to see the story through to find out where everyone's allegiances lie.

Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. You'll have to win a set number of race events. And you'll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.

Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, you'll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the cops or getting busted. Stopping your car--or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops--is how you'll get busted. To actually get away, you'll need to get out of visual range...and stay there. The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. You'll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand Theft Auto's open city and Metal Gear Solid's stealth mechanic. All the while, you'll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that you'll have to keep a couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever you get caught (if that's more your speed).

The game's storyline is interesting and occasionally told through some amazingly hilarious cutscenes.

There's also a lot of racing in Most Wanted's career mode--almost too much, in fact. You'll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesn't really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds--then picked it back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, it'll catch up very, very quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldn't be a big deal. But flipping the switch from "drive like crap" to "drive like a genius" is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, you'll be dying to find out what happens next in the story.

The game has more than 30 licensed cars that you'll be able to purchase or win from other racers. We started out with a pretty weak Chevy Cobalt, but eventually we picked up a much faster Supra, a new Covette C6, and so on. You can also find the Ford GT, a Ford Mustang GT, and other cars from BMW, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Lotus, and more. You'll buy your first car, but as you move through the Blacklist, you'll get a shot at the pink slip of the other racer, letting you ease right into the driver's seat of a new, tuned vehicle. Buying them from scratch means you'll have to apply enhancements yourself. You can buy a lot of different performance gear and a ton of visual stuff, like body kits, spoilers, vinyls, and so on. Applying visual upgrades lowers your heat level, making them pretty useful once the cops take notice of your faster cars.

As you work up to higher heat levels, the cops become much more aggressive in their response.

Aside from the career mode, there's also a challenge series that gives you a car and a specific goal. Race goals are fairly easy to understand, but the pursuit challenges ask you to achieve specific milestones, like blasting through five roadblocks or racking up a specific amount of property damage. You can also just dive into quick races, or take it online. The online game is focused strictly on racing, which is a little disappointing. Teaming up to avoid the cops or letting some players drive police cars probably would have been more interesting. Still, the game offers sprint, circuit, and drag races for up to four players, and it keeps an online version of the Blacklist going so you can see who the most dangerous online opponent is. On the game-creation side, you can play in ranked or unranked games, and you can specify a disconnection or "did not finish" percentage, letting you manually weed out jerks. You can also turn off collision detection between players if you want to prevent people from just crashing into one another throughout the entire race, but that's only possible in unranked games. All in all, the online is functional, but without any sort of pursuit mode or other police-tinged races, it's awfully standard.

Graphically, the game looks great, overall. But when you break it down, some parts of it look better than others. For the most part, the game does the large city environment quite well. The different parts of the city give a nice sense of variety, and the car models look sharp, especially when you start painting them with crazy triple-colored paint. The game delivers a pretty good sense of speed and seems to scale reasonably well to fit different PCs. There's a level of detail setting that gets the image quality up to around the Xbox 360 version's graphics, but when that and the resolution turned all the way up, you're going to need a really tough machine to get a playable frame rate out of it. The game doesn't have much car damage at all. You'll see your rear window crack up after a few good wrecks, but there's never any real damage to your vehicle.

You'll probably find yourself wishing that the game consisted solely of police chases, rather than occasionally saddling you with its more-standard racing events.

On the sound side, the game has outstanding engine noises that change depending on which car you're in and which upgrades you have. The rest of the sound effects are also of excellent quality. The game uses quite a bit of voice acting in the story, which is good. But the best voices come from the police. When you're being chased, you'll pick up the police band and hear them communicating and cooperating as they try to take you down. The cop talk sounds awfully authentic, and you'll eventually decipher the police 10 codes and figure out when they're going to lay out spike strips, set up roadblocks, and so on. While the 10 codes used don't seem to be the actual ones the real police use (at least that's what a little basic research told us), they sound good enough to be realistic. The music included is the standard mix of rock and hip-hop you've come to expect from EA's games, including a few songs from Styles of Beyond.

While the actual racing in Need for Speed Most Wanted is probably the weak link in the chain, it's still solid enough to keep you interested as you move from racer to racer, working your way up the Blacklist as you go. But the real stars of the show are the police, who give the series a much-needed shot in the arm. If outrunning the law sounds like your idea of a good time, you'll have a great time here.

Need for Speed Underground 2

Posted by Sishu / at 11:50 AM / / 0 comments

Need for Speed Underground 2

• Electronic Arts
• EA Canada
• GT / Street Racing
• Release: Nov 9, 2004
• ESRB: Teen

Need for Speed Underground 2

Need for Speed Underground 2 is pretty good, but unfortunately most of the stuff you do in between races keeps you away from the game's best moments.

The Good

• The actual races are fun
• Strong online stat tracking.

The Bad

• Too much meaningless driving to get between events
• Heavy product placement makes the game feel like you're playing a big ad
• Cross-genre soundtrack is too varied to give the game a cohesive sound.

Last year, EA took its long-running Need for Speed series in an exciting new direction with the release of Need for Speed Underground, a racing game that focused on making the import tuner scene the star of its arcade-style racing show. The game worked really well, combining the right level of car customization with good track design, challenging opponents, and impressive graphical effects. Now, one year later, a sequel is on the streets, adding some new race types and a big, open city to cruise around. The actual racing in Need for Speed Underground 2 is still pretty good, but unfortunately most of the stuff you do in between races keeps you away from the game's best moments.

Underground 2 gives you a whole city to drive around, but there's not much to do in it.

Need for Speed Underground 2 tries to inject a story into your career mode using static-image cutscenes that pop up before some races. The effect is similar to what the Max Payne series does with its noninteractive sequences, though that game pulls it off much better than Need for Speed Underground 2 does. Dopey story short, you're sent off to a new town after getting ambushed by a rival racing crew, and you'll have to start from scratch with one car and a handful of races to get you going.

The biggest change made by this year's game is that the action now takes place in one large city. You're given free rein to drive around wherever you want, and you'll have to drive to races to drive in them. You'll also have to drive to different parts shops to customize your ride--in fact, you'll have to find most of the game's shops by cruising around the city, looking for the right type of colored lights. The game gives you an onscreen map, but shops don't show up until you've found them, and some races don't actually appear on the map, either.

On paper, this whole open-city thing sounds like an interesting idea. Someone probably sat down and said, "Well, everyone likes Grand Theft Auto, and it has an open city, so our game has to have an open city as well. In fact, let's even make it so that different sections of the city are locked away until you progress to a certain point in the career mode." In practice, driving around the city is a real drag that keeps you out of the action longer than you'd like. The game also rarely takes advantage of the open city for racing purposes, staging a majority of its events on preset tracks, rather than attempting to go for a Midnight Club-like "get there however you can" feel. There's a menu in the garage that lets you jump to a handful of different events, but most races don't show up here, and none of the shops do, either, making it completely useless.

You'll start out in some pretty slow cars, so the racing isn't very exciting until you earn enough for a full set of upgraded performance parts. But once you've done so, the racing is fun and the cars handle well. The cars are fast, and things like turning, powersliding, and proper corning technique are easy to pick-up. Like in last year's game, there are a handful of different race types: Circuit races are long lap-based events, sprints take you from point A to point B on a set course, drag racing lets you live your life a quarter mile at a time, and drift races rank you based on how squirrelly you can get on the track. New in this year's game are the street X races, which are essentially regular races that take place on drift tracks. Outrun races take place in various parts of the city--you roll up behind another racer, tap a button, and then try to pass and outrun him or her. You'll also encounter a few races against the clock, in which you'll have to get from one point in the city to another before a photographer leaves the area. Make it, and you'll get to put your car on the cover of one of the game's magazines or DVDs for extra cash. The big new race type is the "underground racing league." These races are the sort of mysterious events where you'll see most of the game's cutscenes. They mostly involve some knucklehead breaking the lock on a race track and then swinging open a gate so your street-racing posse can race on a "real" track, though you'll also bust into airports and such, too. These races are essentially circuit races with racetrack scenery instead of cityscape scenery.

Tricking out your car's look will let you put it on the cover of a magazine or DVD.

Though there are three different difficulty settings for the career mode, none of them put up a particularly good fight. As a result, most of the races simply boil down to getting in front of the opposition and then doing what you can to not make a mistake. Between nitrous boosts and drafting, gaining the lead isn't very difficult, and the game doesn't seem to employ any heavy rubber-band AI routines to retake the lead from you, so you can usually stay in front without any trouble at all. When you consider that it will take you about a minute to get in front, and that some of the circuit races can last six minutes or more, this means that a great deal of your race time is spent just cruising along, dodging traffic and not paying any attention to the other cars unless you screw up and get into a wreck. In the event that you do crash, regaining the lead usually isn't too tough, especially if you've purchased a nitrous-oxide upgrade, which shamelessly lifts concepts from the Burnout series, translating powerslides and near-misses into extra boost for your tank. The opposing cars will slow down quite a bit if they take a big lead, making them very easy to beat.

Need for Speed Underground 2's crashes are laughably weak. While high-speed collisions with other cars trigger a slow-motion, cinematic shot of the crash, the game doesn't model any damage at all. It's like you're watching two plastic car models bump up against each other, accompanied by the sounds of an actual car crash. While it practically goes without saying that modeling damage in a game with licensed cars is still a tricky proposition, that fact doesn't make these wrecks look any better. Fortunately, the game's car customization features somewhat make up for this lack of visual detail.

A big part of Need for Speed Underground 2 is the ability to customize your car's performance and appearance. On the performance side, you'll purchase parts that have been organized into stages, which gives the game an easy way to lock the better parts away from you until you're ready for them. While the parts fall into different categories, like engines, brakes, tires, and ECUs, the only thing you really need to know is that you need them all to win races. The visual enhancements are a little more involved and give you a little more leeway, but ultimately you'll need to trick out the look of your cars to proceed, as having a flashy car is the only way to get noticed and end up on magazine and video covers. Each set of parts has a number associated with it, and these contribute to a meter that sums up how many pieces of flair you've bolted to your whip. Spoilers, neons, vinyls, roof scoops, spinner rims, custom gauges, and even speakers for your trunk are just some of the available modifications, and they all help your car stand out. This is especially handy online, where you can show off your stuff to the world.

NFSU2 packs in an obscene amount of product placement.

Need for Speed Underground 2 is online on the PS2, PC, and new to this year's game, the Xbox. The online mode is pretty straightforward, letting you set up races in any of the game's race types, and it also features a free run mode, in case you just want to cruise around the city with other players. As you'd expect, the online mode works well over an average broadband connection, even with a full six players in a race. The game also does a good job with statistics and rankings, which can help you find evenly matched races. You can also limit races to cars of a certain rank, or just open it up and let people take their career-mode vehicles onto the track. The GameCube lacks online play, and to add insult to injury, the already-shaky frame rate gets a little shakier when you play in the GameCube version's splitscreen mode.

While Need for Speed Underground 2 is attempting to emulate an illegal scene of "underground" street racing, the game really tries to drive its product placement down your throat. Things like billboards on the sides of the roads aren't too bad (though with an ad for a financial service popping up on some signs, you have to wonder who EA's target audience for this game is), and the occasional real-life fast-food joint does its part to make the city feel a little more realistic. But basing the game's whole onscreen display around the logo for a cellular phone service provider crosses the line. Sorry, but there's nothing "underground" about forcing a bunch of non-car-related corporate logos on people. The game's hokey dialogue also adds to the counterfeit feel. The overzealous script is constantly throwing poorly placed slang at you, having Brooke Burke use her teleprompter voice to tell you that "you've got to be racing tight," constantly calling you "dawg," or being very careful to always call your money "bank."

Graphically, Need for Speed Underground 2 looks good, unless you're talking about the GameCube version, which has a wildly unstable frame rate that really gets in the way of the action in some races. But in the other three versions, the car models are sharp and the city looks fine. For the most part, the game keeps running at a smooth frame rate, even in the later stages, when you're moving much, much faster. But at the same time, it isn't quite the effects show that the last game was. You still get nice little effects, like the shaky camera used to show drag races, but the blur effects are much less pronounced now, which is too bad, because they were really well implemented last year. Now, you get blurring at very high speeds or when you kick in the nitrous oxide, but more would have been better. Like last year, the PS2 version is the heaviest on the effects, though the overall look is still a little subdued. For the most part, the different versions of the game look very similar, with the Xbox and PC versions allowing for slightly higher visual fidelity than the PlayStation 2 version, and the GameCube version bringing up the rear, but ultimately the only major differences come down to the GameCube version not having online support, the Xbox version's analog triggers being the best control scheme for the game, and the PC version not playing very well with the keyboard controls (you'll need at least an analog gamepad if you're planning on playing this game on the PC).

The game's sound rises above its lame dialogue and poorly delivered speech. The engine sounds aren't quite as deep or as throaty as you might like, but the game is great at changing the sound of your car as you purchase upgrades. Also, things like the whoosh of wind when you fly under an overpass really help sell the game's sense of speed.

Finally, Snoop Dogg and Jim Morrison, together again for the first time.

Musically, Need for Speed Underground 2 is all over the place. The schizophrenic sounds start with the game's lead song, which is a remix of The Doors' "Riders on the Storm" done by prominent rap producer Fredwreck. Snoop Dogg joins Jim Morrison on the vocals here. For some people that will be blasphemy, but the remix sounds pretty good. The part that ruins it, though, is that Snoop is rapping about the racing--Need for Speed is specifically mentioned in the lyrics. Again, if you're going to have a game with "underground" right in the name, showcasing a song that does double duty as both an ad for the game and as an extreme case of exploitation of an old favorite probably isn't the best idea. Other songs on the soundtrack include "Lean Back" by the Terror Squad, "LAX" by Xzibit, and tracks from Sly Boogy, Felix Da Housecat, Paul Van Dyk, Cirrus, Ministry, Queens of the Stone Age, Mudvayne, Helmet, and more. This is a textbook case of a soundtrack that tries to appeal to too many different audiences and ends up not including enough of any one style to please anyone. Xbox users won't be able to fix the problem, either, as the game doesn't contain custom-soundtrack support. However, you'll be able to at least turn off tracks that you don't like.

Need for Speed Underground 2 starts with last year's game as a template and builds from there. Unfortunately, almost everything that has been added to this year's game detracts from the overall experience. Once you're in and racing and customizing your cars, it's a lot of fun, but there are too many obstacles standing between you and the best parts of the game.