By Alec Meer on May 21st, 2012 at 10:00 am.
What… where…. Who? Videowhats? I’ve been away for a week (pleasure not work for once, although the weather did its best to undermine that) without internet teats to suckle upon and I currently have about as much idea of what’s going in the land of videogames as I do about ballroom dancing. While the RPS Hivemind straps me into the Rapid Retraining Device, I’ll leave you with news that Dead Island devs Techland’s next, and entirely who do the voodoo-free, offering will be turning up in a mere nine days’ time. After the dark, divisive concept album that was Dead Island, Mad Riders seems to be Techland’s equivalent of the ninety second punk single. It’s got quadbikes. They are ridden. Madly. Basically, it looks like Mario Kart but with crash helmets and no magic shells.
IMPORTANT FACTS: 45 tracks, 12-body drop-in multiplayer, pretty much seems to do exactly what it says on the e-tin.
That’s out for PC download on May 30, and on the loungeboxes too if you must. It’s billed as ‘the price of a pizza’, but is actually £7.99. Eight quid, eh? I’m presuming they don’t mean one of those horrible Dr Oeteker pizzas made out of frozen cardboard and pre-chewed tomato chunks, then.
21/05/2012 at 10:05 AmateurScience says:
Dr Oetker, the real Italian Pizzeria Taste
(made in Germany)
21/05/2012 at 10:49 Bluerps says:
I’m amazed that it is even sold outside Germany.
Though Dr. Oetker Pizza will always have a special place in my heart for sustaining me during week long LAN-parties when I was a teenager. One Pizza in the afternoon, one around midnight, and between that hours of Starcraft or Counter Strike or fiddling with configurations because someone couldn’t join. *sigh*
21/05/2012 at 10:07 Targie says:
Dude, Dr. Oetker pizzas cost like £4 round here.
Small takeaway pizza is £7.99, so not premier quality, but it is indeed the price of a pizza.
21/05/2012 at 13:20 trjp says:
Dominos standard pizzas – before you start adding stuff – run upto £16.49 around here, so this would be a quite poor pizza then…
Also – anyone, and I mean anyone, who eats frozen pizza is in need of some help – there is not one frozen pizza which is worth using a bog paper, let alone eating…
21/05/2012 at 15:18 Phasma Felis says:
You don’t have Red Baron in the UK, then? You have no idea what you’re missing, poor things.
21/05/2012 at 18:42 DrGonzo says:
I disagree. In fact its the only ready meal worth bothering with. Stick them in a pizza oven, they are much better than most takeaways then.
21/05/2012 at 10:09 Fitzmogwai says:
Ubisoft, eh?
So, what’s the DRM situation on this one then?
21/05/2012 at 10:09 standardman says:
I quite like it when devs do a little game to refresh between big projects. I may be wildly inaccurate here but it looks like they had the tech and thought ‘let’s do one of these’.
Anyone know how big the team is at Techland?
EDIT: pizza.
21/05/2012 at 10:20 Jekhar says:
I could have sworn they had done a similar game before Dead Island, called “Pure”. But it seems i was wrong and it was a different developer.
edit: Ha, found it! It was “Nail’d”.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/naild
Strangely isn’t mentioned on Techlands website.
21/05/2012 at 10:40 Henke says:
I’m guessing this is just Nail’d with a new coat of paint. And maybe some new tracks?
Never played Nail’d, but I do have Pure for the 360. It’s… alright.
21/05/2012 at 10:46 standardman says:
AH. I didn’t realise that was them. Makes sense now.
21/05/2012 at 11:30 Shortwave says:
I have a strange feeling as to why they failed to mention it openly.
: / Pre’ bad mang.
21/05/2012 at 11:58 The First Door says:
It does look exactly like “Nail’d”… which is worrying somewhat. From what I remember it had interesting, fun looking tracks and terrible, terrible driving physics. Made the fun tracks really boring because you could accelerate to full speed almost instantly.
21/05/2012 at 13:21 trjp says:
I wondered why no-one was mentioning Nail’d – which wasn’t a terrible game but wasn’t actually any good either.
Instant acceleration – courses designed to make you feel quite ill – never a total feeling of control – it was an odd game, to say the least.
Quads don’t have a great history in gaming – Pure wasn’t that brilliant, Nail’d was worse, not really expecting that to turn around here…
21/05/2012 at 13:46 The First Door says:
I think Pure suffered from lack of split-screen play (at least on Xbox). It would have been excellent against friends!
21/05/2012 at 10:10 Goomich says:
What kind of DRM it will use?
21/05/2012 at 10:15 AmateurScience says:
Anchovies with pineapple.
21/05/2012 at 10:18 Goomich says:
Sorry no, my pineapple connection can be unstable, and I couldn’t open anchovies can on a train.
21/05/2012 at 17:07 trjp says:
When I worked in a pizza shop, we’d sometimes get people come in and say “I want a pizza” but be unable to decide what.
In that case I’d usually suggest Anchovy and Olive or Anchovy and Pineapple – which would generally cause them to tell me they were ‘allergic to’ or “intolerant of” (21st century speak for don’t like) Anchovies/Olives/Pineapple/Onions/Garlic/Cheese/Tomato/Flour/Oxygen and we’d work something out which didn’t include those things (usually a Meat Feast!!).
A couple of people took up my random ingredient challenge tho – and some of them would come back and order it again. Anchovy and Olive actually works quite well – not sure about Anchovy and Pineapple tho as I hate cooked pineapple (note hate, not ‘am allergic to).
Next up – why that individual Margherita from Pizza Hut contains more calories/fat than you can possibly imagine…
21/05/2012 at 10:11 felisc says:
Well great, i want a pizza now. Not the game. Weird pr.
21/05/2012 at 10:27 Luke says:
I would also quite like a pizza.
21/05/2012 at 11:51 D-e-f- says:
To quote my stomach: “grumble grumble”
The fact that it actually is around lunch time doesn’t help either.
21/05/2012 at 10:17 Gnoupi says:
Needs more motion blur.
21/05/2012 at 10:23 Shadowcat says:
Perhaps some static blur, too.
21/05/2012 at 17:05 Dances to Podcasts says:
Here you go:
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/4346880/Blur+0827_164122_sept1994_1_PA.jpg
21/05/2012 at 10:22 Tridae says:
was going to comment on how it looks just like so many of the other quad racers we’ve seen in the past years but then I saw the balloons and hoops and super spinning trick things and WOOP! The price makes it totally worth it too. Well done. We need more SSX tricky style racing games on the pc.
On the SSX note, anyone know of a PC equivalent to it?
21/05/2012 at 10:49 Turbobutts says:
SkiFree
21/05/2012 at 18:46 DrGonzo says:
Yes!
21/05/2012 at 12:26 somini says:
Shaun White Snowboarding has more to do with Skate than SSX, but it’s a great game, just Semi-Realistic.
Ubisoft published it, I can’t find a digital copy anywhere but the UbiStore(ugh), but a retail copy is cheap and DRM Free. Most technical issues have fixes, don’t let that fool you.
21/05/2012 at 10:30 Chizu says:
Nail’d 2 basically then, from the looks of it. (Yes, I am that one guy that bought Nail’d)
Good to see tricks are in now, “Trick”mode in Nail’d was stupid, cause there were no tricks :V
21/05/2012 at 15:30 BathroomCitizen says:
Is that a blue sky in the video? Now, that’s what I call novelty!
21/05/2012 at 17:19 Baggypants says:
At the risk of being the person who pipes up with “this is like something else”. Excite Quads!