Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Grid 2‘s Eliminator game mode, where the dude at the back of the pack is knocked out every twenty seconds, sure looks exciting. Sure, there’s no jusy-rigged rocket launcher, and no desert apocalypse with attendant moral dilemmas, but speeding metal carts around concrete gullies will have to do. Codies have showed off this Eliminator thing on the Dubai track, which you can see below, and it looks really quite fancy. But trailers can soon be dispensed with: the game is almost upon us 28th/30th, depending on your ocean, and I’ll be keen to play it, because I haven’t enjoyed a racing game in quite some time. Big drift!
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I hadn’t realised that GRID 2 is a game about global domination disguised as a competitive automobile racing simulation but, following an Americar trailer, there’s now a video of European tracks and vehicles narrated by fictional Racing Lord and Man of Business, Patrick Callahan. He is an entrepreneur who dreams of recruiting drivers for a global, multi-discipline Cars Wot Go Fast Championship and he is particularly attracted to Europe because, in his own words, “that desire to race is in the blood here”. I can’t speak for the rest of Europe, but given how much of an average Brit’s blood is taken up by ‘the desire to queue’, I don’t know how much room is left for racing.

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I haven’t played a car game for aaaaages. Much like my real-world driving, I’ve always been rubbish at them but secretly enjoyed them, and Codemasters’ original GRID, with its subtle silliness and invaluable rewind mechanic, very much hit the sweetspot of pandering to incompetence without chucking out all vestiges of believability. I’ll probably be driving into walls and accelerating into rather than out of corners in the upcoming sequel, which we now have in-game footage of to look at.
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“Gameplay” isn’t a particularly useful word at the best of times, but in the case of game trailers it tends to mean seeing the game as it might be played. In the case of a racing game, for example, in a cockpit view. Or, hell, in a third-person view where you’re actually controlling the action, rather than passively watching it. This Grid 2 trailer shows a lot of computer cars racing around a computer circuit, which could literally be the game being played. But is that gameplay? There are a few seconds of this trailer which might be a bumper-cam view of the game being played, but even then it’s without the UI you might expect to accompany a genuine piece of “gameplay” footage. So…

Yeah. I mean no.
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Mine is probably Wipeout 2097, or Ballistics. I do like a bit of rallying, though. It’s in the blood, you see. My Dad used to throw a Mini Cooper around the welsh mountains occasionally. I’d do the same if I hadn’t spent all my money on crisps.

Oh, and there’s a teaser video out for GRiD 2. (It’s spelled like that, you see.) That was the real news, before I got distracted. You can watch that below. Also a ballistics video, because nostalgia.
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I know about as much about racing cars as I do about building cars. Both jobs are better left in the claws of robots than in my own incapable hands. However, I have watched and scrutinised two pre-alpha videos of GRID 2 in order to pick out the most important details. Both videos have cars driving around quite fast before any collisions happen and when they do happen they are bumps rather than crashes. That’s the most important thing of all because if I’m not encouraged to drive into other vehicles within twenty seconds of pressing ‘new game’, chances are I’m going to be rubbish at GRID 2.

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Codemasters have confirmed the existence of GRID 2 with a trailer showing fast cars going quite fast indeed. One goes so fast that it falls over – careful now! Our chums over at Eurogamer have also announced that the game will be shown at the Eurogamer Expo at London’s Earls Court from 27th-30th September. There will be a developer session on the Saturday afternoon at 3pm. Eurogamer game Operations Editor Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell has described the “stuff” as “sounds awesome”.

Watch the trailer below.
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