Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Trackmania 2′s E3 Canyon trailer (below) is even more insane than the last one. Ludicrous sense of speed, ludicrous cartoon physics, ludicrous spewing of cars over vertiginous chasms, ludicrous ludicrousness. If this is genuinely representative of the kind of game we can expect from Nadeo’s latest, then I will be a happy racer. Go take a look.
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Ha. Trackmania 2 is going to be glorious. Watch the video.
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Exquisite excitementation! The sequel to my second-favourite ever racing game is starting to give up some secrets, including this image (click for full size). It’s not telling a whole lot, other than Trackmania features a big yellow muscle car and a canyon, but we are expecting something to happen after E3 this year, due to comments made by Nadeo’s boss person. (You might recall that a beta for the game was expected last year.) It seems that the delays might have something to do with the company developing three new games at once, with the other games being “Shootmania” and “Questmania”. Don’t know much about these right now, but obviously they are FPS and RPG templates for Nadeo’s user-generated ways of doing things, and could be really interesting. Roll on June.

Thanks to the folks who forwarded me this link (Blues), it’s cheered me right up. French devs Nadeo have announced a true sequel to Trackmania at the Paris Games Festival, and you can see it (shakily) in action below. The video shows off the track editor and a load of shiny, shiny cars in action. It doesn’t look like Trackmania 2 will lose anything of the mad verve of the original – insane toy-car physics are still in evidence – when it is release next year. We’ll bring you more concrete details on this as soon as we can, natch.
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[Since the new Trackmanias are tearing up the internet, I thought it'll be a good time to dig out a Making of interview with Nadeos's Florent Castelnerac. This interview was performed in the lead up Trackmania Sunrise and focuses primarily on their first game. Florent was agreeably driven and funny, even through the occasionally broken English. Re-reading this a few weeks after I wrote about the rise of the PC arcade game in the Eurogamer review of Trials 2 amuses me.]

Any independent developer immediately has an uphill battle. They face opposition in the form of an industry that seems to think that any such initiatives are frankly impossible in the days of EA’s three-hundred men teams. However, PC arcade developers have it even harder. While the giants of PC gaming like 3D realms and ID originally made their names with freeware arcade 2D shooters, the idea that the consoles are where you go for simple play and the PC audience always demands something more (or, at least, something more deliberately cerebral) has become entrenched. Well… at least something more cerebral which doesn’t involve shooting in the first person perspective.
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The latest version of anything-goes arcade/puzzle racer Trackmania is out, and it’s free. Unfortunately the Trackmania Nations Forever website is currently taking more of a hammering than would, if I had a hammer, the morning, and the evening, all over this land. Having eventually had it working long enough to reach the download page, turns out it’s actually a forward to Filefront. The download is 504 of your Earth megabytes.

And, as I discovered after having previously downloaded 900 useless Megabytes from Gamershell, it’s all terribly confusing because Nadeo have also just released Trackmania United Forever, a free 900mb upgrade for the retail Trackmania United. Ugh. This naming system seems about as smart as someone giving birth to twins, and deciding to call one Jonathan and the other Jonathon.

Anyway, we’ll doubtless be sharing thoughts on the game later, once the right version has finally finished trickling down the RPS thinpipe.

Things we don’t talk about much on RPS: deforestation, owls, pudding, longjohns, Sonic the Hedgehog, and cars. Well, let’s fix that latter at least.

A car game we can all get behind is smashy finger-steering fun ‘em up Trackmania. On April 16th, the latest version, Trackmania Nations Forever is to be released. And it’s free! Free! Free like the pudding-soiled longjohns Sonic the Hedgehog would doubtless donate to a shivering owl left homeless by deforestation!

Hopefully we’ll be talking about it loads come the day, but meantime here’s the new trailer:

More details here