The Crew is free this month from Ubisoft, just two years on from its release. Back then it received mixed reviews. But free is free, and the size of the game’s open world – a huge recreation of the United States – is intriguing enough to entice Adam and Brendan to revisit the racer with a challenge in mind. Who can get from East coast to the West coast the fastest? Ready, set, go.
RPS Feature Amphetamine addiction is ugly
None can know the minds of EA. We were sent review code for Need For Speed [official site] yesterday, plenty ahead of its release… and told that the review embargo for this online-enhanced game would be 8am the next day. The game’s not out until the 17th. A very strange situation indeed, to be given less than 24 hours to review a large, involved driving game, over a week before the servers would be populated. Keeps us on our toes, I suppose. But obviously we’ve not rushed anything. Below are some extensive impressions of this year’s reboot of the franchise based on my first 12 hours with the game. We’ll update this into a full review for you once the game is out, and we can actually play all its aspects.
RPS Feature Burnout Paradise?
Ubisoft’s The Crew is now out, via Steam in the US and UPlay and something called “shops” in other parts of the world. Ubisoft, after the PR disaster of trying to impose post-release embargoes on Assassin’s Creed: Unity reviews, have taken the rather bold step of informing customers not to trust early reviews. This is because they’ve withheld review code from journalists until just before launch, and then insisted that no fair opinion of it can be gained until it’s been played for dozens of hours, the end-game reached, on populated servers. Indeed, no fair review could be written in a day – especially one where, surprise, there are server issues – but impressions can certainly be had of those opening few hours. I’ve written mine below.
I’ve been looking for a decent, freeware 16-bit-esque racer in the style of Outrun for quite some time now and kept bumping into unfinished prototypes, bad ideas, boring implementations and short one-level offerings.
Thankfully and due to the wonders of the internets, I found a terrific one in the most unlikely of places: the Adventure Game Studio forums. A place where people are bound to talk about their mouse driven point-and-click adventures and not racing games of the Red Hot Overdrive variety.
I have drawn a graph to explain how excited I am about Criterion’s Need For Speed: Most Wanted. You can see it below. Up here I’ll instead comment on just how weird it is to be talking positively about Need For Speed. So recently it was the wideboy gaming release, a new copy out every Christmas for people who wear their caps sideways and speak exclusively without consonants. And now look at it – it’s a sequel to what is unquestionably (I’m in charge here) the most fun driving game of all time, Burnout: Paradise.
Italian devs Playstos Entertainment have announced a rather novel looking racer. Real World Racing is a top-down racing game that focuses on realism, rather than arcade antics. Also, it’s using photographs instead of graphics. Photo-realistic graphics!
Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage is sort of a 3D Death Rally, or at least that’s what it looks like and that’s reason enough for me to be quite eager to see if that’s what it plays like. Customisable cars with guns on top drive around and pretend to race each other while actually only really caring about exploding one another. It’s out in just four days today if the press release that just landed is to be believed more than the official website. Apparently it’s a “fast-paced addictive combat racing game”. A shame then that the trailer below spends two or three minutes adjusting its mirrors before actually igniting into anything that could be described as “fast-paced”.
RPS Feature On the road to somewhere. Somewhere amazing.
If you missed part one of Craig Lager‘s two-part guide to getting going in proper racing games, that’s here. Now read on for the final part, covering advanced techniques, what high-end kit to pick up and which games will best make you wheely good.
Everyone will tell you that the most important thing with racing is consistency. One really fast lap is nothing compared to being able to do 15 fast laps in a row. You need to do some long races. Pick a circuit you know, set the lap count high and go. If you have it, F1 is perfect for this because you can turn all the assists off, set up a 100% race length race and drive for 80 or so minutes with a few flashbacks in the bank in case you mess everything up on the last couple of laps. When you’re done and happy, it’s time to think about wheels again because we’re heading in to all-out sim territory.
RPS Feature You too can master the car wot goes fast
Mr Craig Lager of GamingDaily fame takes to the podium to present a two-part guide to getting started in – and ultimately mastering – racing games. You can do it!
“You’re not braking to slow down here, you’re braking to put weight at the front of the car so it’s easier to turn in” – my driving instructor shouts to be heard over the Lotus’s engine. “Pull it in here. No, more! I want to feel it rumbling over the curb”. I’m driving a Lotus Exige around a short circuit at Silverstone – part of a track day I got invited to. Earlier I’d taken a Megane touring car around, and next they were putting me in a Ferrari 430 and at some point on this day, something clicked and I wanted to race cars forever.
I‘ve always liked racing games, sure. I played the popular stuff where you can happily fling a car around a track with the expectation of winning if not on the first go, then at least in a couple of tries – but that day opened my eyes. Racing isn’t about burying the accelerator as much as possible and power-sliding around corners.
“Codemasters: Birmingham” really doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Eidos: Montreal” or “2K Czech” does it? But despite its inauspicious origins, their F1 2011 is looking pretty snazzy. Also, from my non-F1-caring-about perspective, massively daunting. It reminds me of when F1GP2 came out in 1734, and my tiny brain couldn’t understand why you’d play a game where touching gravel once in three hours was a game over. But that’s because I’m an idiot of the highest order. Check out the launch trailer for the game below.
Trackmania 2 Canyon is available right now as a digital purchase straight from its very own official website. It’s the game with an obscene amount of player-controlled cars racing around thousands upon thousands of physically impossible tracks. The game uses Nadeo’s own ManiaPlanet system for updates and downloads, which is why it’s only available direct from the website. That may change but don’t count on it. As we reported previously, despite Ubisoft being the publishers they have stated that there will be no always-online DRM check. John checked exactly how the game does work offline and his findings are below, along with a launch trailer.
You may remember Proun, the puzzle racing game we first mentioned in 2009. The one with that blisteringly pretty trailer. The good news is, it’s out later this month, on the 24th. The better news is, it’s pay what you want. There’s an exclusive look at the new trailer below.
We all react differently the first time we learn there’s a game called Cargasm. Jim’s reaction last August was to demand that Twitter come up with other ‘gasm names. Mine was to go into denial until there was video evidence. There is now video evidence.
Come on open world racing games, smarten up. After the weak Need For Speed World, and the almost great Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, I’m now banking my hopes on next year’s big-money, big-car Test Drive Unlimited 2. The original Test Drive Unlimited also fell into the “almost great” category, so I’m very much hoping to see even more this time. To get an idea of whether that’s happening, there’s a new trailer below.
Criterion’s approach to the Need For Speed franchise, an all new Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, is out in the UK today. I’ve spent an awful lot of this week racing about its many challenges, and have clocked up enough miles to feel ready to tell you Wot I Think.
Here’s a peculiar trailer for Brit-based racer, Split/Second. It’s like a report for a gaming TV show, but without the gaming TV show. And it’s an American pretend TV show, which offers the rather hilarious opener that Black Rock Studio’s home town, Brighton, is “quaint”. But forget all that, because what you’ve got here is a neatly packaged explanation of what Split/Second is – a racing game where you blow stuff up – along with thoughts behind the development, and most crucially, lots of in-game footage.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the slightly slipped Disney racer, Split/Second. But it’s reappeared at GDC ahead of what’s now a May release. It’s a trailer that asks that all-important question one should always raise at the car dealership: can it outrun a building?
I’m not one to leap with joy at news of a new racing game, but when I see a trailer like the one below the joy-leaping muscles begin to clench. Proun, which is a splendid word, is a 3D obstacle-avoiding puzzly racing game set in a bizarre world of geometric shapes. You rotate around a cable, rather than steering, in a gorgeous looking environment. The project by Joost van Dongen is due to be released early next year, and will be freeware, according to IndieGames.
Do you like France? Are you crazy-excited by Streets? And does the idea of racing send you a-shiver? Well, it’s safe to say, that today is going to be the most exciting day for you since that time you ran down a seedy rue in paris, naked, screaming, glad to be alive, just glad. Team6 have released a demo of their self-explanatory French Street Racing. It’s about the streetracing champions of Nice, Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Lyon getting together and racing. In streets. And you have to beat them. In a Race. A Street Race. 230Mb. You can get it from here. And some grabs beneath the cut to illustrate the game’s Gallic charms.
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No-one at RPS is a great racing game aficionado. Is this because we’re all impossibly geeky men obsessed with science fiction worlds and the devoted worship of Horace the Endless Bear? Or is it because racing, once one of gaming’s main pillars, is growing ever more niche? Certainly, it has spent some years standing still, polarising into the opposing camps of simulation and mod-culture arcadey things, and in both cases avoiding the sense of whizzbang newness necessary to excite a mass audience. So will it go the way of the flight sim, making do with a small but impossibly devoted audience?
Clearly not. But it does have to change. And so Edge have rounded up some of the genre’s most luminescent luminaries – men behind the likes of Project Gotham, Colin McRae, Motorstorm and Sega Racing – to discuss racing’s future. It’s an amazingly frank chat, shining a light on some deep-running problems with the form.
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