A new dirtbike crashing simulator has been announced by the makers of the Trials series. Trials Rising will be out in February next year, says creative director of Redlynx, Antti Ilvessuo, who arrived at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference riding a motorcycle and wearing an Evil Kineval suit, a costume only bettered by the dancing Panda bandmaster from earlier in the show. Anyway, new Trials. Read the rest of this entry »
Combining the stunt riding of Trials with the shoot-o-wackiness of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon in Trials of the Blood Dragon [official site] did not go too well, our John will tell you. But do you believe everything John tells you? He told me that dog eggs are delicious, that ice cream vans jingle to warn they’re out of ice cream, and that a new food is why my hamster changed colour. So to hell with John! If he’s not your real dad either, you might want to try the demo coming this month – and playing it can earn you the full game if you’re good enough.
RPS Feature I find it very guilty
Ubisoft surprise announced, then immediately surprise released, a new game last night: Trials Of The Blood Dragon [official site]. Combining Red Lynx’s long-running motorbike stunt platformer with their half-idea standalone Far Cry: Blood Dragon is a bold choice. And having played this towering turd all day, one I can understand their wanting to keep a secret for as long as possible. I’m a little surprised they acknowledged it after release. Here’s wot I think:
Obviously the combination of physics-driven motorbike stunter Trials and the neon world of FPS spoof Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon would result in something ludicrous but gosh, Trials of the Blood Dragon still surprised me. Ubisoft officially announced the garish stunt game during their E3 press shindig today, a while after word of it leaked, and… then they launched it. It’s out now. You can buy it, download it, and start biking and gunning (yes, it has guns) through neon hellworlds right now. Look at this:
Being in a motorbike accident is, I’ve been told, terrifying and awful, just awful, the pits, ugh, frightful, I really don’t think you’d like it. Yet watching a motorbike accident is, I’ve seen on You’ve Been Framed, a rib-tickling barrel of laughs. Tempering the horror of the first with the joy of the second, Trials Fusion now has online multiplayer to go with its local play. Nine months after the game came out, you and seven other folks can finally zip, flip, and shatter your hips together.
Ubisoft has released a bunch of info about multiplayer changes to its bikestravaganza, Trials Fusion. The update promises to add online multiplayer and to up the number of racers from four to eight.
Currently there’s asynchronous leaderboardy business which has been part of Trials since the first game. There’s also a local multiplayer option for four people. I gave it a bash at a preview event shortly before its release in April. and although fun it had a few problems, not least that if you were at the far end of the bank of racers everyone else would be obscuring your view.
Motorbikes are pretty cool, right? I’d love to learn to ride, but two things give me pause: a story from a family friend about scraping scraps his own skin out his bike leathers after an accident, and the terrifying physics of video game motorbikes suggesting that I’d quickly end up there myself, knife in hand. Trials games probably haven’t given the most realistic understanding of riding, mind.
As if competing with the tracks themselves, let alone on leaderboards, weren’t already challenge enough, RedLynx have added a new mode to Trials Fusion. Tournaments returned from older games in a patch yesterday, with whole sets of tracks to compete across.
RPS Feature Vroom with a view
I was ready to love Trials Fusion. Trials Evolution Gold Edition turned out to be the perfect game to play when I didn’t have much time or didn’t know what to play. It filled in the holes of a busy day or fixed a boring evening. I didn’t care that it was only on Uplay, and I didn’t suffer any the bugs that bogged it down a little in John’s review. It’s so good, so willing to be completely OTT, that it charmed the backwheel off me. Can Trials Fusion pull off the same trick? Here’s wot I think.
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Aw, Redlynx and Ubisoft, you really shouldn’t have. I know we’ve had our ups and downs (and loopty loops and explosions) in the past, but now you’re releasing Trials Fusion the day before my birthday? You really didn’t have to do that. One small quibble, though: you failed to include any mention of Nathan Grayson’s Rad Birthday™ or the accompanying Impossibly Sexy Karaoke Partython anywhere in your trailer. No, no, calm down. I’m not angry with you. Everyone makes mistakes.
Well, Caligula is that is indeed John Hurt on narration duties, and not a Hurtalike doing the whole gravel-voiced ‘ooh, I was in Aliens and I, Claudius and The Elephant Man, and most recently I turned up as a possibly evil [REDACTED]’ thing. I hope so, I quite like the idea of John Merrick intoning out of my monitor. Hurt, or Hurtalike, is applying his sandpapered tones to this footage of the latest in the Trials stunt bike/sado-masochism series, now called Fusion and taking itself to a futuristic city-in-the-sky setting. Apparently falling a couple of dozen feet into a gravel surface at 60MPH wasn’t brutal enough – now we’ll be plummeting about 100 stories.
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When one of the finest PC releases of 2013 is a side-scrolling motorbike game – Trials Evolution: Gold Edition – I can understand that some who’ve not played the Trials games before might be confused by concept. Fortunately there’s now no excuse for not having a play of this ridiculously fun game, as at last there’s a demo.
RPS Feature Wheelie Go... (You're Fired - Ed)
Trials Evolution finally came to PC shores a couple of weeks back. Rebranding itself the Gold Edition, and adding in a bunch of features unique to the PC, RedLynx has once more returned to the platform that gave them life, that they so cruelly spurned. Has it been worth the wait? Does it survive Uplay integration? Here’s wot I think:
After a lengthy beta on the Halo 720 Doritos machine, Trials Evolution: Gold Edition is finally about to hit the perfect landing in the rutted mud track of the PC. At some hour on this very day we’ll be able to see what all the fuss is about, but we kind of already knew. Hey, RedLynx. What gives? We embraced you. We made you what you are today, and then you abandoned us. For what? And why are you back? Has the Mountain Dew lake dried? You think you can make me happy with a new trailer? Okay, you can. There’s a new trailer, and some amazing examples of what you can do with the editor, below.
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It’s obvious that RedLynx stopped loving us. We were there for them, day and night, attending to playing their games. But then oh look who should stride in with their long legs and big, muscley arms but Microsoft, flashing their wallets and giant cars. And Trials really became an Xbox thing, leaving us staring at the space where RedLynx used to be, sobbing.
Oh, but who’s this crawling back to us? Microsoft’s big money and tall hats weren’t everything you hoped for, eh? You think you can just waltz back in here, play with our hearts like they’re days old treacle pudding? Yes, quite correct, because Trials Evolution is bloody brilliant.
And if you can’t decode that particularly labyrinthine syntax, “New patch for RPS fave Trials 2″. The full details are here, but the two biggest changes directly answer a couple of my reservations. They’ve reworked the game so it accepts downloadable content, and to show off have added five courses to the full game. Four easy, and one dynamic, the former of which helps with my problem of not enough relatively laid back course. The latter, is gloriously insane, however. Also, the size of the teams have been increased from ten to twenty, which means that team RPS is yet again recruiting. Feel free to join us – the tag and password is both RPS.
Oh – beneath the cut is a video of the new Dynamic course, Domino Effect.
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Okay, we blogged about it yesterday before we had a chance to actually play it. Now, I have and can only concur with the excited people in the comments threads. This is brilliant, and a perfect example of how a modern approach can rejuvenate even the most venerable of arcade games. But before I talk about that, something about my bladder.
Now, I tend to go and piss a lot. Not a weak-bladder in a leaking urine on my seat kind of way, but in the pub, I wander toilet-wards more often than most. Now, crawling out of bed at about one – I was up until five, as is a freelancer’s wont – I started playing Trials 2 again. Despite consuming the usual endless cups of tea that Jim provides, I don’t leave my seat – or, indeed, my dressing gown – for three hours. At which point I realise I probably should do some work. And get dressed. And eat. And – hey! – probably do something about this sense of fullness in my abdomen. It’s that compulsive.
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We like this sort of thing. Redlynx wrote to us to provide review code of their recent bike-stunt-thing, Trials 2: Second Edition. We haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but we wanted to bring it to your attention quickly as it looks somewhat neat and are a little annoyed we missed it (As Jim just put it “There are so many videogames!”. If only there was some kind of PC games blog that keeps track of all the best PC stuff for us to parasitise off. Man!). We’re always sucker for a Kick-Start-esque obstacle-course trial-thing game. And slogans like the one we use as the title popping up during their trailer before a montage of spine-disintegrating collisions is a sure way into our heart. Or, at least our website.
You can download the – ahem – trial version, which is about eighteen and a half Imperial Peggles in size. If it takes your fancy, you can unlock it with a code you pay money for. Go team capitalism!
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