More splendidly silly timetrial racing is coming with Trackmania 2 Lagoon [official site] on May 23rd, Ubisoft have announced. It’ll bring tropical courses to race across in a new solo campaign and a new multiplayer team mode. The taxonomy of Trackmania is endlessly confusing but I believe this is Nadeo rolling the lagoon environment of 2016’s Trackmania Turbo into the ManiaPlanet world of Trackmania 2 to share its player-made content and community features.

Ahead of Lagoon’s launch, Ubisoft have launched a big ManiaPlanet update with performance improvements and new features. Read the rest of this entry »

Shootmania is to shooty games as Trackmania is to racing games: streamlined, almost austere, a platform for user creativity, and French. But though Trackmania cut away chaff to focus on the fundamentals of completing tracks quickly, Shootmania’s own abstractions – unusual laser-y weapons and unique modes and so on – made it hard to comprehend to people trained on other multiplayer shooters.

Shootmania Platform might help. It’s purposes are two-fold: to act as a showcase for the suite of creative tools and marketplace of Maniaplanet, and to introduce new players to the fundamentals of movement in Shootmania. There’s a trailer and more detail below.

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