Monthly Archives: June 2010

Okay, That’s Enough Cars

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I played a handful of more races in Forza 3, and wound up spending most of the money I’d accumulated in order to get that achievement for owning at least one car of every manufacturer (unfortunately the expensive DLC ones count), so I won’t be getting that Shelby Daytona Coupe anytime soon. Ah well.

I also went back and started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. I got frustrated with it a long time ago when I couldn’t beat the invitational event for the Impreza 22B, but I put some more time into the career mode and enjoyed it a lot. I eventually got back around to that same invitational, and after what felt like 20+ tries, finally won that damn Subaru. It was well worth it though, as it’s probably one of the best cars in its class for the game.

The drifting-related events were still frustrating me a lot though, especially the Time-Vs-Kudos ones, so I wound up dropping the difficulty down to easy soon after. That made a lot of the more straightforward races a bit *too* easy, but I just wanted to have some fun, and as I made my way up the rankings some of the Master-level events were still a bit close. Those A-class cars are a handful to control. I eventually hit rank 1, and although there are still a bunch of other ‘arcade’ events to do, I think that’s all I’ll do in PGR4 for now.

I’m kind of a bit tired of racing games now, so I think it’s time to get back to other genres for a bit. Next up, finishing Bioshock 2…

Newer

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But that’s not all that’s new…

There’s a flood of new racing games, and I also picked up ModNation Racers for the PS3. It’s much more Mario Kart-like with the arcadey handling, twisty tracks, shortcuts, random powerups, etc. The big hook for it is that you can customize things though, and there are already plenty of them (mostly well-known characters of course) being shared online. For your racer and vehicle, it’s purely cosmetic, but you can create tracks as well and I’ll have to check a bunch of them out.

Single-player also seems to suffer from the unfairness of becoming a target for attacks 10 feet from the finish line, dropping you back three places. Fortunately you can spend boost power on shielding yourself, but the timing is tricky. The AI is tough, and the passing requirements for unlocking items for modding are even tougher, so completing the single-player campaign isn’t going to be easy. Unfortunately, online has its problems too. Lobbies have to fill up from scratch with every new race, meaning you often only get half the full complement of 12 racers. And you have to go through annoyingly-long loading screens as you toggle back and forth between the online race, the ModSpot, the race, the ModSpot…

I also picked up 3D Dot Game Heroes out of curiosity, and it’s pretty much a clone of Zelda: Link To The Past, except in a 3D voxel-like presentation. There’s kind of a cheeky self-awareness to it all, but otherwise it hasn’t really had much of an effect so far, so it pretty much remains a Zelda-alike. I’ve only done the first temple (of six) so far, which is pretty much just part of the tutorial.

And as if I didn’t have enough racing games already, I wound up picking up Gran Turismo for the PSP when it was set at a new ‘classic’ pricing on PSN. It definitely feels like Gran Turismo, but I’m still struggling with the controls a bit. Using the dpad leads to fishtailing like crazy (though it’s better for minor adjustments to straighten yourself out), and with the analog nub I find myself lurching around corners trying to find the right amount of steering. Maybe it’ll just take time to adjust after playing Forza 3 so much lately.

The challenges are pretty much like the license tests of previous games, but the passing requirements are pretty fair and I’ve managed to get at least silver on all of them so far, and a few golds. No reward cars though, just cash. Other than that, you just pick a car and track and race a random selection of AI cars. (There’s a ‘drift mode’ too but I haven’t tried it yet.)

It’s not entirely what I’d hoped for, but it might be fun in small bursts, and it’ll get me a head start in GT5.

New

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Wow, there’s a whole bunch of new stuff to catch up on.

I picked up Blur for the 360, since it looked interesting and I’m winding down on Forza 3. It’s basically like a Mario Kart-style racer, with powerups you pick up and fire at other racers, but on realistic cars and tracks. You can also use powerups to block incoming attacks instead. So far I’ve found the single-player game a bit frustrating since it seems like so much depends on random luck; I can come in second place one race, and then 18th the next, and I can imagine it getting frustrating trying to hit the specific advancement requirements.

In online multiplayer though, Blur is a blast. It doesn’t even really matter where you eventually wind up placing, with 20 players in total there’s plenty of action going on no matter where you are. There’s a level-based progression system that unlocks new cars and ‘mods’ that affect the rules slightly, and I’m up to level 13 (of 50) so far.

While picking up Blur, I noticed that Picross 3D was out. I played the hell out of the original DS Picross, so I had to pick this one up. It’s the same basic idea, expose the image within a grid by carving out unwanted blocks, but this time it’s a sculpture in a 3D block. The information you use is fairly different though, as you’re only told the total number of blocks to keep in a given row, how many groups the blocks are broken into, and not all rows are numbered. There’s a fairly lengthy tutorial that explains it all though, and I’ve perfected the Easy puzzles and just started in on the Normal difficulty.

And it’s not so new, but a fair bit of stuff has happened in EQ2 as well. I played my illusionist around the Everfrost area for a while last weekend, getting him 5 levels and burning up all the saved-up vitality xp. My mystic cleared out a bunch of the monster-farming quests in his log and then in the weekly group we went and finished off the Golden Efreeti Boots quest. Or the rest of the group did, anyway — I screwed up and missed a turn-in when we were in the Temple of Sol Ro, and then got wiped out by a level 70 dragon while trying to get back to it. I didn’t want to waste their time, so I told them to forget it and I’ll finish it myself at some later point, when everything’s lower-level.