Oh dear, folks. It’s one of those days. Y’know, those days when nothing happens in the gaming world and as a result you get blog frontpages like ours where there’s just nothing going on. Except for posts like these. D’oh!
Anyway. Read on for the top five things I like to do on a dry news day when there’s nothing else to write about.
If you’ve made a really cool Mod or Kart — say, one based on Optimus Prime — and don’t want copies appearing, lock it from being remixed. OTHERWISE THIS HAPPENS. JEEEEZ.
Lesson learned there then guys. If you make something awesome in Modnation Racers, be sure to lock it before publishing. There’s Create XP to be lost if you don’t!
(And you guys that did clone my Optimus, you’re all assholes.)
The Ultimate Fighting Championship is, as far as I can see, a big event where lots of people gather in the same place and shout at some big sweaty men in shorts who spend about 10 minutes engaging in some big baby-oiled cuddles before one of them falls over and is declared the loser. Or so I thought, until I sat down with a copy of UFC Undisputed 2010, the second game in THQ’s series of mixed martial arts (MMA) scrapping games.
Modnation Racers is a racing game. It involves racing. Honestly though? I’ve spent less time racing than I have making my karts and my mods look RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME.
That said, when it comes to actually hitting the track, you’ve gotta make sure your kart looks super fly. So here’s a quick guide, step-by-step, to making your karts look good, with an example kart showing you step-by-step how to do it yourself!
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Have a look at this week’s PlayStation Store updates and you’ll notice that there are not one, but two Modnation Racers downloads available for your PSP if you fancy the portable version of the DIY kartracer we reviewed a few days ago. One of them is the game itself as a digital download straight to your console; the other is the curiously named Online Entitlement Pack.
The story behind this? The Online Entitlement Pack is, as the title might explain, the entitlement to play Modnation Racers on PSP across the internet. In other words, you need this pack if you want to race online or share your creations with other MNR PSP owners. It’ll set you back £7.99 on the store.
But wait! Before you make busy with the pitchforks and the flaming torches, hold up a second. If you buy Modnation Racers as a digital download for £16.99 or buy a new boxed copy of the game on UMD, you’ll find that online play is either already enabled (in the former) or ready to be enabled through a PSN voucher code found inside your game box.
Why have this pack on sale then? It’s to combat both second-hand sales and piracy. Y’see, in order to encourage people to either buy new copies of games from Sony or to buy games in general (instead of going all Jack Sparrow on Sony) the decision’s been made to essentially cut back on features of games until you’ve at least bought a segment of the game from the publisher. Obviously when you pirate a game Sony’ll make nothing from it, and the same goes for second-hand sales – those profits all go straight into the pockets of Messrs GameStop, GAME, and so on.
In order to play Modnation Racers to the full on your PSP you’ll either need to buy a new boxed copy, a new digital copy or a used copy with the £7.99 Online Entitlement Pack to go with it. Does that sound like a bum deal, considering how cheap pre-0wned copies will probably be? The second-hand market is generally giving publishers a bit of a bum deal and so trying to scrape a little bit of cash back isn’t that bad a shout.
In Modnation Racers‘ case, cutting out the ability to share your creations is a bit of an Achilles’ heel if you buy a used copy and I’d hope that future profit-preserving measures aren’t any more severe than this. Of course, it might just encourage people to buy a new copy instead if it adds up to be cheaper in the long run – and that’s exactly what Sony would be hoping for.
As far as comic books go, every hero has to fall at some point or else it gets sorta boring watching them save the world/parallel universe/a cat from a tree over and over again. Guitar Hero is no different…except it’s sorta fallen anyway. Milking of the franchise, unnecessary price hikes for DLC and even the re-release of songs from previous current-generation GH games such as World Tour means that, in my eyes anyway, Activision are simply reviving the series with paddles as much as they can to keep it alive. Beep beep beep beeeeeeeeep.
What Guitar Hero needs then is not to fall, or even have a comic book death where it comes back in a few months as a different game. Nay, what it needs to do is just die.
This month’s copy of the UK’s Official PlayStation Magazine has a brief 2-page spread on Guitar Hero 6. The idea for shaking up the genre? Instead of just playing as a band making their way to rock immortality, you’ll play through a new Quest Mode with a Brutal Legend-style storyline that will doubtless be filled to the brim with references to classic rock and metal all over the place. It’ll be narrated by Gene Simmons and will revolve around your character of choice – Axel Steel, Johnny Napalm, yadda yadda yadda – building up an army of rockers to face down The Beast himself.
Sounds somewhat cool, right? But the problem here is the necessity to reinvent. Not to bring up comparisons with Rock Band, but…ah hell, I am bringing up comparisons with Rock Band. Save for Rock Revolution there’s nothing else to compare the series to and frankly Rock Band keeps doing what it’s doing far better than Guitar Hero seems to be. With just one “true” sequel under its belt and extensions outside of this kept purposeful (see: The Beatles Rock Band, and try not to look at Green Day) Rock Band has done very little to derive from what it was meant to do — simulate the experience of being in a band.
Guitar Hero? Well, when I saw the photo of a “metal” Johnny Napalm at the top of the 2-page OPM spread, accompanied by the info that he’ll have a 6x multiplier when you use his special ability — instead of an 8x when you use Star Power in current GH games? what? — I realised just how irrelevant the series has become.
It’s not just about picking up a plastic instrument anymore and playing whatever the game gives you; the age of single-player Guitar Hero and cover recordings is long dead. In its place we have co-operative play and as the genre became more and more mainstream (especially with the advent of Rock Band) we saw masses of DLC appearing allowing audiences to play what they wanted. In the context of Rock Band, this really was what they wanted, as all Rock Band DLC continues to work across both main games regardless of advancement in Rock Band 2‘s game engine.
Guitar Hero refused to play catchup and as a result we get tiny batches of comparatively overpriced downloadable content and an unnecessary number of extra releases packed to the brim with songs we don’t even want. Be honest, did you know even half of the songs in World Tour? Following World Tour we’ve started to see cross-compatibility but even then, in very limited form: I’m not sure which songs are exportable and to which games and why these decisions were even made. It’s all a bit of a mess.
Maybe I’m raining the hate down on Guitar Hero a little too much but the way I see it, it’s a series that needs canning. In trying to bring a reinvention to a series that has done nothing but reinvent the same wheel over and over for 11 games, it’s a case of too little, too late when put up against a franchise like Rock Band that has the genre cornered and with good reason.
11 games in, do you think a “storyline” reinvention of Guitar Hero is what the series needs, or is it time to bury the franchise for what it’s worth?
UPDATED: Miley Cyrus DLC has just been released for Guitar Hero. I think we can declare this franchise dead.
Modnation Racers might not be out yet but that won’t stop me from finding any excuse to write about it. If my review wasn’t any indication of how great a game this LBP-veined kart racer is, perhaps this pie chart will help. Then again, it probably won’t, because it’s just a pie-chart. That’s all it is. Just a pie chart.
Every business presentation that has a pie-chart in immediately doesn’t make any sense. This is FACT. And also nothing to do with this article whatsoever. So here’s a pie chart all about Modnation Racers. The game itself is out on the 21st in Europe and hits American shelves on the 25th.
Look, it's a business deal, alright? It needed SOMETHING interesting.
Remember OnLive, the cloud gaming service that will let you play anything instantly by streaming it over teh interwebs to your telly without the need to buy anything but a controller? (Or your PC, or your Mac, I know. But “to your telly” sounded much better.)
Fresh from an extensive beta-testing session in the US, UK ISP BT (BTW that’s a lot of acronyms, LOL) have announced they’ve secured a deal with OnLive which will allow them to bundle OnLive controllers and the service itself with their broadband and TV packages, meaning that aside from accessing video on demand and surfing the web with them, you’ll be able to include “gaming without any consoles” in your list of “things I can do with my internet” too.
That’s not to say that BT have exclusivity rights – it just means that when you sign up for BT broadband you’ll be offered the choice of an OnLive controller on the side. If you don’t have BT you can still go out and buy an OnLive joypad and the software that allows you to sign up for the service and buy some vidyagames, albeit at a higher price point than you would pay if you got it from BT. Probably.
If you’ve forgotten, OnLive is a service which, using the power of just a special joypad, lets you buy games digitally but play them instantly without any waiting for the game to download. This is because when you’re playing it, all of the intense processing is performed by a remote computer, and the output is then relayed to your screen as if you were playing it in realtime. Obviously, picture quality and the omnipresent threat of lag are issues but according to OnLive these issues have mostly been dealt with and with that comes the promise of 720p HD gaming without the need to splash out on a console. Neato.
So, if you’re on BT and get a letter through the post from them sometime later this year (OnLive’s currently slated for a summer release in the States) advertising OnLive, let us know if you sign up for the service. Then invite one of us over to try it out for ourselves because we’re really quite poor.
Since its announcement at E3 last year there’s been a lot of interest in Modnation Racers, United Front Games’ addition to Sony’s line of “Play, Create, Share” toybox games that aims to do for racers what LittleBigPlanet did for platformers. Does it hit the racing line, or bound off into the tire wall?
MNR is a kart racer in the mold of every kart racer that has gone before: a heap of diminutive cutesy characters get behind the wheel of dinky go-karts that match their wicked cool style and set about using all manner of speed boosts, missiles and shields to try and beat each other around tracks themed around things such as professional race tracks, jungles, crumbling temples and bustling cities. So far, so very normal.
Creating Mods and Karts like this takes minutes.
BUT WAIT. What makes Modnation Racers unique is that everything is customisable, tweakable and generally shake-upable by you, the dear gamer, with the DualShock slobbed there on the sofa, with the Mountain Dew and the Fritos. From your kart to your character — and naturally, tracks — you’re able to create the lot from scratch, tailor it to your exact likings and then upload it all to the net for others to download and try out for themselves.
This is all well and good, but if the karts don’t drive well then it’s all a bit of a waste of time. Thankfully, Modnation‘s petrol-powered pipsqueaks are all well and good, responding deftly to a flick of the stick to zip across the game’s 30-odd pre-made circuits and drifting in wide, dramatic arcs with a simple press of the X button. Drifting is key to going places fast: chaining together slides, hangtime on jumps and mid-air spins builds up a boost bar at the side of the screen.
This boost bar can be used to, erm, give your kart a speed boost, but it can also be used to go on the offensive and sideswipe opponents, or create a shield around your kart to deflect incoming attacks. These attacks range from lightning bolts, which disable your kart, to full-on swarms of explosive missiles and sonic booms that throw your driving off (and usually into an explosive barrel or off of a cliff).
As a balanced mechanic, the boost bar is a little off. Sideswiping or using your shield requires a specified minimum amount of boost and Modnation Racers has a very bad habit of giving you just below this amount whenever you need it most. Boost ahead of the pack and you’ll probably find yourself desperately needing your shield as the entire pack unleashes weapon-based hell on you from behind. If you manage to survive that by somehow having enough boost left to deploy your shield, someone else will decide to shoot at you and you’ll end up at the back of the pack again. It’s not the most balanced mechanic but it’s not entirely broken and can be tolerated with a gentle grimace each time it happens.
The plentiful career mode forms part of the Modspot hub that Modnation Racers calls home, with other modes such as online play, hot lap scoreboards and four-player split screen multiplayer (yes!) accessible from the open-ended menu. In the style of LittleBigPlanet‘s Pod, you can also invite fellow racers (or Mods, as the game christens them) to your Modspot and from there embark on races together online. Well, presumably anyway, because the servers aren’t online yet.
The Modspot hosts access to racing, creating things and checking out scoreboards.
As for the Modnation bit of MNR? Creating your ideal Mods, karts and tracks is a piece of cake from the confines of the game’s Creation Station. Karts can be customized from a base body model by changing engines, seats, spoilers, wheels and suspension and then utterly ravaged with your choice of stickers and additional accessories such as mirrors, big fat GPS devices and, um, giant satellite TV antennae.
As for Mods, you can customize skin colours and patterns and then move onto facial features, hair and headgear, followed by clothing down to the last detail (seriously, whoever thought it was a cool idea to let you change the colour of the stitching of your jeans, THANK YOU). As with karts, you can then decorate everything with stickers to your heart’s content, and even apply effects such as a metallic sheen to each sticker to make your Mods and karts truly unique. With just a few days of MNR experience under my belt I’ve managed to create some seriously cool-looking karts and I’m pretty proud of my self-portrait Mod too…Hellraiser-style hat full of pins and all.
Then there’s the Track Editor. If the already-deep kart and Mod editors weren’t enough, the track editor runs so deep that it might as well hit the center of the Earth and then just KEEP GOING AND REFUSE TO STOP. This fantastically flexible editor allows you to be as in-control, or as passive as you like: basic track editing allows you to drive out your ideal track with a giant road-laying truck and then auto-populate it with props, speed-boost pads and pick-ups in the space of five minutes, immediately ready to race and publish. Easy peasy.
Wait, there’s more! You can sculpt the entire landscape to your pleasing, place every prop yourself — ranging from buildings to animals and trees, along with race items such as power-ups and ramps which launch racers high into the air — and reshaping the track’s height, width and banking block by block. On top of that, you can create branching pieces of track or create off-circuit shortcuts which the AI can even drive on using what MNR calls Breadcrumbs.
Races vary from multi-car scraps to one-on-one duels.
As a result it’s easy to lose yourself in Modnation‘s track editor for hours at a time, tweaking every curve until it’s perfect. Dismiss any cynical ideas that the racing genre is more restricted than say, the platforming game style that LittleBigPlanet embraced so well; Modnation‘s track editor can lay waste to days of your life in a bid to get everything just right before you publish that perfect circuit to the net.
Combine these frankly deliciously deep customisation options with a solid handling model and the potential — emphasis on potential, as the servers are as dead as Elvis — for frantic online mayhem and you’ve got the PS3′s own answer to Mario Kart and a steadfast addition to the “Play, Create, Share” range that Sony are so eagerly promoting, and rightly so.
If you’re looking for a solid kart racer you’re sorted; but with the powerful tools you’ve got at your disposal, you’ve got the potential to do so much more. As far as console exclusives go it’s up there with Uncharted 2, LBP and God of War III, and as racers in general go it’s hanging around at the top of the charts too. Highly recommended to PS3 owners of all shapes and sizes.
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Making a note here: huge success. To celebrate the release of PC gaming platform Steam on Mac — meaning I can’t call it a PC gaming platform anymore — Valve have decided to give away Portal in its entirety for the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead). And no, it’s not First Slice, the glorified demo that hit Steam when the game came out, but full-blown Portal Portal. For nothing. Gratis. Nada. Nowt. Zero. You get the point.
If you’ve got a PC that meets the minimum spec (or a Mac in general, since the spec of every Mac more than justifies the ludicrous amount of cash you paid for the thing) then I’d heartily advise you to hop onto Steam, create an account if you need to, and download Portal in its entirety for free. You’ve got until the 24th of May — that’s a Monday, by the way — to get it, at which point it’ll return to its original price point of, y’know, whatever dollars, since it won’t matter as you missed out on it being free. But there’s no sense crying over every mistake. You loser.
Anyway, look at me still talking when there’s science to do. Hop onto the Steam website here to commence your download, or check out the Store section of Steam. And remember (being so sincere right now): IT’S FREE!
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