Tag Archives: racing games

Games

A Game: Midnight Club LA Remix (PSP)

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While I’m been away from my PC over the past week, I’ve been indulging my gaming habit with this gem of a game on my PSP. It’s essentially a shrunk down version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 but it still packs an astonishing amount of content and will likely delight any racing fan for a good long while. It delivers seriously intense racing experiences, a very satisfying sense of progression over time and despite being somewhat repetitive and frustratingly difficult at times, a tremendous sense of achievement when you’ve finally won some of the harder races.

Midnight Club LA Remix is essentially an open world racer in which you drive around a complete and beautifully detailed city to find races to participate in, earning reputation, unlocking rewards and making money along the way. One of the things I liked best about the game is how much it felt like an RPG. Starting as a virtual unknown in a old and clunky car, you’ll painstakingly progress towards the flashiest and sleekest Mercedes and Lamborghinis. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, Remix uses actual cars and motorcycles from real world brands, so there’s that additional sense of realism.

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Games

Rockstar gives PC gamers the finger

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I’ve been waiting for the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV for a very, very long time now, but after reading everyone’s complaints about it, it’s looking more and more likely that I’ll be skipping it, at least until it gets a decent patch. Where to start with the litany of complaints?

How about the extremely lengthy and tedious installation process that requires you to sign up for and be logged into both Microsoft’s Windows Live network and Rockstar’s own Social Club network? If you’d bought this via Steam, you’d naturally need to be logged into that as well, though Steam won’t sell GTA4 to customers outside North America. If you’re a Vista 64 user, you’ll be upset to learn that you’ll have a hard time getting it to run due to a Windows Live incompatibility, despite the fact that according to Microsoft, compatibility with Vista 64 is a requirement for the Games for Windows label.

Next, if you actually manage to get the thing running but were hoping to play it using a gamepad, you’ll soon discover that the only gamepads that will work with it are the Xbox ones. PC-only gamepads, such as the ones manufactured by Saitek that I’ve been looking at buying, simply won’t work with the game.

Finally, the one that’s really big for me, is the realization that no current computer on Earth can run this game at max settings. Even IGN had performance issues running the game on a beefy system (Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX with Vista 32) after turning the settings down. I think my poor 512 MB 8800GT will choke on it. Yes, the game looks good, but not that good. As many others have observed, it’s likely that Rockstar didn’t put much effort into porting the game over and optimizing it for PCs. And if you have an ATI card instead, be warned that there has been massive complaints about graphical glitches that Rockstar has said it is aware of and are looking at finding solutions for.

Fortunately for us, the PC port of GTA4’s main competitor, Saint’s Row 2, is due out in January next year. While it’s not as technically impressive as GTA4, plenty of reviewers have named it as the better game. Unless Rockstar cleans up its act and fast, that’s what I’ll be spending my time and money on.

Games

Driiiifting…

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I’ve still playing GRID in between bouts of killing vast numbers of nearly naked natives in Medieval 2. I’m just about done with it though. I’ve been able to win every event consistently except for the drifting ones, and although I can understand how drifting works in the game, I can’t muster the patience to practice enough to get good at it. I curse the day racing game designers decided that making drifting a separate event was a good idea, as opposed to being a technique that’s generally useful for racing on twisty tracks.

I have to admit however that it feels immensely satisfying when you actually succeed in pulling off a good drift while racing. I won my street races in Japan using the Nissan Skyline but I’ve tested the same tracks using a Subaru Impreza and I can see how much faster you can shoot through the tracks using properly executed drifting techniques. My favourite race event is actually Pro Togue, which is racing up and down twisty Japanese mountain roads, Initial D-style, against a single competitor and you’re not allowed to touch one another’s cars. You generally need a good bit of drifting to win these events. Anyway, here’s a gallery of GRID screenshots just because they look so cool.


Games

Playing GRID

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Now I’m not much of a driver, whether in games or in real life. I’m dabbled in my fair share of racing games over the years, but I’ve never been a particularly enthusiastic fan of them until I tried GRID. Now I realize that GRID is really somewhere between an arcade racer and a true simulator, and until now I’m been playing with the realism dial turned “low”, but, damn, this game still beats every other racing game I’ve ever tried hands down. If the only racing games you’ve ever played are the Need for Speed series and its ilk, you really owe it to yourself to check out real racing feels like. You can just feel the wheels burning rubber on the asphalt.

The highest praise that I can give it is that whenever something goes wrong in a race, I know that it’s my fault and I know what exactly I should do to fix it. Constrast that with the NFS games’ tendency to up the difficulty level by randomly having traffic pop up at suspiciously convenient times for you to crash into. There’s no silly rubber-banding as well. If you’re that good, you are free to leave your AI opponents in the dust. Plus the replay that you get after winning a race is probably better than 90% of the car chases you see in movies.

Read Tom Chick’s list of 10 reason why you should be playing GRID if you’re still not convinced.