I like racing games because they're lacking the excess fat that's found in most other types of video games. Stuff like: - Ridiculous twenty-hour stories about space marines and the things that eat space marines. - Realizing fifteen minutes too late that you need to light your Warhammer on fire BEFORE you strike the castle gates if you want them to open. - Tediously backtracking through levels and sniffing around dark corners to collect powerups that you may have missed the first time around whenever you're low on health and ammo. - Fighting tree slime. All that is lame and I don't want to see it! Racing games are basically video games stripped of all these excesses and distilled to gaming's core essence: pure challenge and competition. Plug the game in, whip around the track at high speeds and admire the scenery, but just as you're getting your sensory pleasure, the bastards in the car behind you start catching up and now you're getting the excitement of competition as well. It's an adrenaline-filled thrill, a rush of pure escapist release and then it's over. Bam! The race ends long before you even start to get bored. Although I still prefer cocaine really. With a racing game, there's no lengthy social life killing story you have to get emotionally involved in just to have fun, it's simply "there's the finish line, go cross it before these other assholes do and you'll get bragging rights." Cool. Let's do it. No major time investment required, no sentimental attachment needed, you play, you do it for twenty minutes, you enjoy yourself, you move on to the next one. In other words, a perfect relationship. Easy, fast and fun. Eventually you'll tire of your racing game when it becomes old and outdated and its looks have faded due to newer, prettier racing games coming out that run on more advanced technology, but when that happens you can always sell your old racing game to a used video game store and they, in turn, will sell it for cheap, therefore letting some poor guy who couldn't afford it when it was still popular take it home and play it years after its lost its popularity, while you get to trade up for a newer model. No punchline here, I just wanted to make women feel bad about themselves. You can race online against other people, race at home against your friends or race at an arcade against impossibly skilled Asian strangers who will smash your car to bits and then demolish you with their judgmental silence. No matter what though, it will almost always be fun, fast, furious and fantastically enraging whenever your competition keeps smoking you on the last corner and winning the race even though you were leading for the entire remainder of the lap. If you got an erection while reading that, you're only mildly gay, if you didn't get an erection you're impotent. Lose/Lose, just like what happens when you race against me sucka (even if you win I'm still going to bang your girlfriend). So it's pretty obvious that I like the idea of racing games. Yes well, the idea of racing game is great, but most racing games come with a sack full of problems that prevent them from being the perfect time wasters that they were designed to be. Too much shit is infesting my favorite game genre and its got to go. Here are the biggest problems, getting rid of them will make gaming better... Problem 1: All
right! So you got your friends together, you've all settled
down in your poorly lit basement and everyone is hyped and ready to
play some multiplayer on your brand new racing game! Excitement
turns to angry grunting when it turns out that the only car which
anyone can select is a broken down Chevette from the 1800's and you and
your friends can only race on three of the game's advertised 30 courses
out of the box. That's right: all the good stuff is locked... to
be unlocked at an excruciatingly slow pace as you waste the next ten
hours of your life plowing through the single player campaign.
Unfortunately, by the time you've unlocked enough courses to play an
adequate multiplayer session, it turns out that your friends have
already left - or worse yet - they've drank all the beer behind your
back while you were slaving away trying to unlock stuff. Life is
not always beautiful.All the good stuff is locked  Problem 2:
Laps Unless
your game is based on Formula One or NASCAR and it's trying to
maintain realism to the sport, there is no reason for the courses to
have laps. Laps are lazy as hell, because when a racing game uses
them, instead of creating one long, interesting course, programmers
just create one short stretch of track and then loop it three
times. Lap1, Lap2, Lap3 same exact shit three times in a
row. By merely copying and pasting a few times, laps allow
lazy developers to get away with programming one third of the levels
that
they should be programming.  Street Justice: tough but fair. S Problem 3:
Too much wasted
real estate on screen  In racing games, the most important thing is the ability to see the road... all these little icons, they just obscure the road. They clog up the screen and make it harder for you to see where you are supposed to go. They don't tell you anything important and if you look at them you end up like Sonny Bono. A pothead. Problem 4: Always
being forced to start in last place and then spending the entire
race slowly inching your way up from the 30th position until you can
hopefully creep into first at the last possible millisecond before the
finish line.The racing games that are designed like this are very annoying since the only reason you lose at them is because you always start way behind the guy in first place, not because you drove worse than him. It doesn't feel fair. Other racing games are better, the other games let you start the race at a respectable position like fourth, so you can get in first quickly and spend the majority of the race defending your lead which is a lot more fun and intense than merely playing catch-up. Problem
5:
Cardboard Cutout crowds.  If you think shitty looking crowds only appear in old games you're wrong. Even the otherwise prettiest modern games have ass looking crowds:  It's always a good feeling to know that cardboard cut outs applaud you everywhere you go. Wow... that's a great idea for a shitty horror movie. Make it so. Problem
6: Racing games
remind me of how poor I am.  In racing games, it's
fun to crash a Lamborghini into a wall or off a cliff and into a vat of
molten acid. But it's always such a come-down when you realize
you could never get away with this kind of behavior in real life... and
that sucks. |