Post by Meisnerd on Apr 21, 2012 17:20:48 GMT -5
What's your favorite racing game?
Mine, as I said in the Diablo 3 thread, is Extreme-G 3 for the Gamecube and PS2. It is, by a wide margin, the fastest, most difficult, fun and exhilirating racing game I've ever played. Here's a sample video of an end-game level. (For me the video was bugged in window mode, but looks fine in full screen mode.)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu5UjM49lPQ
Another reason it's so ridiculously difficult is because it's also a combat game, where all 12 racers are trying to kill each other as well as place first. Each bike has shields and weapon energy. Unfortunately, your shield energy is also your afterburner fuel, so you can speed up at the cost of health.
This combination is made even worse by one weapon in particular - bouncing mines dropped by a racer in front of you. When you hit one (they'r dropped in clusters of 3-5) you slow down greatly, and lose HP. In order to make up this lost ground, you have to spend more HP to boost back just to get to where you were, but now at much lower HP. At low speed they're fairly easy to see and avoid, but at the higher difficulties (speeds) they become progressively more difficult to dodge, until at the max difficulty, it's pretty much random chance - by the time they appear on your screen, you have less than a second before you either hit or miss them, so it's largely out of the player's hands whether or not he gets nailed by a mine. This is a very frustrating aspect of the game, to say the least.
Yet another part that makes the game exponentially more difficult the further you progress is the method by which you regain shield energy. There are strips along the side of certain sections of track (they appear to glow green) and while you are driving over them, they regenerate your shields. However, they are a fixed length, and the amount of time you spend on them is directly proportional to how long it takes you to cross it, and by extension, how fast you're going. Higher speed = less time spent on the pad. Problem is, the higher your speed, the more HP you're going to lose to various events, and you need to spend MORE time on the pad, not LESS in order to recover what you lost.
Lastly comes wall damage. Almost completely insignificant at low speeds, and very dangerous at high speeds. At max speeds, you lose a visible chunk of hitpoints with each tap against the walls. This also slows you down!
So when you combine the fact that by going faster you can't dodge projectiles as easily, you're going too fast to navigate most turns and bends properly and hit walls more often, and the faster you go causes each wall bump to do more damage, and the fact that the faster you go the less HP you will regenerate each lap can make for some retardedly difficult levels.
There is one level in particular that I have probably played 200+ times. I have only ever placed 1st on this track, and I've only done this once. The other 199 attempts ended in death because the track is so long that I simply did not have enough HP to survive 4 laps, lol.
But despite all of this, I LOVE this game because of the adrenaline rush, and many of the things that make this so hard make it that much more fun to me. I thrive on challenges, especially ones based on the players ability to dexterously control an object.
Mine, as I said in the Diablo 3 thread, is Extreme-G 3 for the Gamecube and PS2. It is, by a wide margin, the fastest, most difficult, fun and exhilirating racing game I've ever played. Here's a sample video of an end-game level. (For me the video was bugged in window mode, but looks fine in full screen mode.)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu5UjM49lPQ
Another reason it's so ridiculously difficult is because it's also a combat game, where all 12 racers are trying to kill each other as well as place first. Each bike has shields and weapon energy. Unfortunately, your shield energy is also your afterburner fuel, so you can speed up at the cost of health.
This combination is made even worse by one weapon in particular - bouncing mines dropped by a racer in front of you. When you hit one (they'r dropped in clusters of 3-5) you slow down greatly, and lose HP. In order to make up this lost ground, you have to spend more HP to boost back just to get to where you were, but now at much lower HP. At low speed they're fairly easy to see and avoid, but at the higher difficulties (speeds) they become progressively more difficult to dodge, until at the max difficulty, it's pretty much random chance - by the time they appear on your screen, you have less than a second before you either hit or miss them, so it's largely out of the player's hands whether or not he gets nailed by a mine. This is a very frustrating aspect of the game, to say the least.
Yet another part that makes the game exponentially more difficult the further you progress is the method by which you regain shield energy. There are strips along the side of certain sections of track (they appear to glow green) and while you are driving over them, they regenerate your shields. However, they are a fixed length, and the amount of time you spend on them is directly proportional to how long it takes you to cross it, and by extension, how fast you're going. Higher speed = less time spent on the pad. Problem is, the higher your speed, the more HP you're going to lose to various events, and you need to spend MORE time on the pad, not LESS in order to recover what you lost.
Lastly comes wall damage. Almost completely insignificant at low speeds, and very dangerous at high speeds. At max speeds, you lose a visible chunk of hitpoints with each tap against the walls. This also slows you down!
So when you combine the fact that by going faster you can't dodge projectiles as easily, you're going too fast to navigate most turns and bends properly and hit walls more often, and the faster you go causes each wall bump to do more damage, and the fact that the faster you go the less HP you will regenerate each lap can make for some retardedly difficult levels.
There is one level in particular that I have probably played 200+ times. I have only ever placed 1st on this track, and I've only done this once. The other 199 attempts ended in death because the track is so long that I simply did not have enough HP to survive 4 laps, lol.
But despite all of this, I LOVE this game because of the adrenaline rush, and many of the things that make this so hard make it that much more fun to me. I thrive on challenges, especially ones based on the players ability to dexterously control an object.
