Review: Midnight Club: Los Angeles - 7

Midnight Club: Los Angeles has the feel and look of most arcade style racing games, but is brought down by its difficulty and various flawed game play elements. The overall look and set up of the game is nice and works for this style of game, but it doesn’t fit well when placed together with the extreme difficulty. It has a lot of stuff going for it but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Midnight Club: LA uses the concept of an open world for you to drive around in and find racers to take on. An open world means that you have an entire city to drive through and the races that you take part in are set up in certain areas /streets of the city. For example, this same concept is found in games like Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed Most Wanted. This game requires you to open your map and select your next opponent, then drive and find them. At times, you will be able to race your opponent to the start line which adds a bit more to the experience. Though, this game doesn’t really require an open world setting for it; the style of venue doesn’t really add much to the game. The city doesn’t have many notable land marks, so you won’t be able to remember how the city is laid out. What makes it weirder is that even though it’s an open world, during the races you still have check points to meet. So you can’t find your own way to the finish line. But you can still drive off the path, which can cause you to fall far behind and adds to the game difficulty.

The game play in Midnight Club: LA also is feels off. Because it isn’t a simulation racer (a style of driving game where the car’s mechanics replicate driving a care in real life), it focus’s on the concept of “hold down the accelerator and dodge obstacles.” This kind of game play is found in the Need for Speed and Burnout games. What this game falters on with this control style is that it focus’s too much on this. In most games with this style of racing, the break button is still needed during some sharp turns or to help avoid an obstacle. Unlike those, Midnight Club: LA doesn’t use the brake button at all. In fact, using it will cause you to slow down so much at a turn, that you will easily have your opponent(s) pull ahead. This makes you have to always worry about whether you are going to fast or not when reaching a turn and hoping you have enough room between you and the guy behind you to use the brake. Not being able to use the brake button much can make driving in between cars and taking sharp turns very difficult.

On the other hand, the game awards you with new “Special Abilities” the further you go through the game. These can be anything from slowing down time so you can manoeuvre better for a few seconds or even causing an opponent to break down for a bit. These help out quite a bit during a race; slowing down time when you realise you need to make a sharp turn immediately can really save your life. The addition of these abilities are good and fun to use and ease the pressure of the game difficulty. They allow for more thought and strategy to be used in the race and gives you more diversity to the way you handle the tracks.

This brings us to the difficulty of the game, which is very high. With a lot of racing games, not having a super clean run can cost you the race. This aspect is quite frequent in Midnight Club: LA. What makes this even worse is that the opponents will hardly ever crash into anything or overshoot a turn. Your opponent(s) always knows exactly how fast they should be going and the best route to the finish. This causes you to always need to be on your toes. No matter how far back your opponent is, one wrong turn or collision can still cost you first place.

To add to the difficulty, they set you up with four different levels of challenge to play. Green is easiest, yellow is medium, orange is hard, and red is hardest. For the majority of the time I spent with the game, I was playing either green or a few yellow runs. Green became quite easy for me once I upgraded my car as much as I could, but I was still only winning by a few short seconds. Yellow was the level I had to play at to have a challenge and yet still have some chance of winning. Normally you’d be able to keep replaying the races so that way you can memorize some of the hard sections and practise it – not in this game. Each time you do the race again, after losing, it changes the track. You’re still doing the same race, but now you’re driving through a different set up. This makes any chance of trying to practise at the areas you screwed up at impossible and greatly increases the game’s difficulty. Not being able to memorize key turns and the layout of the race tracks can really annoy you.

If you do get tired of the computer players, you can take your driving online. The game allows for up to sixteen players racing at once with various different game modes. Besides the standard racing modes you can play types such as Keep Away, the player must hold onto a flag for as long as they can; as well as Stockpile, the player must collect as many flags as they can. The online also adds a couple more special abilities for you to use against your opponents.

One of the nicest things about Midnight Club: LA is the graphics and the way it presents itself. Everything looks real nice and shiny wherever you go. The car crashes aren’t as good as what we’ve seen in games like Motorstorm or Burnout Paradise though since your car will never blow up. However, it does a good job of making your car look like trash if you get banged up enough. The city of Los Angeles in which you play also looks great and has a day and night cycle. The city’s weather can even change from sunny to cloudy to even start to rain on you while you race. So you will never have to race in only one type of setting/weather pattern.

The music in Midnight Club: LA is also good and diverse. You can select different genres in which to play depending on your music taste. The best part about the music in the game is that it allows you to make a Favourites Playlist. This lets you choose which songs specifically you like the most or want to listen to. The inclusion of this is great since listening to music you can’t stand and getting frustrated at the game are not a good combination.

Overall, Midnight Club: LA is a very nice looking game that just gets frustrating after a short while of playing. The game play and difficulty make it a real hard to stick with. However, if you can get past the tedious beginning, it fixes some of these issues when you start getting the better cars and superior tune ups. The game presents itself very nicely and can get extremely fun when racing online. Though it doesn’t bring anything new to the genre and doesn’t stand out as a better racing game against some of the current contenders on the market. It does a good job of looking sharp, but can be hard to get into and if you really want the best racing experience, you’ll look somewhere else.

Overall: 7/10

I miss RPGs

This weekend has made me realize that I haven't played a good RPG for quite some time. The last one that comes to mind is Final Fantasy 3 and maybe Lost Odyssey before that. Now yes, Final Fantasy 3 was good but I never finished it because the final boss arena required me to go level grinding for a few hours, something I didn't want to do. Lost Odyssey on the other hand - I didn't like.

So this weekend while watching TV, I remembered that Cheap Ass Gamers was saying that all GBA games were $5 at EB. This by the way was very much false (Super Mario World 3 was $45 used!!). This made me think about the GBA games I had missed and wanted to pick up. Earlier in the week I had made a list, it included, Final Fantasy 6, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and more. Those were the big name ones. So since I wasn't able to pick these up earlier this week, I wanted to play Final Fantasy 5.

I had been really hoping to get 6 because I one day want to have experienced all the main numbered ones. But I remembered that I had hardly played 5. So I picked it up, and played it all weekend. And I had a great time with it and will be playing it for a while.

What this has done though is really made me want to get back into RPGs. I haven't really gotten into one for such a long time. Just not many good ones have come out that I've wanted. Now that Chrono Trigger is out, I'll be trying to get that around Christmas time. I really can't wait for it because it'll be for my DS (playing the SP again is a little annoying and I don't feel like grabbing the DS for this) and because it was a huge game when it first came out. I never got to experience it on the SNES so I really want to now.

The next RPG I really can't wait for is Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for the DS. Why am I so excited for this game? Simple, it is Fire Emblem and I haven't played a good FE game since the GBA games. I actually miss not having a new mission to go into. And there's just something about playing FE in my hands (portable) as opposed to have to set a time in which to sit on the couch and only focus on that.

So those are some of the games I can't wait to get a hold of soon and will throughly throw me back into my old RPG days. And to think that RPGs are my favorite genre.

Review: Shaun White Snowboarding - 4

Shaun White Snowboarding is Ubisoft’s first shot at the snowboarding genre. They teamed up with celebrity boarder Shaun White and came out with an overall bad experience. This game does a bad job of making you really feel like you’re flying down the slopes by its shoddy controls and bad physics. The game was an overall let down and won’t make you want to continue with it.

The graphics in Shaun White Snowboarding aren’t bad. They do a good job of recreating a mountain- scape and the atmosphere included. I generally found the area I was boarding down was nice to look at. One thing though was the character models. I was quite torn about how I felt about them. Normally they looked okay, but I was always looking at my guy from the back. The only aesthetic I didn’t like in this game was the character faces. I thought Shaun White’s character in the game is incredible ugly and looks almost last gen-like when it came to his face.

My favourite part about the game was the music line up. It did a good job on incorporating old pop/classic rock with some new age hits. This wasn’t that big a deal for me and I doubt for many of you since the game other than that wasn’t really fun to play. Though there’s no way to be able to choose which songs you want to listen to out of the selection you have. You can’t make a playlist of your favourites in it.

Now the biggest issue I had with this game was the controls and the difficulty that came along with them. The controls are just awful to work with and they make the game very hard and not enjoyable. Controlling the camera only works if you aren’t moving. You can’t look around you while you’re going down the mountain unless you come to a complete stop. Also you need to use the right trigger for most of your stunts as this is the jump button - it’s also the brake button. This causes you to have to move towards a jump and when you are on the jump, you have to start breaking to that your guy can get more height. All this does is slow you down and you can’t do as many tricks because you don’t have as much air time as you probably would have if you didn’t have to break. Another weird thing is that the right analog stick is for, while on the ground, turning your board. Which if you don’t have any speed, or aren’t landing from a jump, does nothing but help you slow down (giving us now three ways to slow down and stop). These controls just made me dislike playing and ending up getting frustrated to the point that coming back to the game was a challenge.

The next thing I didn’t like was how they made you do tricks. While you are doing a flip or a spin, you have a little meter come up below you to show your chance of landing it. You want to aim for the green middle area of it so that you have the best chance possible of landing the trick. Now when you are grinding something you can control where the arrow is on the meter so you can stay in the green pretty easily. When you are doing an aerial trick, you can’t control it at all. This means you need to judge your landing based on your body’s position, which can get pretty hard as you may not be able to tell the best angle to land compared to the slope below you. This just makes the tricks really hard to do if you’re just starting out which ups the learning curve quite a bit.

The game play in Shaun White Snowboarding is a double sided sword. It does a good job of letting you feel like you have an open environment. You can just mess around with tricks while going down the hill if you don’t feel like doing anything significant or you can move to these floating objects that let you get into a competition. The competitions can range from things like “most points received from only grinds” to “highest multiplier achieved”.

When it comes to the story line, it’s just dumb and needless. You’re some new shot kid who met up with Shaun White and his friends one day after wiping out on a jump. Shaun figures you have what it takes to make it big and that there’s something special about you. This all ends up with you becoming Shaun White’s errand boy by collecting giant floating coins for him. After you collect a complete set, he gives you a Focus Power. For example, the first one you receive is the ability to break through broken fences of some ice walls. After you get these new powers you now have to go collect more coins for Shaun which will test your ability to use the new Focus Power. After mastering the power and collecting all the coins, you move on... to receive another Focus Power to use to get Shaun more coins.

The last thing that felt really off about Shaun White Snowboarding was the speed of the game and the collision detections. No matter what kind of gradient you are faced with, you always feel like you are going really slow. If you ever do find yourself going fast, enjoy it, it won’t last long because you slow down really fast. But there are a few times that you will find yourself really flying, which is a great feeling. Though of course, you are bound to hit a tree or some sort of obstacle sooner or later. But in this game, when you run into an object at high speeds, or slam into a grind rail, nothing really happens to you. You will just bounce off the object with a slight deduction to any speed you still had.

Overall Shaun White Snowboarding was a huge let down and almost tedious to play. The poor quality controls are terrible when you first get into the game and only become tolerable after you pass through its long learning curve. If you do however get used to the game and find you can pull off tricks with ease, you will most likely get bored of the story line you are faced with. Shaun White Snowboarding does a terrible job of making you want to come back for more and should just be left alone.

Overall: 4/10

This is retarded

Looking up the Midnight Club: Los Angeles achievements, I came across this.

	T-Mobile myFaves	10
	Join an online game with 5 of your friends. Stay Connected with MyFaves from T-Mobile.

This is just dumb. Have we really gotten to a point where Rockstar needs to sell the "achievements space" they have? Last time I checked, GTA4 was doing okay. Also it should note that the image for this achievement is indeed the T-Mobile icon.

I really hope no one actually decides they need to get a new cell phone plan because Midnight Club: LA told them to.

PS.

I have a french manual for Midnight Club: LA that doesn't actually fit in the box. Does anyone want it?

First Impressions: Shaun White Snowboarding

So I popped this gem into my machine and it's not as bad as I thought. Here's why:

• Shaun White looks awful
• Apart from people's faces, I like the graphics of the characters
• Controls definitely need to be gotten used to
• GREAT MUSIC
• Awful controls
• Very hard
• Objectives are dumb
  

This isn't much, so I'll add more over the next couple days. Look forward to a review this weekend.

P.S.
I'm getting a copy of Midnight Club: LA later this week.

This is crazy

I should get this up

(That's what she said...)

Anyway, I figured I should write this before it was too late. Talking about the new dashboard for the 360 after everyone has is, that's just lame. So here are my first and lasting impressions:

• Cool intro video
• Glad to see that the opening section of "panels" (what are we ever calling those?) can be taken away
• Everything seems a little to "marketingy". What I mean is that a lot of it just seems like more advertisements.
• Avatars aren't awful, so if you had a problem with them you may now shut up.
• Installing games to the hard drive is awesome! I'm not sure how it helps the loads times because I installed The Force Unleashed before ever playing it off disc. So I don't know if it's any fast, but the 360 is quieter! Done. Done deal.
• An idea (that I am doing) for people who want to install games to the hard drive but only have a 20GB hard drive. Save just the game you are currently playing, or the one you frequently go back to. As I don't go back to many games as I get new ones almost weekly so I save my current game so that each time I get a new game, they run faster and quieter for me. And of course, the old one gets taken off to provide room for the new one.
  
• I'm not a fan of the lay out of the Guide after you hit the guide button. I just find it bland and plain.
• Friends list is cool - even though all my friends have blank Grey avatars - but I think it needs a better indicator if that person is actually online. It took me a while to realize that if they have a little rectangle with either a game or a 360 icon beside the avatars' feet then they're online.
• I haven't had a use for the Quick Launch yet, but I can't see it being to relevant unless I need to get into an arcade game from my disc game (or vice versa) really fast - which is something that doesn't happen often.

Now for some stuff I'm looking forward to doing once anyone on my friends list gets the update:

• Party chats, though I can't see myself making a party chat just to chat. And if I'm making a party chat to talk in game, I can just use the in game chat. Though I still would like to try this.
• Uno Rush! Should be out soon! (Has nothing to do with the dashboard update)
• Seeing my friends' avatars, hoping there can be something to do with them.