Dreamcast Racing Games Article - Tell us what you think!

[Crynox]

^awesome post. You really piqued my interest to give MSR another try. You also made me want to check out Test Drive Le Mans, as I knew nothing about the 24 hour endurance race.

Why thank you. If you've never given MSR a real try then you should its an amazing game that once gets its hook into you, wont leave you alone for ages. I feel that it took Bizarre until only PGR4 to better it. If your playing the American version, better still as it has the intended reply function that the UK version never had, (rushed).

Not really trying to be critical but the whole point of Le Mans 24 is the 24hour race, although perhaps the American title doesn't really indicate this ? I suppose being from Europe & a big motor sport fan I know all about the 24hour annual race. Anyhow yes another brilliant game, it really does make you feel that you are in a serious race, it can take lap after lap of no mistakes to finally creep up on opponents and then finally overtake.

[noiseredux]

If you've never given MSR a real try then you should

I only tried it once, with my wife for like 15 mins. Basically she was like "I wanna play Daytona instead, this is too hard" and I was like "yeah cool" and never played it again haha. But it does sound interesting.

Not really trying to be critical but the whole point of Le Mans 24 is the 24hour race, although perhaps the American title doesn't really indicate this ?

Exactly. In the US it's called Test Drive Le Mans. I had no idea what Le Mans was, so in my head it was "just another Test Drive game." Now knowing that it has such a mode, I'm far more interested in checking that particular one out.

[Crynox]

Hmm, I gave MSR another go the other day. It's still pretty good and handles well, but the kudos system penalizes the player when other cars crash into you. This is obviously annoying and happens way too much. It also seems to force you to ramp up the difficulty a bit as you don't earn enough kudos from ordinary races to unlock later stages and challenges. It's a bit tetchy and cryptic.

The day night thing is cool in theory, but in practice you have a semi-serious racing game with a teleporting avatar zipping back and forth between London, San Francisco and Tokyo. As Wryguy says, you mostly spend 2/3 of the game in darkness wherever you live.

I see MSR more as Bizarre Creations prototype for what would be much better games with their Project Gotham series.

Then don't let the other cars crash into you ! Stay away from them and get in front. Play the game at different times of the day, or if your that bothered adjust your Dreamcast`s clock. Living in the UK and playing at the same time each day I only experienced Japan in total darkness, which incidentally, I loved. San Francisco was always late afternoon, (I think). As for the difficulty, I never found it too hard until later levels, it is definitely a challenging game though, but then surely this is half the fun ?!

The PGR games never had different time zones or random weather, or fog. Only PGR4 had weather and it was preset. The music of MSR was unmatched by any the PGR games due to the complete soundtrack talent of Richard Jacques. Despite the fact that the music all sounds like authentic tracks, he made all of the tunes from scratch.

[Crynox]

Not really trying to be critical but the whole point of Le Mans 24 is the 24hour race, although perhaps the American title doesn't really indicate this ?

Exactly. In the US it's called Test Drive Le Mans. I had no idea what Le Mans was, so in my head it was "just another Test Drive game." Now knowing that it has such a mode, I'm far more interested in checking that particular one out.[/quote]

Yes that's what I suspected. This is the core part of the game, and there is a lot built around it. You don't have to play through a whole 24hours, you have different options such as 24 hrs condensed into 12hrs, 6 hrs or even 30 mins!

Then there is a championship based around the different categories, (LMP1/2, GT1/2 etc), and different European tracks. Big game, lot to see, worth it.

[noiseredux]

Yes that's what I suspected. This is the core part of the game, and there is a lot built around it. You don't have to play through a whole 24hours, you have different options such as 24 hrs condensed into 12hrs, 6 hrs or even 30 mins!

to me the appeal is that you could have a 24 hour race in a game though. That's so ridiculous/awesome. How often can you save, though?

[Crynox]

Yes that's what I suspected. This is the core part of the game, and there is a lot built around it. You don't have to play through a whole 24hours, you have different options such as 24 hrs condensed into 12hrs, 6 hrs or even 30 mins!

to me the appeal is that you could have a 24 hour race in a game though. That's so ridiculous/awesome. How often can you save, though?

I seem to remember it was around about every 1.5 hours which was fine as by then Id had enough and was feeling knackered! Also during those times you would see slight differences of light levels, which makes it authentic. It would also randomly rain as well, to different levels.

[ExedExes]

While you're talking Test Drive games (I have Le Mans), what about Test Drive 6? It's a bit over the top in parts, but it's still pretty solid with real cars and a sorta-decent licensed soundtrack.

[Crynox]

While you're talking Test Drive games (I have Le Mans), what about Test Drive 6? It's a bit over the top in parts, but it's still pretty solid with real cars and a sorta-decent licensed soundtrack.

I think I only played it briefly and thought it was rubbish. I will give it another go. Another good game is Stunt GP, its a RC car game. I also played Buggy Heat and despite its faults thought it was good fun.

[Sload Soap]

Then don't let the other cars crash into you ! Stay away from them and get in front. Play the game at different times of the day, or if your that bothered adjust your Dreamcast`s clock. Living in the UK and playing at the same time each day I only experienced Japan in total darkness, which incidentally, I loved. San Francisco was always late afternoon, (I think). As for the difficulty, I never found it too hard until later levels, it is definitely a challenging game though, but then surely this is half the fun ?!

I'm not sure if you're being totally serious here, but never mind.

Firstly, since Kudos is something only the player collects, losing points to the AI's inadequacies is just bad design. End of.

Secondly, why should I have to wait to play a game at a specific time of day or arse around with the internal clock, when the developer could have just put it the option to, I dunno, choose the time of day?

And finally, my problem with the difficulty is that it's tough to know how much kudos to bet on a first run through. So you might win a race really easily that first time, but only bet to finish third losing you potential kudos. So you have to replay to get anything from it. But then the next challenge is a lot harder and you have to bump the bet down, earning you a lot less kudos. So now you have one race you can win easily, and one where you have to have a two second head start because the opponents car is faster than yours. It's uneven. The trial and error is then compounded by having ten-ish challenges in each of the twenty plus divisions, padding out an already overly long game.

MSR is still a good game and is pretty revolutionary in some respects. It definitely deserves to be talked about. I just feel that with PGR, Bizarre Creations ironed out everything that MSR did wrong and amped what it did do right up to 11. The day/night thing is just a gimmick. Give me better handling and a smoother experience any day.

[wryguy87]

My biggest issue with MSR is just the lack of a quick retry. I don't think the risk/reward argument is valid. There is no change in the risk/reward factor by letting you retry.

If you make a single mistake, that's quite possibly enough to make it pointless to continue. There is no more reward at that point. It's not like a game of Fire Emblem where it is possible to still win the game if one of your characters dies permanently. Most people will retry the level immediately because they don't want to lose the character, but the option to keep going is still viable because new characters will come along. At that point there really is a choice because both options are feasible. Perfectionism vs compromise.

But once you fall behind in a race there's no reason to persist. You're not actually risking anything. The score is reset every race and you'll need to try the race again, so what exactly is the reward you lose out on if you didn't have the ability to immediately restart? You're fighting for a score you won't keep.

Also if racing at night is harder, I believe they should have compensated by offering you a higher kudos reward for completing challenges in the dark. It's very cool that the environment changes based on the time, but if you don't give it some kind of real gameplay angle then it's kind of pointless. The game is harder for no real reward. Logically you should always want to play at daytime hours if there's no benefit.

I can understand why some people would love the game for being unique, but some of the mechanics exist more for their own sake than to actually improve traditional ideas.