wryguy87 wrote:Hey, guys. Name's Mike. I'll be writing some articles for the site on and off whenever I can muster the free time. My first project has been a fairly thorough racing/driving games article for the Dreamcast. Considering everything's relative I thought I'd open it up for commentary in case people have games they want to help add to the list, or thoughts on pre-existing entries.
Metropolis Street Racer
Technical knowledge required: Below Average
Driving technique required: Above Average
MSR was one of the better racing games on the Dreamcast thanks to responsive control and physics that strike a very nice balance between realism and fantasy. Developed by Bizarre Creations in conjunction with Sega, this was an attempt to get a more mainstream racing game on the Dreamcast market. The concept of MSR is simply street racing through London, Tokyo and San Francisco. MSR was quite notable at the time for the attention to detail placed in recreating real locales.
To advance through the game you need to accumulate "kudos" which are given to you for driving stylishly. This idea devolved into constantly penalizing the player because "kudos" are also taken away from you for each mistake you make. You can win a race but not actually win it, basically. Another issue that hurts MSR is that if it's day in San Francisco it'll be night in both London and Tokyo. That means two thirds of the game are usually spent driving in the dark, which means you'll make more mistakes.
Something that could have helped the game is the ability to retry races if you've performed poorly. You're only allowed to quit a race entirely and sit through multiple loading screens to try again. MSR tries the players' patience a bit too much but it's still one of the better Dreamcast racing games. It had some good ideas (several rarely imitated) and the handling feels very rewarding. There's a certain attention to detail in MSR that give it charm despite the flaws. MSR could be thought of as the prequel to Program Gotham Racing. Bizarre Creations was unfortunately shut down after being acquired by Activision.
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Whoa!
The kudos system does not penalize the player! It is a very unique idea of risk/reward in which race by race you can either leave alone or increase/decrease your kudos earning potential by adjusting the difficulty level of the particular upcoming challenge.
The risk is that if you do not achieve `your` objective, (that only you set), you will lose the kudos that you gambled. On the flip side the reward is that you achieve your goal and you are then rewarded with more kudos points which then enable more stages and new vehicles.
As long as you err on the side of caution you generally achieve your goal and therefore earn more kudos, therefore unlocking more of the game. In my experience this lends itself well to stage replaying because after your achievement you realise that actually you could achieve a bit more and therefore you play again but increase the risk/earning potential, which if you pull it off, end up feeling a great sense of satisfaction.
As for offering a retry, that would be silly as it would negate the whole idea of self setting difficulty, (risk/reward).
If you are feeling penalized, its probably due to setting the difficulty too high, (too much risk).
Right then, the time of day setting. This is not an issue, its another unique idea yet to be utilized in any other car game to date. Put simply its a brilliant idea, it makes the global cities feel real as you are experiencing the correct daylight settings at that time. Obviously this means that it could be dark or early morning/late evening depending on where you live in the world. The fact that you may find it harder to drive it night is just a fact of life, after all the same is true in real life. See it as a challenge rather than a set back. I do understand that we all play our games at the same sort of time so therefore the daylight settings around the world would be consistent, but I found myself going along with it and varying my play times to experience the different time zones. For example I found that I would only play the Tokyo tracks at night because I thought they looked great with all the lights etc.
Ok MSR rant over! (Yes I love it!).
Other than that, some people have mentioned some of my other favourite DC driving games, so, here's my take on them:
Le Mans 24hr:
Another amazing driving game, I've played through all of this twice and thoroughly enjoyed it. The best bit is definitely the 24 hours, (real time), race that can be saved every couple of hours when you enter the pits, (why couldn't this be true of the GT4 endurance races ?), I think that the handling is spot on, (once you remove all driving aids & select pro etc), I loved driving the Porsche 911 and struggling/breaking into the next class, (David and goliath), and the gradual day to night and back again cycle is genius, it happens so slowly that you don't really notice it, until suddenly your lights are on and its dark, very dark. The sun coming up in the morning is a real pleasure, (and relief to see).
Great game, (and nothing to do with `Test drive`. Only the American copy had this poor endorsement).
Vanishing Point:
What a hidden gem. Very off putting at first due to the highly sensitive handling but once you master it, wow what a game. Lovely graphics and really catchy music and a real sense of tension as you swerve in and out of the traffic trying to achieve the specified position within the set time limits. I played this game to death.
F355 Challenge:
Another game I played a lot. I loved everything about this game, recommended to all.
Daytona USA 2001:
I'm one of those that was put off by the highly sensitive controller, however I'm going to give it a retry thanks to the `play` option true meaning explanation, so thank you for that.
That's my 2 cents worth.
... I think you will enjoy V-Rally. In fact my order me another copy one day. Back in the day we had a lot of fun playing it as a party game of sorts.