I miss games that expect you to learn how to play them…
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I miss games that expect you to learn how to play them before you actually start to win in them.
For the last couple of years I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Wave Race: Blue Storm. I remember renting the game once and loving the dynamic feel of it depending on what weather effects were happening. It was so cool, and so much fun to see how different each track felt under different weather conditions.
I finally managed to get a copy for a decent price, and boy I did not remember the game being this damn hard. This is a game that can and will, relentlessly punish you for any small mistakes. You didn't gauge your speed approaching that ramp? I guess you're stalled out at the top... Oh, you're relying too much on the sharp turn? Now you're completely spun around and starting in the wrong direction to where you need to be going. And the way progression works in the championship campaign? Mistakes can and WILL compound until you can manage to clear "most" of the tracks cleanly.
The thing is, this design feels completely alien compared to modern racing games. At this point I've gotten used to something like the Forza Horizon series, where you can go dozens of hours without losing a single race. Racing games these days seem to be less about mastering the physics and track layouts, and more about shuttling the player through as many cool and interesting vistas as quickly as possible over the course of a few minutes.
Yes, you can change the difficulty to give you more of that challenge and make the "AI" more "responsive" to your "skill"... But more often than not, that barely amounts to changing how quickly the game forces the rubber banding to match how well you're currently doing.
Maybe this game, (and my other favorite racing game from this era F-Zero GX) is just a relic of its time; but I kinda missed the days when a games difficulty was baked into the games design and I wish more games continued that philosophy.
#games
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For the last couple of years I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Wave Race: Blue Storm. I remember renting the game once and loving the dynamic feel of it depending on what weather effects were happening. It was so cool, and so much fun to see how different each track felt under different weather conditions.
I finally managed to get a copy for a decent price, and boy I did not remember the game being this damn hard. This is a game that can and will, relentlessly punish you for any small mistakes. You didn't gauge your speed approaching that ramp? I guess you're stalled out at the top... Oh, you're relying too much on the sharp turn? Now you're completely spun around and starting in the wrong direction to where you need to be going. And the way progression works in the championship campaign? Mistakes can and WILL compound until you can manage to clear "most" of the tracks cleanly.
The thing is, this design feels completely alien compared to modern racing games. At this point I've gotten used to something like the Forza Horizon series, where you can go dozens of hours without losing a single race. Racing games these days seem to be less about mastering the physics and track layouts, and more about shuttling the player through as many cool and interesting vistas as quickly as possible over the course of a few minutes.
Yes, you can change the difficulty to give you more of that challenge and make the "AI" more "responsive" to your "skill"... But more often than not, that barely amounts to changing how quickly the game forces the rubber banding to match how well you're currently doing.
Maybe this game, (and my other favorite racing game from this era F-Zero GX) is just a relic of its time; but I kinda missed the days when a games difficulty was baked into the games design and I wish more games continued that philosophy.
#games
source
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