Outrun - Arcade (Yes, that one with the red car)

It's all about the car.

It's a simple idea, car racing through picturesque places and locations, wonderful sights, nice chilled theme tunes to listen to and if you find the right arcade, a big ol' impersonation of a sports car to sit inside and move around while you're trying to drive with a TV screen sat in front of you showing some pixelated tracks and cars. On top of that there's not much here really beyond this scope and aspect of the game.

Lots of choices, some levels harder than others.

Outrun, probably one of the more iconic arcade games of the mid-80s and awarded best arcade of the year by Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, beating out Bubble Bobble (Which I think should have won over this...) involves players driving a Ferrari Testerossa across the sprawling landscapes of Someplace while trying to hit the checkpoints that magically assign more time to the players and at each checkpoint, gives the player the option of going left or right, in search of new scenery and things to look at, as well as crash into.

I... saw this a lot...

That said, Outrun likely will hold a special place in a lot of people's hearts. The simple style of play in getting just to the next checkpoint (and if you run out of time, game over. No continues, no slowing down to try and inch over the finish line here) and racing back and forth through traffic while trying to avoid harder corners that will cause you to slide out and slam into various obstacles, which will cost you more time as you wait for the game to put your car back on track.

Use checkpoints to extend gameplay, or just quit.

The audio is likely the best part of the game, composed and sequenced wonderfully and adding to the overall feel and pace of the game in that while you're trying to gun the engine for all that you can, there's nothing really to compete against other than the arbitrary clock, it almost leaves you feeling that you can take your time playing this game. In truth you can't.

At least the scenery changes from route to route

The time limit for Outrun is tight, very tight against any and all errors if you want to be able to beat it. As such you'll get about 5 - 6 minutes of gameplay if your driving is perfect and a lot less if you crash, bump or generally take too long to get up to speed before switching the gearbox from low to high while driving. Outrun is rather unforgiving in that regard.

Scenic, but deadly trees.

As such, because it is so very unforgiving it becomes difficult to enjoy the game without having to dedicate a lot of time and energy into the situation in order to get much back from Outrun as it is. There's a fair amount to enjoy here and with multiple different endings depending upon the routes that you take and the journey there, there's a level of replay factor for people but getting access to that level in the first place is going to be more difficult for some than others and it becomes a sticking point for Outrun.

Hot Rod - Arcade

There's some rods, they're hot.... Maybe...

Take a television and put in down so that the screen is facing up towards the ceiling. Then take 4 steering wheels and 4 pedals and you've basically got the right layout for this arcade racer. Throw in some colours for the cars, make the tracks increasingly difficult and ensure some short cuts for the cheekier players and you've got Hot Rod.

And nothing happened for ages, then a quick flash of something, then nothing.

The recipe here is perfect for the home console (wait for it...). You've got a top down view racer akin to the old Micro Machines games with similar functionality. Up to four players can race around a track, picking up points and gas in order to race over the finish line and gain more points which can then be spent on upgrades and boosts to the racing car. The grinding is paramount and after winning races, you'll get yourself more and more points in which to buy better things and become an almost unstoppable car. On the assumption you can actually DRIVE the car.

Shopping time!

As a racer, it's bright and bold and flashy, a rainbow spectrum of illustrative prowess brought by Sega here with clearly defined roads and layout, bonus pickups and nice little details in the background from people walking along roads to cattle wandering the countryside while you're driving through it like a bat out of hell. However, there lies a problem with this method of gaming.

On your marks, get set, don't blow your engine on the start line.

As mentioned above, actually driving the car can be a challenge. You're encouraged to floor the pedal and spin the wheel to corner, while there is also NO BRAKES. You can slow down gradually by releasing the pedal but there's no braking at all. So if you're going to lose control, you are GOING TO LOSE CONTROL and likely into a train, or against the wall and bump repeatedly against it while everyone else trundles happily along to the victory line.

You either won or paid enough money to see this shit.

Like the aforementioned Micro Machines, Hot Rod uses the same system of playing. In that it's one screen and whomever is found to be lagging behind (i.e. slipping off the screen) will be bumped to the middle of the screen and a significant amount of fuel will be confiscated as punishment. Do this enough times in a race and you'll be drained of all fuel and out of the game. Fuel pickups are not that numerous and you'll get 10 to 20 points worth each time, while winning a race will get you roughly 80 or so. Win enough races and the card girl gives you a kiss, aww isn't that cute. No.

Despite the image, it's actually quite a smooth game.

In the shop you can buy a whole host of items, from tyres to spoilers, wings and bumpers, engines and beyond. Cash is usually tight and you'll likely only get the change to have one upgrade or less (yes, none at all) when you visit the shop and not every item is available, it all depends upon which shop you go into. Sometimes your engine might blow up and you have to buy another, other times you'll have little clue as to what hazards will assail you in the next level and you'll be left guessing whether to buy the speed tyres, snow tyres, or radials in order to get the most of your control in the upcoming race.

Different tracks with different challenges, sometimes you'll get a clue at the shop.

That said, while the driving can be picky, tricky and finicky at the same time, there's also the fact that there are a LOT of levels in this game. If you can navigate around the tight corners, the horrible chicanes and the occasional traps like rock slides, avalanches, oncoming traffic and such, you might find it's a fun game to play but it does love to punish the unsuspecting player and punish them fiercely. If you can fund the time, it's an ok game, but far too expensive to really get into the meat of the gameplay and discover the marred gem of a game this is.

Rage

Now for a more modern, more recent, First Person Shooter. ID software seems to fall into a trap of their own making in which each game they make looks nice, looks lovely in fact, is developed on a very impressive engine (aesthetically impressive at least) and falls down with the game in so far as plot/story and the delivery of which. Doom was a wonderful little game with atmospheric delivery, doom 2 was very similar and became and much more action orientated game with cut scenes/text plots. Quake was more of the same but in full 3D mapping and modelling. Quake 2 had the same with more detail and animations in models; Quake 3 was a fast and fluid multiplayer experience of dropping the single-player mode in favour of bots in multiplayer. Doom 3 was a wonderful experience in a technical engine but still falling flat with the delivery of storyline and plot development. Quake 4 was a more open Doom 3. I'm Not going to touch Daikatana, for now... I'll suffer that one another time.

So what's RAGE got to offer? More of the same. But at least there's an attempt at doing something with some plot beyond "Turn up and shoot stuff until everything's dead". Doesn't sound like fun but works well in Doom and Quake, in this case there's more than that available to everyone playing.

The game kicks off with you, Captain Anonymous, unrecognised regenerating hit-point wonder with an affinity for carrying lots of weapons and ammo types, making things from scrap (if you've the blueprints) and mad driver extraordinaire from buggies to quad bikes, cars and more, including able to operate guns, rockets/missiles and weapons from the future (by your perspective). The Buck Rogers of this game, waking up in the future and being attacked by assholes and then in turned saved by John Goodman. (Genuine Celebrity Voice).

With Mr Goodman's guidance, he'll help you as long as you go and slaughter locations filled with fuck-heads. John kills 2 mutants and in exchange for helping you, he wants you to (as a one man army) kill an entire tower block of ass-hats with a crusty old pistol and some of those bladed boomerangs from Mad Max 2. It's in this first area that a rather interesting element of the game comes to the fore in the form of your regeneration and health. Not only do you have the red-mist of damage descending over your screen, but in being taken down, you can force your heart to restart itself with a small mini-game of push the analogues in the right place, then hitting a button. The more you get right, the higher the health regeneration will be and the more powerful the output, meaning you can electrocute people with your own personal defibrillation kit.

After a while it'll regenerate sufficiently enough to let you do it again. Though oddly, getting blown up with a rocket sometimes bypasses this. But a shotgun round to the face won't bypass the heart restart. At the risk of becoming far more cardiologically focused, I'm going to move on to the game again.

The first act of the game is John Goodman asking you for help, getting you new weapons, medical supplies and opening up routes and access points where everything is very 'by the numbers' in the form of gaming, go to point a, do mission, go to point b, do mission, go to hub b and do missions c and d, get cards, shoot guys with bad accents in the face. It's not until the big breakthrough into the 2nd area that the game opens up a little more (not entirely free range but sufficient enough a step up from Doom games) where players can visit a lot of locations and do very little until they're supposed to be there on specific missions.

Eventually you'll become saviour of a town, move on to another town, save that one too and then go fight the big bad group that has a lot of futuristic tech and beat them at their own game. In the meantime you'll get to play an odd form of cards akin to battle cards, racing cars and upgrading cars (limited options in the form of engines, wheels, armour etc, and very limited in that there's an obvious BEST to have and you'll just use that), stab your own fingers in reflex games, play duelling banjos and do a few missions consisting of turn up to a place and kill dudes. One particular mission is to turn up to a place, grab the things someone stole and kill everyone, the mission provider doesn't even want those things back and you can sell them. So basically you turn up to slaughter a load of people on the whim of some guy who could easily have said that inside location X is a Thing that was stolen.

Great. Freedom to kill based on generic bullshit. But at least it's more of a reason than some other games provide.

The driving in the game is simply a means to get from one location to another because doing it by foot will get you killed quickly when the first cars turn up and either run you over or cheese grate you out of existence quickly and regenerating will get you stomped shortly after again. Though at one point I was successful in running myself over and having to regenerate back into my own car, score 1 for Twit Of The Year. There are races against other players in the online mode or races against the AI which thankfully doesn't do the whole rubber band difficulty thing and if you're a big distance ahead, you'll STAY a big distance ahead unless you just stop still like a prick. All of which gains you tickets to buy more things so you're forced to win races if you want upgrades and forced even more to win races to progress the plot at various points too.

This is never fun. "You must do this before you can kill more dudes!" makes me wonder why there isn't a response of "....fuck off" and then smacking him over the head and stealing all the fun toys before driving off into the sunset laughing like a nutcase.

There's an odd duality in the game too, there's this fun side of the game that's rather jumpy and fun, light hearted despite being about killing things mercilessly and then there's the darker more foreboding side of having to wander through derelict cities and being attacked by the dying remnants of the world's infected/mutated individuals. Some of the settings and scenery really conveys the sense of depression and hopelessness while you're scavenging through a dead city. Given that until a few moments ago you were running around a town pissing off the Mayor and playing games of "my card kills your card", it's rather a sudden twist and the shock can come a little too suddenly, breaking you out of the atmosphere and plunging you into another one.

In fact that's this game, two halves that are one side light and peppy despite the apocalypse and the other just full of doom, gloom and depression and the switch between the two is an express elevator to hell. Almost immediate switches with little build up between and as the game goes on, becoming further and further apart from each other with the darker side of the game taking almost the forefront until you're saving the day up to the cliff-hanger that few will expect to happen.

Yes it ends on NO closure at all. Pods open, you're stood atop a light-barrier tower and ... that's it. No final boss, just a final gauntlet. I'm tired of seeing shit like this in games, where designers couldn't find a suitable ending point so they just don't use one. It's annoying. When the first few games did it, it became edgy, but when it becomes the standard it becomes fucking stupid and unfulfilling. Try cooking a meal, the best meal you'll ever taste, you get to sample the ingredients, slap it in the oven and cook it to the point you open the oven, smell the finished dish and slice it perfectly to place onto a plate and then you leave the shop after paying and not eating it. That's how these kinds of endings feel. Anticlimactic and I really shouldn't write a review just before dinner.

The game looks impressive, not great because we've gone the route of the doomed world in brown and grey, which is a great reason to NOT throw in lush green fields, flowers bursting into colour and instead pretend everything is doom and gloom and slap a few brown filters atop the lenses to make it murky and dank. Movement in the game seems to suffer the Doom experience of feeling like you're running slightly too fast but that could just be down to not having faster movement in other recent FPS games, I'm not going to criticise there on being different, it just takes a little period of adjustment.

Co-operative mode is entirely disjointed from the game, which is disappointing, it'd be nice to run through the game with a colleague/partner but instead you get a series of 'legends' about events that happened before the proper game takes place. Rather than having to bring in experience or setups from the players, the level itself determines the weapon load out, and inventory load out (and places things in different places on the quickslots... Left on D-Pad will be bandages in one level and sentry bots on another, with similar for the weapons too!). Players will have to work together to kill lots of dudes and score points and multipliers to boost themselves up onto higher echelons of video game scoring.

I'd rather have had a colleague with me in the main game, because once the levels are over, there's only the harder difficulty to try and that's it. Co-Op done, dusted, finished and completed. Thanks for playing, sod off, now drive cars at each other for hours. It's a lacklustre addition and while there is the possibility of using DLC I shouldn't have to wait for someone to add it when they feel the need to later on, just so I can get the full experience once someone gets off their fat arse and types a few keys on a keyboard.

I'm done here, now to drive off into the sunset, laughing... for some reason...