Witch cards will drop: Blazerush

Blazerush is an old standard of game that has, on the most part, gone out of style. I played RC Pro AM back when I was a wee tyke and I'm sure everyone has heard of Rock n Roll racing, which was in the news recently when some Russian studio tried to make a clone and launch it on steam. That got deleted off Steam pretty quickly.

Anyway, basically you drive cars with an overhead isometric perspective, but rendered in proper 3d as opposed to the classic sprites that make up the long ago champions of the genre. In this case, you choose a driver and with it a car, and then drive around vaguely sci-fi tracks with a variety of scenarios. The basic game mode of driving to win the race makes up about a third of scenarios, with 'king of the hill' style races and this weird game mode where you're trying to stay in the lead because there's a giant rolling machine chasing the race and also not fall off, and you score points as people crash. The latter makes for some really enjoyable gameplay; the former usually starts with an AI breaking into the lead and then you just restart because the other AIs will jump on you if you try to catch up.

The gameplay is less built around consistently holding down the lead and more consistently recovering your position as you, and other cars, tumble off the track or get exploded by power-ups. In this sense the game is relatively fun for a couple hours, but it didn't hold my attention long.

In terms of visuals and audio, it's a nice looking little title with a couple decent sounding tracks. Nothing impressive, but easy on the eyes with some cool car designs. In theory there's hovercars and rocket cars, but they don't perform all that differently and don't expect F-zero style speed out of the game. In fact, since the camera aims to fit all the cars on the screen at the same time, you'll never get much of a lead going in this game. If a car falls back far enough, it actually gets leap frogged forward. So the sense of speed is lost a little, and instead the game is as I said, mostly about constantly recovering and tumbling off the track. Even the power ups feel kinda pointless in this. You get a mix of boosts and weapons, but most of the weapons will only knock someone back a little bit. There's just not that far back to actually go, probably because the game is designed as a couch game. Which is good if you're playing it as such, but I never did and I don't think I'd take time out of a social gathering to play an updated RC pro am, you know?

Which is fine, but don't expect it to feel like a skill-based racing game. There's not really much to talk about, when it comes to Blazerush. It has lots of medals and badges and scoring, but none of them really seemed to do much of anything besides unlocking tracks. As long as I continued to do ok in events, I never even noticed tracks needing more medals to unlock, pardoning 1 track once. Because of the game's chaotic nature, I barely even noticed the different tracks anyway. The power ups and game mode are way more crucial than the design of the track.

Anyway, Blazerush isn't a great game by an metric, but it's a solid enough title to play for an afternoon as I did before getting bored with it. Like I said, you don't find much variety in the tracks, but on top of that they don't change all that much or really push the limit. You can't fall back that far or get that huge a lead anyway, so it doesn't make much difference in the end. The night levels looked cool, but they actually just made it harder to pick up power ups, which is already a luck based hassle to begin with. If you happen to see it in a bundle or have it from a bundle, it's fine for said afternoon. But nothing I'd seek out at full price.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

Rest in Peace you crazy THQ fellows: Saint's Row 3

I talked about this last year when I was playing through Just Cause 2: I've never played a GTA game. I can't recall if I mentioned that GTA came out on PC back when I was a youngun with a friend who tried to sell me on it. I'm still not sure why he successfully got me into Master of Orion and X-Com, but not GTA or Fallout. It's a mystery for the ages. Mind you, GTA was a top down game that was a bit of a letdown from Carmageddon. I don't know if they came out at the same time, but Carmageddon was way more interesting. You know, because I love murder. He played the shit out of both of them though...

His sister was very pretty. I considered making a misogynistic comment here to help set the mood for talking about Saint's Row 3, but the game is into some sort of bizarro land where the very concept of misogyny or misandry fail to deliver enough punch to what the game is like. Saint's Row 3 is nonchalant and almost inoffensive in its vile tendencies, simply for lack of anything connecting to real life response. There should be some level of revulsion to using a stripper as a human shield before throwing her into the pool and taunting her, but the game is so far gone into clown college territory your brain just can't make the connection. Like you know those words should hold meaning but the game is just one big crazy bear show.

This game hates humanity. Loathes it. Even if you play very tightly, drive safe around civilians and refuse to kill cops, they'll end up dead. A burst of gang warfare sees traffic around you freak out, with passing grannies plowed over by desperate fools who spin their car 360 degrees before moonwalking into a curb that six people happened to be standing on. Hell, sometimes you can just see traffic screw itself up without any input from you. Someone will walk into a car, a body will go flying, people will panic and then there's just death everywhere.

this it not ever going to be mature

Once you get away from the ridiculousness of its parade of buffoonery the real game lies beneath and ... Actually, that game is pretty good. For an effort that is tied very intimately to the death of a publisher and its years of excess, Saint's Row 3 is neither desperate or ugly. It's an attractive game, a mad men murder simulator, in which you take your sharp dressed gangster and plow into a cadre of opposing thugs in a garbage truck before leaping out from your flaming wreckage to benny hill your way into the distance. In theory you can dress your guy or gal in whatever outfit you like, but I just can't get over the idea of dressing as some sauve motherfucker as I barrel through city streets with barely any idea what I'm doing before t-boning a truck in traffic and dying in the resulting three car pile up explosion. Death and carnage follow in your wake, leading me to feel like you should dress for a funeral, because holy fuck people die.

And once the heavy weapons come out? Only the dead can know peace from this circus. Murder time fun time, indeed.

Free from the rpggggs : Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed

I did not realize how much I missed cart racing until I picked up a cart racer and went wow I missed cart racing. Apparently there was a gaping, oozing wound in my heart where cart racing is supposed to be slotted in and damn suddenly I am once again a whole man, a sum of totality in actuality. Hallelujah, praise the lord that be Shadow the Hedgehog, for he has driven my heart whole, amen.

Obvious comedy aside, shit this game is good and damn does it look good. You would not imagine that a kart racer has thus far been above and away the prettiest thing I've run through this monitor, but I'm sorry Witcher 2, you sir are dethroned. The screenshots really can't do it justice.

The title of the game has this key little word that defines why it's so amazing to look at: Transformed. What does transformed mean here? It means, as the track goes, the vehicle you're driving in or the track beneath you can transform. It's way cooler than it sounds, usually - there's a little bug in the land/air to water transformation that crops up very rarely - but basically you go from driving, to hitting the water as a boat, to launching into the air as a jet or hovercraft or weird looking steam punk thing. The tracks change over the course of the race, either pushing you into different sections or entire sections explode, so you take off into the air.

On paper that sounds rather horrible, but on the most part the transitions are flawless. The game has an excellent sense of flow, blasting you past molten rivers, through dragon skeletons, over sinking aircraft carriers, through shinobi temples at autumn and just everything else you can think of. It is both a stunning homage to Sega games (though of course I wish they could have gotten rights to stuff like Herzog Zwei or used tracks from Phantasy Star) and wonderful to look at. This is probably the first game I can bring to mind where water not only looks good, but has its own feeling as a terrain that isn't just "go slow".

Why do they put water in mmorpgs anyway? That's all it ever is - go slow. Great. Here, water is fun, though obviously the way a boat handles is pretty eager to fishtail. But then again, it's a boat. Boats do that. I am not good at driving a boat because I am not literally boat people. I've spent less time in a boat than I have in a plane in the real life.