Thursday, June 2, 2011

New Carmageddon, NNOOOOOOooooooo.... (Driver, GTA, LA Noire)

Age gates are stupid, just set the date to 1965 or something and move on.



SO BEAUTIFUL...

Stainless Games is in the early stages of designing the next instalment of the Carmageddon series; Carmageddon: Reincarnation.  As the game develops, you’ll be able to follow progress in the Blog.

Of all the racing games to get a reboot, how come Carmageddon?  Wow, I completely change my mind on Burnout and Split/Second now, those are sparkling gems on a hill compared to this.  At least those two try to keep some "professionalism" while Carma looks to shock as many soccer moms and Jack Thompsons as possible.

I'm checking out the blog and it's interesting to learn about where their inspiration came from:

When we set Stainless up, the plan was to kick things off with a relatively simple Destruction Derby game (this was before the Reflections title) to establish the company, and then go onto greater things. The Destruction Derby game – codenamed 3DDD, as ‘3D’ was actually still a buzz word back then – was born from an observation of people playing driving games. Most driving games were pretty dull (this was well before Gran Turismo changed that forever). Even the top of the pile like the original Ridge Racer were as boring as an accountant’s pillow talk (well, OK then, to me), so the less patient amongst us (well OK then, me), used to turn our cars around, race around in the other direction and try to hit our opponents head-on in order to alleviate the ennui.

...

What then happened is documented in detail elsewhere, but to cut a long story short, about two years later we were well into development of what was by then, “Carmageddon”. By this time, the concept of “being naughty and breaking the rules” had grown wings, climbed up to the roof, flown off, landed on the head of the tabloid soap-box preachers, and shat down the back of their neck.

Basically don't follow the rules of conventional racers.  Oh and check this out.  This site gives you the materials to make your own paper cars...really?  I could never make any of those paper things, I suck.

There's not much else to say.  I'm not a fan of "dark" games but they can make whatever they want.  And now you know the whole story.

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Cool, check this out.  I'm looking at related videos and here's a Carma 2 stunt video.  It's relatively tame compared to the actual game.  These are custom-made cars and on display, but I'm amazed at the car damage and physics...not bad.  This game came out in 1998.  I also assume this is online multiplayer.  Too bad the actual game isn't like this.



LISTEN TO THE SKA, F-YEAH

Now more these free-wheeling PC racers.  This Carma 2 footage reminds me of Driver 1 and 2 (yes, the prequels to Driv3r).  I actually did play Driver for the PC a long time ago.  It was an okay diversion.  That came out in 2000 which was two years after Carma 2.  It was developed by GT/Reflections Interactive.

This is Driver 1.  Clearly, the whole Driver series is based off of 70's car chase movies which is pretty sweet.  You can't run over pedestrians which is nice.  The cops' method of stopping you is simple--recklessly smash your car to bits without regard to anyone's (including their own) safety.  Cop chases are kind of fun, but they spawned in front of you and never, ever stopped coming so it was always a losing battle.



Now this is Driver 2 for the PS1...unlike Driver 1, you can get out and steal other cars GTA-style and that's about it.  It's entirely driving, no killing.  Also, the city actually has curves, highway on-ramps, more than just hard 90-degree turns.  Surprisingly, Driver 2 also came out in 2000.  This video's just a funny glitch.



But in the end, we all know Grand Theft Auto 3 is better.  It came out in 2001 and just shut everyone up.  I like the PS2 GTA games, but not all the violence and cursing (sorry).



Anyway, this mission is making fun of Tanner, the protagonist of the Driver games...  Rockstar had their way with the competition at the time.  Driv3r was released in 2004 and included a character called "Timmy Vermicelli," a parody of Tommy Vercetti of GTA: Vice City.  Unfortunately, Driv3r was mediocre at best.  By then, GTA became the golden standard for free-wheel drivers.

Fast forward seven years to 2011 and this LA Nwah game handles a lot like GTA 4...except that you can't kill pedestrians.  Yes, they jump out of the way so Rockstar has decided to spare peds for once, aww how kind of them.  This makes sense since you're a good cop, not a criminal (you can still "borrow" civilians' cars).  Although you CAN kill a pedestrian with a car if you use exploits.  I think the devs modded the GTA4 code but forgot to completely fool-proof it...



Only thing that really sucks about the game is that the 40's cars are obviously much slower which sucks.

LA Noire...hmm...it's like a better version of Dick Tracy for the NES.

And that's it, your history lesson for today.  I'm fairly sure there's other games like this (like, uh...Tony Hawk's Underground) but I cannot mention them all.  ADIOS.

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