I’ll get to the Tutorial in a second, but I’ve really got to go into what inspired this post in the first place.
So, I finally sat down and went through DeviantArt ICON (ha!) POOTERMAN’s gallery. I’ve been meaning to download all of the icons he’s made to replace my own for a while now, and being laid up with a bad back today was the perfect excuse to get cracking and just do it.
I really didn’t think I’d be sitting at my desk – in 2018, no less – writing about how fantastic a game Hot Wheels Velocity X: Maximum Justice is, yet here we are.
Licensed games of the 90s/00s could be hit or miss. OK, they were mostly misses, as with startling regularity, hot properties of the day were shoehorned into genres they had no place being in. Home Improvement SNES, anybody?
I found the Alpha Demo of Apocryph really enjoyable. It wasn’t an amazing experience, but the core of something really, really fun was most definitely there. So much promise, so much potential, yada yada yada.
So it pains me to tell you that the full release of Apocryph is frozen in time – that same potential, the same promise – there’s still only that and not much more.
Things have been a little quieter this week, but there are reasons, I promise!
Early last week, I crossed a big-ticket, bucket-list item off my ‘want’ list – a Steering Wheel for my PC! I settled on the Logitech G920 Driving Force GT because game compatibility is great, and well, its pretty.
Real pretty!
To say I’ve been happy with my purchase is an understatement. This thing has changed my racing world.
Here it comes! More arcade racing goodness!
I really enjoyed Aquiris Game Studio’s Horizon Chase on my Android device – it’s a great homage to classic racing series like Lotus, OutRun & Top Gear that rises above the nostagia all the same, and is a legitimately great game. The only qualm I ever had with it was that it was stuck on a mobile device. OK for gaming on the go – although (practical) physical controls wouldn’t have gone astray – but in my experience, less than ideal for extended play sessions at home. So maybe I wasn’t too fond of the overly mobile-esque UI either, but Horizon Chase Turbo looks to be heavily re-worked for home platforms.
Aquiris Game Studio has taken its time with these ports, and all signs point to it being worth the wait. I’m all for delays if it means we’re getting a game that is more than just a quick mobile cash-grab. Which Horizon Chase Turbo most definitely is not – it’s looking mint.
Where hath my integrity gone? I told you in the last post that I try to avoid EB Games on principal. Well, throw that out the window, because I bought a massive bucket-list item from them today. I couldn’t help it, honest! The price on the Logitech G920 was pretty damned good, and when I rang the store to see if they had it in stock, they were super nice, so eh, what the hell. But more on that soon.
All I know is I’m going to be playing a lot of rally games over the next couple of weeks.
Starting with…
2 for $20 – a price that’s hard to beat, and for me, definitely within the realm of an impulse purchase. While waiting around in a plaza recently, I wandered into EB Games (the GameStop of Australia, pretty much) to kill some time. I did my usual thing. Stared at all the overpriced Nintendo Switch games, checked out all the games I’m not missing on the Xbox One and PS4 and then, finally, made my way over to the PC section.
Now, I try to avoid EB Games as a rule these days. I don’t like them, I don’t like their business practices and I find up-selling abhorrent. I’ll never buy my big-ticket gaming items from them, because they don’t deserve the bulk of my business. But resolve isn’t my strongest attribute, and the staff are usually really nice. Besides, who’s going to knock back a decent bargain every now and then? Like a 2 for $20 thing. Not me, not I.
So whilst browsing, Moto Racer 4 and Trackmania Turbo caught my eye immediately. I did have Trackmania Turbo on my Xbox One before I sold it off, but I’ve given Moto Racer 4 a fairly wide berth. It never did look like the Moto Racer games I grew up with, and nothing I saw of it really convinced me that I needed the game. Still, with the low price both games were commanding, I couldn’t resist.
Welcome to A Certain Kind of Gamer – PICK UPS AND PLAY EDITION.
Have you tried playing Colin McRae Rally 2005 on PC lately? If you have, you may have been shocked to discover that, out of the box, it looks like this:
OK, maybe you weren’t shocked. The game is fairly old by this point. But still – yikes! A 4:3 aspect ratio stretched to fill a 16:9 space always, always looks horrendous. This screenshot is the proof.
What if I told you that you can make it look like this?
Giving games a second chance can, sometimes, totally pay off.
I can be stubborn and closed-minded when I experience a game for the first time. I imagine what it would be like for a long while, and then when the game inevitably fails to live up to my expectations, I’m done. Out for the count.
But nine times out of ten, I’ll choose to revisit said game. I’ll come back in with low expectations and an open mind. And sometimes, just sometimes, a game that I ignorantly detested so damned hard becomes something else entirely. Where hate once stood, there is now only love.
This happened to me a few days ago, and DiRT Rally is one such game.
I’ve also been hopelessly hooked on Gotcha Racing 2nd on the Switch. Great game, and I’ll tell you all about it reeeeeeal soon!
But first, DiRT Rally.
