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Road Rash: it’s a big game

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I saw Road Rash for the Playstation on the shelf at CEX, which seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the last of the sprite scaler games in the series (using the backwards-compatible PS3 for a decent output). Having previously played, and completed, Road Rash, Road Rash II, and Road Rash 3 (yes, the numbering scheme is annoying) on the Mega Drive, I’d never experienced the other game in the series – confusingly called Road Rash, and released on the 3DO and later the Playstation and Saturn. Even more confusingly, this was released before Road Rash 3, making this the third game and the Mega Drive RR3 the fourth game.

Road Rash for the 32-bit consoles is certainly a step up in graphics from Road Rash II, with a combination of colourful opponents, smoother scaling for roadside (and on-road) obstacles, and the use of textured polygons for buildings. It runs at a faster pace, and feels a lot more responsive while riding the bike, although there remains a bit of a lag when hitting the punch button. It is still a lot of fun, but there are a few things which feel a little off – maybe because the 16-bit games are so ingrained in me.

First, while the graphics are certainly better, they’re nowhere near what the Playstation is capable of. This is probably a result of the game’s origins on the 3DO (and, apparently, the Mega CD). What is more odd is the variety of art styles throughout. The in-game graphics appear to be higher resolution pixel art, looking much better than the digitised riders in Road Rash 3. These compare well to the grainy pink-tinged videos shown before and after races. Both these are preferably to the awful caricatured cartoons used to illustrate menus and represent the other riders.

The videos have some of the worst acting committed to film

Second, there are some elements of the game which have been changed for the worse since RRII. One of the staples of the series is the small selection of riders who will catch up to you throughout the race. In the Mega Drive games there are typically three groups of riders – those in places 10-15, those in places 4-9, and those in places 1-3 – which are roughly grouped throughout the stage. As you make your way past each group, you then have a break where one of the overtaken riders comes back and pulls up beside you, trying to knock you off – giving you an opportunity to punch them back, take their weapon, or push them over. That doesn’t happen here; no riders caught back up with me after being overtaken unless I crashed, and as a result I never actually knocked anyone off their bike.

The weapons are treated differently. I seem to have started with a baseball bat, and as a result (and because of other riders not travelling alongside me) I can’t access any other weapons – I don’t even know if it’s possible to steal them. The baseball bat doesn’t seem to do a lot of damage at all, but since I never hit anyone more than once it’s academic anyway.

Third, the menus are really badly designed. There’s a huge lag between selecting something and the menu changing, and the menu tree is needlessly confusing. There are two modes you can choose from at the start of the game – Thrash and Big Game – although it seems as if you can change between them through the options menu at any point. Thrash is effectively a quick race, with no progression saved, although it does seem to keep track of which races you’ve qualified in. Big Game is the main mode where you must earn money and qualify to be able to buy better bikes to compete at higher levels. More focus is placed on Thrash at the start of the game, and then the options menus list options not available in that mode.

Those are all relatively minor complaints, and I’m pleased I got hold of this. I’m halfway through the second level now, having just got a new bike, and the police have finally properly turned up. Combined with denser traffic and narrower roads, this makes some stages a bit more of a challenge.

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: completed!

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I went to Syria, spent some time faffing around in the bar’s toilets, travelled up to the mountain shaped like a bull’s head, found a hidden cave with a dead body and a lens in it, went to Spain and faffed around in a mausoleum for a bit until I found something there that nobody else had seen for years, buried in a candle. I went back to the church in Paris and reassembled a telescope that showed me part of a stained glass window, went to an archaeological dig which had a funny picture on the floor which was resolved by putting a certain-shaped chalice on the floor, went back to Spain and uncovered the mystery of the missing children, got on a train to Scotland and narrowly avoided being shot, and then ended up in the ruins of a church.

Compared to the start of the game, the end seems to be a bit too frantic, travelling all over Europe (and the Middle East) with relatively little to do at each location. Maybe I was playing this too intensively, but I felt increasingly restless with the improbability of some of the leaps of logic the game was guiding me through, and felt there was an unneeded sense of urgency to the last part of the story. The very end was more abrupt than I remember, and as a result pretty unsatisfying.

The locations were varied, at least.

My aim was to play through all the Broken Sword games, with the stories fresh in my mind, but I may have a little break before moving to the second.

Forza Horizon 4: an Ubisoft original

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I mean, look at the state of this map.

Every one of those icons is something to do – in fact, often there are multiple things at a single location. They can be single races; they can be tournaments; they can be entire storylines. Every time I complete an event I seem to get seventeen new icons pop up. As a result, I often turn the game on and spend more time deciding what to do, rather than actually doing it.

I’ve been prompted to upgrade my difficulty, because I was winning every race, and so I’ve settled at “above average” because I want to win almost every race. The variety in races, cars, and conditions is superb – the changing seasons on a weekly basis means that racing in one session can feel very different to the next. I must return to the buggy race (where I came second) when it’s not winter and I can get better grip on the fields.

Who am I joking? I won’t be able to find the icon a second time.

Cookie Clicker: playing the stock market

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I have had a Cookie Clicker save for many years. It has moved with me between laptops, and, since I unlocked the ability for it to continue to earn cookies even when closed, I feel less attached to it, dipping in and out every few months. I have found the ways in which the game has expanded to be well thought out, if overly complicated. Nowhere is this more true than the stock market.

You unlock the stock market by upgrading your banks, and suddenly there’s a whole new currency to be learning, which varies with your cookies-per-second measure. While it means that the game is relatively stable compared to the main cookie attainment, the added layer of abstraction means it’s tricky to understand how it’s going to affect your cookie balance.

Anyway. Buy low, sell high. But what is low, and what is high? Each of the stocks – which are tied to the cookie-producing buildings you own – seems to have a different natural level, although they do each seem to vary all over the place. It looks as if the minimum is $1, and the maximum is up around $250. Things don’t vary too fast, but they do span a wide range. As a result you need to be monitoring the movements fairly regularly, and I just find it far too stressful trying to work out what is going up or down.

And yet there’s the prospect of a 4.5 quindecillion cookie profit …

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: there’s been an explosion!

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Having completed Nico’s prologue, I moved into more familiar territory. It is many years since I’ve played Broken Sword, but I remembered most of the story and puzzles in the first section – the way the clown looked with the accordion, the annoying policeman Moue, the workman who had seemingly missed the huge explosion a few metres away from his hole. I made my way to the sewer, where I remember searching for ages in the Playstation version before seeing the tiny red dot of the red nose.

In this version, interactive points are highlighted, which makes all the difference.

Woven throughout the first hour or so of the game are more elements of Nico’s story, with her revisiting the quayside and Imelda Carchon, but the main focus remains on George. Maybe it’s years of experience and cynicism, but the story now seems very unrealistic – travelling between countries at the drop of a hat, particularly as an American; finding very specific villages in the middle of nowhere; a very limited number of people to actually talk to. And Nico, who (from George’s point of view) is always just sitting in her apartment, waiting for him to drop by.

Travelling to Ireland uncovered many stereotypes, and a goat which I remembered to be a pain to pass, but which I seemed to fluke my way past within a minute. I found a gem which had been dropped through the pub’s cellar grate. I paired this up with a tripod that Nico had stolen from the museum, and then found (again seemingly accidentally) where to place these, after an awkwardly-scripted meeting between world leaders in a sewer, which then revealed the next location.

So, I’m off to Syria.