Caltrops - Mr. Shifty





	[quote name="Dream Cast"]Lack of air control is acceptable in a realistic setting, since your wheels spend 99% of their time on the ground anyway - Earth grav sees to that. But in a cartoonishly low-gravity milieu, losing all control every time you carry too much speed into a dip or a bump or hit a wall at the wrong angle or let another car wedge itself underneath you on a turn is MADDENING. I know what you're thinking. It's probably like classic Sonic the Hedgehog, where every ramp is an opportunity to outsmart the level designers, hoarding momentum to launch yourself clear across huge swathes of obstacles or into otherwise inaccessible locations. It's a physics playground! Only it's not a fucking physics playground, all the tracks are narrow and winding and surrounded by invisible walls stretching high above the regular walls. Hitting these invisible walls stops your car dead in the sky, with nothing to do but watch it tumble like a leaf back down to the course. The only "shortcuts" are a few alternate lanes the designers laid out for you, which fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of a shortcut in the first place. But what about the trick system, surely that compensates for the absence of air control? Joy Ride Turbo doesn't have a trick system, it has an animation system. The essence of tricking is calculating exactly how bodacious a stunt you can pull off in the hangtime you have, then executing the tricks using your own dexterity. If you don't finish tricking in SSX Tricky before you hit the ground, you're going to feel it. Tricks in Joy Ride Turbo are performed by pushing the analog stick in any direction while your car is airborne; as long as you hold the stick, your driver will continue tricking until the game calculates he won't have time to finish another before touchdown (easy to do when the player has no air control), at which point the trick stick stops accepting input. Tricks are for kids, but these are for invalids. I read as many reviews on the Joy Ride Turbo <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/joy-ride-turbo">Metacritic page</a> as I could tolerate. I could maybe understand if the reviewers didn't share my complaints about the mechanics, but they didn't even address them! The consensus seems to be that if you like this sort of thing, you'll like this thing. Well, I like this sort of thing, and I don't think Joy Ride Turbo is worth the bag of Funyuns it was printed on. I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. If you enjoyed Joy Ride Turbo, or if you made Joy Ride Turbo, that's fine. You're stupid but that's fine. I think criticism can be healthy. It can help developers make better games in the future, and it can help players choose better games in the here and now. In that spirit, here's a list of all the XBLA racers I've played, in order from best to worst: 1. Outrun Online Arcade (delisted, though you may still be able to find it on other platforms as Outrun 2006) 2. Hydro Thunder Hurricane (regularly $10, currently free with a Live Gold subscription) 3. Daytona USA (regularly $10, on sale for $2.50 until Tuesday) -----CUTOFF POINT----- 4. Toybox Turbos ($10) - Micro Machines without the license. Or most of the content. 5. Gripshift ($10) - Super Monkey Ball with buggies. See: the first post in this thread. 6. Sega Rally Online Arcade (delisted) - Glorified demo of the stupefyingly underrated Sega Rally Revo. Get that instead, it's amazing! -----POINT OF NO RETURN----- 7. Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious ($10) - Glorified demo of the compromised backport of Forza Horizon 2. Don't bother. 8. Joy Ride Turbo ($10) - Worse than Funyuns.[/quote]