Remember when I used to post in this weblog all the time? Holy crap, that was so tight! For the past few weeks, sadly, I've done very little besides spent time with my loved ones and play video games. Not very exciting blog material? Not really. It's just hard to muster up the energy to do anything else. But damn it, I owe this blog my time and at least a little bit of my energy, don't I?
So, lately I've been embarking on a strict training regimen in preparation of February's Dual Driving Game Mega-Release of Gran Turismo 4 and Forza Motorsport. See, I have a uniquely checkered past when it comes to driving games. When I was a sophmore in College, and an RA, one of my residents was hugely into the burgeoning new generation of video games (the PS1 had just been released). I too was heavily curious, as any college student worth their salt is always seeking new ways to waste time and energy. He was a subscriber to the late great Next Generation magazine (there has never been a better gaming mag, sadly) and one of their cover stories was on the game WipeOut. I wish I could tell you exactly what it was about it that piqued my interest, nay, consumed my interest, but the incredible CG image on the cover and the screenshots and details inside were the coolest fucking things I'd ever seen. I arranged for the Hannukah to be a harbinger of both a PS1 and a copy of WipeOut from Oxford, Ohio's own Wal Mart. I still remember the fateful day when I brought it to my dorm room. I was, at that point, somehow lucky enough to have procured an advanced copy of Soul Coughing's Irresistible Bliss and I can still remember barelling down the second course of the game to "Super Bon Bon" and thinking it was just the flat out greatest experience of all time (I would not lose my virginity for another four months). WipeOut, at least the way I played it, was a game where depressing the accelerator was not even within the realm of consideration. It was all about twitch steering and survival. For years, WipeOut and its several descendants were the only racing games I played, and I played them religiously, falling into a trancelike state whenever I did, zoning out completely, my thumbs reciting their ordained and invisible-to-the-naked-eye movements.
I tried to get into games like Gran Turismo, that I knew were spectacular, but the physics were so bizarre and alien, I was so unable to control something so sensitive and, let's face it, slow, that I quickly lost interest.
A few months ago, I bought Burnout 3, which was pretty much WipeOut with cars. Blisteringly fast, violent, and incredibly fun. And so I was reinterred into the racing genre, this time with actual cars. Then I got Halo 2 and starting using Xbox Live, and at that point everything changed completely. I was never behind the idea of Online MultiPlayer gaming. I never figured I'd have the amount of time necessary to compete against people who spent every waking hour of their lives playing games online and learning every nook and cranny and basically completely pwning me. But Bungie's incredible online setup completely blew me away and made me completely rabid for any kind of similar experience.
At around that point, I started hearing about Forza, and the incredible online experience they were preparing for the game. Combined with an enormous amount of visual customization options, I just had to be there. The idea to making my dream, cream/maroon colored four banger and showing it off online, well, it was appealing as hell.
The only problem was that all my previous racing game experience had taught me absolutely nothing about driving.
The first post-Forza game I got was Need For Speed Underground 2. I'm about 65% through it and, to my mind, it's the perfect gateway drug between a twitch accelerator game like WipeOut and a pure sim game like Forza. It's got arcade handling, sure, but it's actually taught me the blitheringly obvious concepts of slowing down a bit before you enter a turn and actually braking once in a while. I also got to make my car look ridiculous.
Next up, Project Gotham Racing 2. This was a completely different animal. Much less forgiving handling and realistic tracks. Almost 90 turns which required me to almost completely stop the car. Etcetera. The one thing I'm realizing though, as I pathetically slog my way towards a piddling Bronze game completion, is that I need to learn the currently impossible task of power sliding. This is undoubtedly both the hardest thing for me to control, and the most necessary skill in the game.
I just picked up RalliSport Challenge 2, as a brief flirtation with EA Big's fun and criminally underrated Shox completely enamored me with the concept of Rally Circuits, and that and Gran Turismo 3 will join these two other games in a training regimen in preparation for February.
And this is basically what I've been doing instead of talking to you.
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