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25/01 - Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
31/01 - Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas
01/02 - SOMA (Safe Mode)
09/02 - Shadow Warrior
18/02 - Mulaka
26/02 - NieR: Automata - 3C3C1D119440927 DLC
02/03 - Race Driver: GRID
This was an absolute joy to revisit. Despite them being one of my favourite genres, I almost never replay racing games. With them it usually feels like the initial run through exists as something to hone your skills and unlock all the content. Once that is done, why bother going through that again? You have everything you wanted by that point. But on a whim I decided to go back to this one, and I'm really glad I did. With how stagnant the genre has been feeling for a long while, this was an excellent shot in the arm of the kind of excitement that it feels like the genre has been missing for years.
I'm also really glad it holds up after so long too. Despite it having a flew blemishes here and there, it's still a really solid experience with great feeling mechanics. It still captures that tension is always had of feeling like your constantly right on the knife edge, despite the handling being pretty approachable. It's really stylishly presented in a way that still does the job really well and gives the game a unique mood. Despite having a pretty basic structure to the career mode, it has a great sense of progression to it, and takes you through a lot of very varies race types that are mostly very fun to drive. There's a big mix of track cars from different classes that all drive very differently, like the comparatively slow and slippy muscle cars, through touring cars, GT cars, and hyper fast and grippy LMP cars. Tracks are nice and varied too. The game shines most in the tight street courses that force you through narrow corners with little room for error. But there are also a decent amount of proper race tracks that have some nice multiple apex sections that are satisfying to properly nail. A couple of Japanese mountain roads, and even an open dockyard area also exist that work well for specific race types.
The game still also has one of the best drifting modes in any game too. This can be extremely tricky to pull off, and as such I think modes like these often get criticised for the wrong reasons. Usually I don't like these modes either, where they create a separate handling model for drifting, instead of that style of driving just simply being performed by the player in the default physics engine. The problem with these modes is that they give you very limited control over your car. Since the developers make these modes with what I guess is an assumption that the player can't hold a drift by themselves, or that the physics don't support that well enough, they simply make it so the car automatically slides any time you turn at all. But this creates this really unnatural feeling where you have to second guess exactly where the developer thinks the limit of grip should be in this weird mode, and it's never quite clear, and it's definitely not consistent between games. There's also the problem that without being able to choose whether you want to slide or not, that makes trying to correct mistakes a nightmare. You might be out of your line a little bit, or you want to get back grip to readjust, but the game won't let you. And instead you end up with the mistake snowballing in to something much bigger as you try to manage the swinging pendulum of your out of control car as it just keeps getting worse. This game seems to manage to avoid those problems somewhat. Maybe it's because I've played this game more than others with this mode, but the limit of grip feels a bit more intuitive here than in other games, and there's a better sense of when you're going too far before you just totally lose control. There is also a little bit of leeway in giving you some grip when you're not already sliding. It allows you to readjust slightly if you've messed up, instead of just making it worse.
I think perhaps the problem people have with modes like this is that they don't get familiar enough with them to understand what the developer was trying to go for, or don't have a sense of what drifting even feels like outside of modes like this and so have no reference. But when these modes are usually so inconsistent and overly punishing towards players who haven't already mastered it, I can see that point of view. In a way I think I can see the developers of this game might have even been aware of this issue. The target scores for the drift events in this game are ridiculously easy if you're even somewhat competent at them. While the game in general can be pretty challenging, I was finding myself crushing my opponents in the drift events every time. It wasn't rare for me to get triple their score, or even up to ten times as much in some events. Maybe that's an admission that they don't expect most people to get the hang of it, and will even able to score remotely as well? Somewhat strange, given how this has been probably the most intuitive version of this kind of system I've come across. And that's way more time spent on just one mode than I was expecting to, even with my enthusiasm for that style of driving. It's not exactly a huge part of the game either. Just one mode of many. It's another one of those hyper specific topics that I bet I'm the only person to put so much thought in to.
There were a couple of problems that reared their heads though. Despite most of the tracks being excellent, I think a few were pretty bad, or at least had bad parts. There were a few that felt like they just didn't have any good room to overtake, and were really miserable to race on. I know I was faster than the AI on those tracks, but at any point that it would makes sense to overtake, it was always in really awkward choke point that was just impossible to do anything with. There were also a couple of tracks that had some pretty poor sight lines, meaning that I could never get a decent feel for where the best line through a complex would even be. A couple of tracks had parts that weren't exactly bad, but didn't work well with the way the game is designed. There were some tracks that start off with a very narrow chicane, and the AI just cannot navigate them at all without causing total chaos on the first lap. It makes some races infuriating as you're restarting them like a dozen times trying to pick your way through the wreckage, and usually failing, despite trying to take it slow and steady. A lot of it is just down to luck.
I also had a few issues with the way some of the cars felt to drive. Despite the vast majority of the classes being very enjoyable, a couple were really bad and just not fun, for very strange reasons too. Some of them require an absolutely insane level of perfection to get corners right in, that is really unreasonable compared to the difficulty level of the rest of the game. On top of that, the physics system that seems to favour dramatic crashes, combined with that other problem of the AI I mentioned, makes trying to pass opponents in these cars near impossible. It produces a quirk in the physics that makes you bounce off opponents pretty drastically if you touch them, and with the AI all piling in together at the start of a race, and the absolute zero room for error these cars give you, it just makes the whole thing really unreasonable. I swear the AI cheats in these cars too. I suspect there might be a system where you bounce off opponents more than they bounce off you, to perhaps mitigate the pile-up problem. They might even be able to turn sharper than you too, given how they seem to have way more leeway to get their line wrong in these cars than the player does. One of the weird things I found was that this is a big problem in the LMP2 class, but not LMP1. Both classes being extremely similar, and should be ultra fast and grippy racing machines, with the former only being slightly slower than the latter. Yet they are totally night and day in how hard it is to drive them, and how hard the AI drivers are too.
But those issues thankfully only cropped up in a few race types, and the majority of the game was still excellent and a lot of fun. Just as good as I remember it. I was somewhat worried that might not be the case coming back to it, with it being one of those kinds of games that was special in its day for standing out when there wasn't much like it. But it turns out it wasn't just the novelty that made this game appeal back in the day. It absolutely has legs. I just wish the sequels were as good. I guess the series could still make a second comeback at some point...