ModNation Racers First Look

I played around with PSP ModNation Racers this afternoon after Sony sent out a code for an exclusive demo to members of the PlayStation Network. I think the last cart-racer I've played was the first DS Mario Kart titles, and I found this to be just as satisfying.

It's kind of like a combo of Mario Kart and Burnout. As you pull off moves like long jumps off of ramps, hitting your opponents, drifting, and drafting you accumulate boost power. You spend your boost on offensive moves like sideswiping or what you'd expect, a big burst of speed. There's a lot more than meets the eye, and some great opportunities for offensive strategies that take this game beyond what I'd expected.

What developers seem to be counting on with this title is a user's ability to create or edit tracks so that there could be literally thousands of shared tracs out there to play with your friends. This might be more viable on the PS3 version, but with the quick look at the PSP track editor, it looks pretty weak. The controls don't seem to be intuitive at all, and I had a hard time finding my way through the list of different types of additions to the track layout unless I went back to the main menu of the edit screen each time. This is a limited demo version , so maybe this will be improved later. Also, I've never really been into level editors much myself, and trust that developers are making games for me as best they can and nothing I can work on in ten minutes will top it.

       

ModNation Racers Beta Invites Sent Out

I just found my e-mail invite to the ModNation Racers  beta on PSP. I'll have to install it and give it a go, and write a review later. Basically, it's a new take on Kart racing games, where the tracks are highly modifiable and can be shared over the Playstation Network including the PS3 version. More to come!

Retro Gaming: The Green Screen of Death

Some friends have suggested I join a Facebook group called When I was your age, we had to blow on our video games to make them work! Those were the days, eh? Pop a game in the NES, gently push it down into place, turn on the power, and you'd be greeted with a screen flashing green, gray, and brown. The phenomena lead to game retailers peddling cleaning kits that would fix your cartridges.

They did get dirty, but it was rarely the games that were the problem, it was the 72-Pin connectorinside the NES itself that would eventually stop making the right connection. The design was terrible, with the internal connector being bent in with every use, and the death of any moderately used system was inevitable, so why did they make this thing so badly?

The Nintendo Entertainment System went to market just after the so-called Video Game Crash of 1984. There weren't Gamestop shops all over America's strip malls back then, and gaming stuff was mostly sold in department stores like Sears. After the crash, retailers wouldn't touch home video games with a ten foot pole, so Nintendo marketed it not as a computer systems as the Atari was, but rather an Entertainment System. Nintendo's design totally hid the cartridge, with hopes that it wouldn't be associated with what had come before, top loading game consoles.
The gambit worked, and the NES went on to sell in record breaking numbers and became the king of home gaming for years after, and laid the foundation for Nintendo's future portable and home consoles. Just before Nintendo retired the format, they released a revised model where you loaded the cartridge from the top. The games that would blink away on your old machine now worked right every time, but the thing looked so crazy because the cartridges were so tall.


The top-loader NES was a big ticket item on online auction sites for years until cheap clones flooded the market in the late about five years back, and now you can find high quality replacement 72-pin connectors for your old gray box. Now we can all enjoy our NES classics on our first loading attempt!

Retro Gaming: Bionic Commando

I was about 11 years old and still hadn't learned how to swim. It wasn't so much I had never learned as I was absolutely terrified of the idea of swimming. Sure, I liked to play around in the shallow end, but anything after a depth of 4-1/2 feet scared me witless. One year my mother roped us into swimming lessons at the local pool, and I was ready to run away from home. So the parents played off my obsession: Nintendo. If I went through the swim class, I could have a new NES game. I did it, and my reward, the legendary classic known as Bionic Commando.

You'd think it anti-climactic to have finished the game in one weekend. In most cases, this is true, but with Bionic Commando, you could play it over and over. What's not to love? Swinging around on a bionic arm, a variety of weapons, some nonsensical dialog, and killing Hitler's doppelganger in the final showdown.

The gameplay as easy to learn as it was unique. Getting a hang of the bionic arm took all of a minute, then your trusty NES controller became like an extension of your own body, pulling off some amazing swinging moves. The graphics were never really revolutionary for the time, but the music was very impressive, especially with the limitations of the day. I remember Area 2, the one with the slime, always ended too soon because the music was actually pretty hypnotic.

The game was remade for current gen platforms a couple of years back. It looked incredible, and played fairly well, but for some reason lacked a lot of the charm of the original. It wasn't nearly as nice to control, and I stopped playing pretty early in frustration. The sequel is due out early 2011, for XBLA and similar venues. Hopefully they'll put a bit of polish on it to honor the original now over twenty years old.