NLU Weekly #75 (June 14, 2008) - Just Straight Up Bloggin' |
 Though the main mode of the game called GRID World is pretty neat as it sort of reminds me of the main mode in World Driver Championship with a team aspect, but it is much more in-depth. In WDC you joined a crappy team and moved up as you got better, the teams were nothing more than glorified car upgrades and it made no sense that you'd change teams after just two or three races. In GRID you start off as a freelance driver racing for other teams until you can afford to pay for your team to refurbish an old Mustang. Once you do that you can pick your teams paint/color scheme and you enter your first race. When you finish your first championship you get some sponsor offers (winning nets you 3 sponsors offers, 2nd two and finishing one). You can then apply these to your car though the game has control over where they appear on each car; you can set the order in which they appear. You can have up to 8 sponsors, the first of which is you main sponsor and if you meet their requirement for payout then you get double. The trick here is that each sponsor has its own rule/goal you must accomplish or abide by to get paid. For example, one might just pay for you to show up and finish the race; another won't pay you unless you finish in the top 5 and yet another might only pay you if you finish 1st and do no damage (damage to bodywork doesn't count) to your car. This becomes even more convoluted when you get your own teammate after you reach the second tier of any of the districts (US, Euro and Japan). You have to think about how he will do, not just about how you will do, sure you might be able to win every race but he's going to be coming in at least second, so you'll want to add some less demanding ones so that you can earn some from him being in the race too. Speaking of teammates, the first group are completely crappy, but you might not be able to afford any better... not to mention all of them have different disciplines that they excel at. For example my current teammate was so good at Pro Muscle that I had trouble beating him, so you might want to hire someone good but not better than you. It's pretty in-depth for a semi-sim arcade racing game. After completing three events the season ends with the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race; early on you won't be able to afford to buy a car to enter the GT2 Cla$$ so you will have to race for another team. Le Mans is cool, especially in the last few minutes when this intense movie like score starts playing and rattling your nerves, but it has a few flaws... First they sped up the 24 hours to become 24 minutes, which is nice because not many are going to want to race 24 hours for real (though I am pretty sure you can if you'd like in the single race modes)... The thing is the circuit "Le Sarthe" is very long and takes even a fast racing car 4-8 minutes to get around that means in the GT2 cla$$ you only get to do 4 and a half laps. Though you do get to enjoy a really cool day night cycle as you race around the track and at night the racing becomes pretty intense. As for the gameplay, it's a mixed bag... It is "balls-to-the-wall" racing with lots of fender scraping action, but it is pretty shallow on the other hand. You do have to brake for corners but it is closer to Burnout than it is Forza 2 or GT5. The damage modeling is cool, though you really have to hit something HARD to do any real damage to your car; sure you might break off some fenders or crack your windshield but none of that hampers the car's performance. If you do by chance total your car you can use the cool "flashback" feature which allows you to rewind time (via replay) to a spot further back and try not to make the same mistake twice. It is optional and you are limited to a certain amount based on skill level, but it is does allow for more daredevil racing because you can just, well, try again. I still have a ways to go in the game and I will have more about it as I progress, but though I am not as in to it as I wanted to be, it still is a pretty rad racing title. That was pretty epic, more than I was going to say really, but remember this is "straight up" blogging so anything goes. I have been trying to decide what to do for this summer's special feature because things haven't been so hot around here. May only had three posts and we're two weeks into June and this is the first post so I need to do something to keep this blog active. Are you ready for the next big thing here on Now Loading, well here is announcement... For the next week or so (starting Sunday, most likely) I will playing through Final Fantasy IX again and providing coverage to you via a playthrough log, which is a hybrid of a personal progress blog and a walkthrough. I will warn you though a negative is that this log will be full of spoilers as I discuss the story and walkthrough spoilers as I discuss the progress through the game. So if you never played through FFIX and still wanted to, you'd have to avoid the blog for a week or so. Although I think when games are 8 years old like Final Fantasy IX is, they have been out long enough not to worry about too much about Spoilers, if you are that late to the game then, too bad (though I will probably post a spoiler warning at the top of each entry just in case). If you want to sample a playthrough log, check out The Legend of Dragoon Playthrough Log 2k5: Game Start and the post Summary page for the Final Fantasy VIII Playthrough Log 2006, be sure to only read as far as you are comfortable if you want to limit spoilers. I think that about covers most of what I wanted to talk about, but there are a few loose ends. First I have been working towards my "gold" AK47 in Call of Duty 4, to unlock the gold plated finish, you need to get both 150 kills and 150 headshots with all the assault rifles in the game; there are 7 of them, so far I have the M16, G36c and MP44 completed and I am currently working on the G3. It is going to take a while but I need something to shoot for since I don't think I will be doing another prestige. I have also been playing Rock Band a bit, I managed to complete the vocals tour on hard which is pretty cool. I haven't made too much progress with the drums, I'm just not able at this point to play two different rhythms with two different limbs. I have messed with just playing the drum pads on expert and I can keep up with most of the songs (there are some difficult rolls and patterns that I am not too good at though), but the bass pedal is by far the hardest part of the drumming... or I should say drumming and hitting the bass pedal at the same time is the hardest part of the drumming. Now I think I am done. I have gotten the "straight up" blogging out of my system. After looking at this post in the preview a few times, I remember why I started organizing and putting headers over the different subjects in each set of paragraphs; it makes things much clearer when topics change, especially when you write as much as I do. I'll talk to you again either late Sunday night or early Monday morning with the first post of the Final Fantasy IX Playthrough Log... well that is unless you want to avoid having Final Fantasy IX spoiled for you, in that case I will probably talk to you next Saturday with NLU Weekly #76... Damn, thought I was done... I wanted to mention when NLU Weekly hits the 80th edition on July 19th I am probably stopping the line. I came up with them so that I wouldn't miss a week when slow times like this came up, but they have made me lazy. Instead of writing separate impression or finished articles I just wait until Saturday and combine everything in to one post. I liked having separate Impressions/Finished articles it made reviewing my gaming history much easier and much clearer for everyone what the post was about. I was thinking of letting it go until it hit 100 editions but that wouldn't be until December... There is still time before I hit #80 so I can still change my mind, we'll just see how things go. Alright, now I am outta here! The Crystal Comes Back! Loading Complete! |
POSTED ON JUNE 14, 2008 |
