Category: Game On

With the arrival of GTA Vice City on Friday, a lost weekend ensued as Fliss and I immersed ourselves in the seedy underworld of a Miami-esque city in the 1980’s. As with GTA 3, Vice City’s hook is that you can do pretty much anything you want to but without ending up in jail.

Except this time ’round you can do more – ride motorbikes, fly helicopters and even run businesses. Although we spent around 16 hours playing the game at the weekend, I’m pretty confident that the leaves will be back on the trees and the days will be getting longer before we have completion in our sights.

Lets face it – spending the winter in a tropical climate, albeit a virtual one, is a damn sight more inviting than the freezing alternative… :o)

This game will quite deservedly sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Off of the back of that, Criterion will then be able to offload crates full of the Renderware development package to third party developers the world over.

And if people still need convincing after Burnout 2, Grand Theft Auto : Vice City will follow hot on the tyre tracks of this adrenaline fueled arcade racer to deliver a very merry and graphically enhanced xmas for gamers the world over, all courtesy of Renderware and a little imagination.

Could I be wrong?

Yes I could, but the quality of Burnout 2 defies the sub-year development time. Considering the world had been on a couple of trips round the Sun in the time it took the Codies to churn out TOCA and it’s bland renderer, it might be worth their while to invest in Renderware before they start work on yet another sequel.

This game is everything TOCA Race Driver failed to be. It’s a very decent racing experience, the graphics are sublime, and even when you get it all wrong the physics and particle effects make for a heart stopping, eyeball grabbing one way ticket to Carnageville before you’re off on your merry way again.

If it has any faults it’s that once you’re ahead, the AI cars don’t use boost if you don’t. So once you’re ahead there’s really no reason to take the risk and have it all end in tears on the final corner.

But where would the fun be in that?

Burnout 2 just begs you to see how fast you can go. It’s not quite up there with Wipeout Fusion’s Zone Mode, but considering your wheels are on the tarmac and the roads are filled with traffic it goes plenty fast enough!

New for the sequel; when you hit the boost the music fades in instead of fading out to a heartbeat, as in the previous game. It’s weird at first, but pretty cool after a while. Also new are the various game modes such as pursuit, obviously borrowed from the Need For Speed series, and Crash mode, which just involves having as big a crash as you possibly can from various set pieces. Sounds fun, and it is.

Looking forward to picking this title up on its due date of Friday 20th September. Over the last month the demo has proved immensely popular at work; there’s something about the level of immersion that makes every lunchtime an essential step back in time to WWII.

Surprizingly for me, it’s the first time I’ve looked forward to a PC release in… well, ever, really!

Fingers crossed the full game is even better than the demo – that and it works over my poxy dial up connection too.