[/caption]This is the fifteenth post in our Game of the Day series.
Driving a car frightened and excited me in my youth, which recently passed quietly away at the thirty-year mark on Wednesday. The thought of passing Driver's Ed and the DOL driver's test, even in Morton, scared the begeezus out of me. Navigate the squirrelly, steep, one-way avenues of Seattle? No way! However, the anxious feelings remained, a need for speed in exploration that I sated with Interstate 76.
This is another game where I played the demo countless times (in 320x240 on my non-accelerated P75) until I had every location, enemy spawn, and line memorized. That level you started out already moving, I believe, and took over control with your compatriot Tauras in a large white car in front of you. Initially I didn't understand the relationship of the characters, or the plot besides some Mad Max underpinnings, and lost several times by blowing the shit out of poor Tauras. Hey, I've got a giant gun turret on top of my sweet ride! What else is there to do with it?
I finally did buy the whole game and got treated to the entire slew of cut-scenes as I slammed through every mission with the kind of gamer determination I do not normally have. There are memories floating around of various levels where I lost and died nigh endlessly and yet somehow kept trying until I won. So it was that when I brought Groove Champion (seriously, that was the hero's name) crashing into the final fortress for his showdown, I whooped a well-earned whoop of delight.
As in most of my favorites, I76 has an openness to its environments despite rather linear objectives. The road is merely a guide, but there are expansive plains to be crossed and battled upon, cliffs to jump, and mountains to crash into at the last instant because what looked like a slope a minute ago is now a sheer face. Yes, so the graphics engine re-used from the Mech Warrior series was a bit gross, despite trying to dress it up as stylized, but it worked well enough for cars, guns, and plateaus. So what if the characters looked a bit Duplo?
Controlling your sweet ride with all its weapons and gizmos is the reason why I never picked the game back up after dropping it. I bought some fancy, programmable joystick with dozens of buttons so I could burn rubber without lamely clicking keys. It's much more satisfying to pull an impossible turn when you're hanging it off a plastic knob than just holding down one of the arrow keys! Just thinking about trying to figure out all the different buttons and behaviors is enough to cool my desire.
However delicious the memories of chasing, fleeing, and shooting in 70's muscle cars may be, the recollections of online multiplayer are much less so. They do make good stories, however. Unlike Warcraft 2, I definitely felt like I had a serious chance in kicking other people's tailpipes, and maybe I did except for one problem. Everyone was hacking the damn game! In my very first match I came up against a flying tank-car with heat-seeking one-shot-kill missiles and impenetrable armor. That wasn't the last time I saw such feats and eventually I gave up trying to find honest players to grind under my treads. All things considered, I did a decent job of not dying.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that someday a game publisher will bring back the spirit of Interstate 76 and at least Tauras with his sweet poetry. It's the kind of game I dream about when skidding about in the claustrophobic racers of today which seem much to attached to city streets. Give me the open range!
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar