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All Over the tmNations
May. 8th, 2010 03:08 pmAs I mentioned last weekend, any work on personal projects has been stifled recently with a new-found addiction to Trackmania - I'm not sure how it's been around for this long without me noticing it before. On starting, I admitted my location as Massachusetts and as a result it stuck me in a humiliatingly ostentatious Stars and Stripes car that broadcasts to everyone that I'm proudly racing for Uncle Sam - I tried to undo some of the damage by changing my user flag to the Union Jack but I still feel a bit conspicuous. I thought, quite reasonably, from the description I was given that what I was about to take this car into was an online racing game, and while this is technically still what it is, that doesn't really begin to describe it.
Happily, this is a game along the lines of the simply-titled Stunts from the 1990s that unapologetically realizes that there are no bounds as to what you can do in computer racing - having roads remaining on the ground, or the cars remaining the right way up as they go along them, are unnecessary in the virtual world. Therefore, the "mania" part of the name is well warranted - in the "Nations" free version that I have, you take control of a Formula 3-ish car and have to guide it around increasingly unlikely obstacles such as jumps, banked curves and corkscrews. The tracks rarely last more than a minute or two, and ones that go longer are labelled as "Endurance" - the aim of the game is just to get from A to B in the most efficient way possible, beating a series of medals to earn points to go forward. If you fall off or make a tiny mistake, you can just restart instantly and try again.
An editor is provided, and it has very little limits on what you can do apart from insisting that you play through your track demonstrating that it is indeed possible to visit all the checkpoints in order before finishing. Therefore, online, some of the more improbable tracks become a team effort in even working out how to get to the end of these precariously-constructed examples of automotive crazy golf.
The whole engine only has one very obvious incongruity - because of the super-high-speed nature of the tracks, you can't help noticing that when you veer off course and pancake into a brick wall while going at more than half the speed of sound, you will be sent tumbling a bit, your driver's head will stay on, and your car will generally stay in one piece instead of disintegrating into its component atoms. The cars are totally invincible, and from what I remember, most Formula 1 cars were lucky to even get around three laps of a normal track without falling to bits.
You can download Trackmania Nations here - I'm davidxn.
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If Formula 1 were actually like this I would still be watching it! |
An editor is provided, and it has very little limits on what you can do apart from insisting that you play through your track demonstrating that it is indeed possible to visit all the checkpoints in order before finishing. Therefore, online, some of the more improbable tracks become a team effort in even working out how to get to the end of these precariously-constructed examples of automotive crazy golf.
The whole engine only has one very obvious incongruity - because of the super-high-speed nature of the tracks, you can't help noticing that when you veer off course and pancake into a brick wall while going at more than half the speed of sound, you will be sent tumbling a bit, your driver's head will stay on, and your car will generally stay in one piece instead of disintegrating into its component atoms. The cars are totally invincible, and from what I remember, most Formula 1 cars were lucky to even get around three laps of a normal track without falling to bits.
You can download Trackmania Nations here - I'm davidxn.
