Beating a dead horse
posted by Skandall (SANDY, UT) Oct 14, 2009
Member since Oct 2004
In short, don't bother with this one. I'm sorry to say this as I'm sure the developers put in all the effort that they could given the time and budget the producers allowed them, but unfortunately the end result is little more than a visually dismal and overall lacking product. The biggest problem is that the visuals are just not up to par with what one expects from a next gen console (save for maybe if this had been a launch title). That aside, this game suffers from the same problem that every other motorcycle racing game suffers from; controls. A motorcycle is driven not by handlebars, but rather by the riders entire body. Your lean angle is a result of pushing down on a foot peg (or counter-steering, depends on who you learned from but I tend to think Freddie Spencer knows what he's talking about). The rider feels what the bike is doing and that feeling contributes to their control. That feel is also basically impossible to replicate in a game. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, when you're riding, your head is not fixed forward!!! The rider has to look at his braking point, then he looks to the corners exit, and then to the spot on the track where he wants to be when he exits the corner. You cannot do this in these games and that contributes to making them so hard to control. Perhaps we should control where the rider is looking rather than lean angle. Of course, ideas like that will never happen because publishers only want developers to do what worked last time. Maybe one day publishers will allow a game designer to try something new, something that works, and then we can all have a motorcycle racing game worth playing
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