When grey is acceptable

I've been rather taken by the interest shown in my protest against grey, bland driving games. It isn't a new protest whatsoever - Eric4372 at the excellent Musings of a Sega Racing Fan is one such warrior against the grey, and the sadly now deceased UK: Resistance was banging on about it for years, but I do have to make one notable exception to save me from being caught out later down the line for being a fickle git.


That exception is Driven to Destruction (or Eve of Destruction as the US knows it) on the Playstation 2. It is a stock car racing game like nothing else on the market. It is without comparison in truely capturing the essence of stock car racing that I used to love watching so much as a child with my Dad. It has everything - shabby cars, dirty environments, roaring but incapable engines, sluggish handling, exquisite damage modelling and an inspired set of race formats that, frankly, puts any other racer to shame.

Despite some horrific frame rate drops, it has also supplied me with some of the greatest 2-player moments of my life - strangely enough playing well into the early hours with my Dad on the 'Detention' race where one player takes control of an indestructible bus and has to stop the other player finishing the race as a car.... superb doesn't come close to describing it.

And yes, it is quite grey & bland looking. But perfectly so - it simply couldn't survive being all bright and lucid - this game was born to be grim.

Ironically, I don't actually own the game anymore. I've bought the game on 3 separate occasions, seemingly unable to live without it, but I made the decision a few months ago to get shut of my PS2, but it still sits there upstairs gathering dust. Maybe one day...

EDIT 13th Sept 2012:  I bought it again.  Played it once.  Its not as good as I remembered... :(

Italian magic returns

Completely random post, but as I said I would occasionally talk about football in this blog, here goes my first post - dedicated to the return to UK football of Paolo Di Canio, formerly of the mighty Sheffield Wednesday, and one of my all time favourite footballers.


Paolo was well known for his time at West Ham, with his superb spell alongside another Italian, Benito Carbone, with Wednesday being often forgotten or overlooked, or at the very best simply associated with his infamous push on referee Paul Alcock back in the late 90's. Of course, it must have been funny as fook for everyone else at the time, but I knew in an instant it would spell the end of his time with us. We've been pretty shit ever since really.

He was a real shining light in a team of hard working but ultimately dull Englsih players. Some of the goals he scored for Wednesday were out of this world. He was probably one of the first players to wear white and even orange boots, too.


He's now back in the UK as manager of Leauge 2 side Swindon Town. Stranger things have happened I guess, but I genuinely hope he is a huge success and gets a move to a big club after a while.... maybe at Sheffield Wednesday???

Driving with eyes wide shut

Like many people, I'm a big fan of traditional driving games, particularly rally games. But I do have an increasing hatred for their utter boredom.

But I don't think it is purely the games that I blame, I think it is my age and lifestyle that means I just can't cope with them as well as I used to be able to.

I'm nearly 30, married with 2 very young children and I wear contact lenses. My gaming stretches as far as a a few sessions a week nowadays. I still really enjoy driving games but have slowly but surely drifted (excuse the pun) over towards the arcade style games rather than these serious driving sims - simply becasue they are more fun in short bursts.

Grey everywhere

What annoys me most about these sims is the fascination of night races, or races in poor 'evening' light or dull overcast weather conditions - all to make it more 'real'. Even rally games do it loads now. I often literally fall asleep when playing games like this, and struggle to see where the hell I'm going a lot of the time. My eyesight itself is fine - is my brain knackered???

Feeling tired...

I used to detest playing the 24HR races on GRID, simply because I'd be doing perfectly well until dusk set in - I'd then struggle like hell to judge corners and when dark set in I'd completely lose it. Whether it is my age, lifestyle, contact lens wearing or simple tiredness, I just cannot enjoy these moments. Not just GRID, I recently went back to play Rallisport Challenge 2 to see a horrible track playing in the fog. Fog FFS - making the track fooking hard as nails to judge at speed. I'm sure I didn't have a problem when playing it first time around.... am I knackered now??

Watching a new video of DiRT 3, released this weekend, makes me realise how little the rally game has moved on since the early days of Colin McRae Rally on the PS1, let alone the original DiRT released 4 years ago. I know there is only so much you can do to make a rally game different, but why do they have to look & play so.... fucking dull? I was nearly falling asleep just watching the video.

This whole article may read like re-hashed UK:Resistance entry, but give me crisp blue sky, green hills, bright red cars anyday thankyou... at least it keeps me awake.

The Return of the Heroes

Just like busses, you wait around for ages for any news of interest then two lots come around oin a matter of days!

More thanks to Sega, too. This time the announcement of a remake of the superb Guardian Heroes, the Sega Saturn classic from Treasure.

What a game - probably the last great 2D action side-scroller. A quite amazing visual treat with great (and huge list of) characters & stunning music.

The game also had a duel mode that allowed players to choose from any of the main characters plus every single enemy or NPC that you met or defeated in the main game. It was a genius of an idea, allowing the most ridiculous match-ups possible. Pit a tiny little ninja rabbit against a massive screen-high fire-belching plant, or better still pit a tiny ninja rabbit against 5 massive screen-high fire-belching plants in a 6-man brawl!

Enough anyway - roll on the autumn.