racing

Early ModNation Racers Impression

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I’ve been looking forward to playing a non-Mario Kart kart racer for quite some time. Sure, Mario Kart Wii is great, and may still be the best kart racer to come out of this generation when all is said and done, but my palette is looking for something a little different right now.

Enter ModNation Racers. This PlayStation 3 exclusive is part Mario Kart and part Little Big Planet. I’ve only played about an hour of campaign and split-screen, but I don’t think it would hurt to share a few opening thoughts about what I’ve played so far.

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Hitting the Road with PGR 4

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For the last few months, PGR 4 has been my go-to “bored game”. When I don’t feel like playing any other video game in my collection, I pop PGR 4 into my 360. Not to say that PGR 4 is a bad game, but racing games aren’t really my scene. I get bored quickly of any arcade racing game that isn’t Mario Kart and realistic racing games such as Gran Turismo and Forza frustrate me to no end due to their demand of precision driving control skills that I just don’t have. The only reason I even have this game is because it came free, along with a chat pad and headset when I bought last year’s subscription to XBOX Live.

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Metacritic and My Video Game Collection

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Hate it or love it, review aggregators are becoming an increasingly important service for consumers of just about anything. In the video game space, people like them because it gives them a quick and quantifiable way of knowing what games are good and what games suck. The counterpoint to those people are those who don’t feel that aggregates tell the whole story and put an emphasis on a number rather than the context from which that number is derived from.

I’m not here to choose sides. Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to take my XBOX 360 and Wii game collection, full retail games only, compile all of their Metacritic scores and see what the results say about my game stash. I must preface that this is far from scientific and that my collection has changed since I compiled these numbers.

With that said, lets hit the results.

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Game Design Talk: Burnout Paradise and the Feeling of Progression

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For a game that is fairly one-dimensional at its core, Burnout Paradise does a lot of little things to motivate players to keep playing. You will unlock new cars by either winning races or taking them out as they randomly drive by you on the road. The game keeps track of all the super jumps you complete, fences you smash and billboards you drive through. You can even race for the best time on basically every street in the game against your friends or against the world.

Those little things have kept me playing this game longer than I usually plan to. However, each of my sessions usually ends when I realize how far away I am to making progress in the most important measure of progression in the game: the licenses.

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Where the Grass is Green and the Girls Are Pretty

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Burnout Paradise was a game I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. The series first caught my eye when I played the Burnout Revenge demo that came with my XBOX 360, which came with a really cool take down mode. However, the demo for Burnout Paradise left me skeptical. The sensation of going fast was intact, as well as the joy of wrecking other cars (as well as your own), but the demo didn’t really give me a sense of how the open-world structure of the game would work.

I may be two years too late, and the developers have added a ton of free and paid additional content to the game since I last tried it, but I recently got a copy of Burnout Paradise at the bargain basement price of $5 at a Blockbuster Video sale. Was this ticket to paradise well worth it?

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Making It Another Blockbuster Night

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Yesterday, while on my way to my girlfriend’s house, I passed by another Blockbuster. Having pillaged every Blockbuster in my city, I decided to check out the Blockbuster close to her house to see if I can find some gems in their clearance bin. While their selection had no shortage of old sports games, generic shooters and crappy movie-based games, I did pick up some stuff and there were other games worth noting.

Hit the break to see what I found.

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