Motorstorm review
Wednesday 17 September 2008 ◷ 01:00
Motorstorm came with my Playstation3 package, just like some F1 racing game I forgot the name of. I tried the F1 racing thing first, but I don't believe I enjoy watching a screen from a perspective where the part you can anticipate on is tiny. The whole viewport translation of real-life to the screen is not comfortable, or I'm sitting to far from my 40" screen while the average PC gamer has a 22" 1600x1200 screen just a few feet from his face. So the F1 racing was out, and I tried the Motorstorm. In the beginning I just picked the first bike to come up and do some rounds to get used to the SIXAXIS motion sensor as control. Those controls are good, and it feels natural to use the SIXAXIS to control the vehicles (just switching between this and GTA IV controls is a bit tricky). But once you get the hang of using the boost it get's a bit to easy, and the AI starts to show. Boosting means you get enough power to pull the vehicle stable again from an unstable situation and handling the gas or steering isn't very important anymore, just keep boosting to the max and make any vehicle drift as you want. While that would make you faster, it doesn't mean winning more. The AI seems to just keep up with you and to win mostly means overtaking the whole pack on the last stretch, it doesn't matter what happened in the first two rounds. So for the tickets in the first two levels it's a nice game, then you start to think "Rain God Mesa in a buggy, again???". And while I love the GTA IV soundtrack, turning of the music in Motorstorm was about the first thing I did. I hate college rock adding artificial coolness to boring stuff, the same way looking through a microscope in CSI is tried to make more interesting by adding a pompous soundtrack.
And then the Fudge Packer event, The Tenderizer on a Bike. The track is a canyon on a foggy morning, making it dark, hard to distinguish the rocks from the mud, mud in your face making that even harder and then you're on a bike that explodes as soon as anything comes near it, and the opponents do that all the time. Sure, Doom 1 had to be played with an almost dark screen, but Motorstorm is an HD game. I didn't buy a $2000 screen to be annoyed by not being able to see what I'm doing... So it's back to GTA IV while waiting for Heavy Rain (Yeah, having to put a disc in the system to play a game means there is a definite decision to take it out and not put it back in again for a very long time).
PS: Fuck Sony for not allowing to move the location of a PSN account to another country.