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Review: Enthusia Professional Racing

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:15:00 +0000

It’s brave to go up against an established franchise, but that’s just what Konami tried to do with Enthusia Professional Racing. In many ways it’s a better game than Gran Turismo but that wasn’t enough to take any substantial market share.

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is that it looks every bit as good as PS2 rival Gran Turismo 4, especially when your PS2 is connected using component cables. Courses and scenery are definitely set in more varied and interesting locales. But there’s no support for widescreen display, which is a slight annoyance especially when playig on modern equipment. Most noticeable is that the load times are very fast indeed, restarting a race is instantaneous as it should be in every game.

The game features a total of 211 cars and take a different approach to proceedings, in that you win cars rather than having to earn money to buy them. Plus, it has one of the strangest introductory movies I’ve ever seen - it includes CGI of fast cars, a dinky toy Morris Mini, a female photographer, a necklace and… an orgasm. So strange.

There are three main sections to the game. Driving Revolution gives you various driving scenarios and allows you test your driving skills and in return unlock cars for use in Free Race mode. Free Race mode allows you to race with your newly unlocked cars on any course, just for kicks. Finally we have Enthusia Life - you start off with a small number of cars in your garage, and are given a number of themed races to take part in, winning a random competing car as a prize, along with points and ranking. Quite RPG like, in some ways especially the random nature of winning a car after the race has ended. One tip - which sounds kind of obvious - is to make sure you pick a race where the odds are in your favour, with your car around the same skill level as the other competitors.

Not one for the feint hearted, you lose points for driving badly - crashing, colliding or going off road - pretty much opposite to the Kudos system seen in Metropolis Street Racer. This is probably the biggest issue with the game, as it can be a little bit too eager to deduct points especially when you also lose them in collisions that are caused by the AI.

These days I think most people would consider the game closer to the Forza series than the Gran Turismo series. However, I can see a lot of other games in there too: handling is very good with offroad sections feeling a lot like RalliSport Challenge 2, scenery is full of character a lot like another of Konami’s games GTi Club or even Metropolis Street Racer, and the attention required whilst driving is very reminiscent of Vanishing Point. So, elements of a handful of my favourite ever racers, which can be no bad thing.

I’d love to see a sequel to Enthusia, but I doubt Konami would ever consider it. They made an admirable effort but the game just didn’t excite the punter in any lasting way. Shame. Look out for a future review of Konami’s Kaidō Battle game for their take on another style of driving game.

Review: Meteos

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:02:00 +0000

It’s easy to forget that when dual screen feature of the DS was announced some corners of the gaming world thought Nintendo had lost the plot. Whilst a reasonable number of launch games used the lower, touch-sensitive screen in novel ways, it was important that games continued to do so as the console matured.

Meteos was the DS’s second big-name puzzle game, after the excellent Polarium from Mitchell Corp. The scenario is fairly simple: meteors of various colours rain down towards the bottom of the screen and pile up into columns as they land on top of one another, whilst the player moves any block up and down within it’s own column. When three or more meteors of the same colour are arranged either vertically or horizontally they ignite and rocket up towards the top screen, carrying with them any other meteors that get in the way. Skilful play chaining together multiple ignitions means you can lift lots more blocks at once and make things easier for yourself. Push as many meteors as you can of the bottom screen, and watch out for the bottom screen filling up or it will be game over.

The constant barrage of blocks raining down the screen and the continuous chain of reactions blasting blocks back up the screen can result in absolute pandemonium. Coupled with a riot of sound effects, some players find the whole thing sensory overload. Indeed, the multi-tasking required by the player means that playing the game is both a mental and physical exercise that is never short of tension. It’s the initial confusion that comes with playing such a manic game that I think prevented the game reaching Tetris-style fever.

Nevertheless Meteos is accommodating to new players, featuring a multitude of “planets” each with subtle variations. For example reduced gravity will affecting the pace of the gameplay. Throw into the mix a finely balanced difficulty curve, a bunch of single and multi-player game modes and you’ve got a pretty much perfectly realised game.

The game is commonly credited to Tetsuya Mizuguchi, given that it hails from the Q Entertainment stable, but it was in fact designed by Masahiro Sakurai who had previously been the creative force behind both the Kirby and the Super Smash Bros. series of games for Nintendo whilst at HAL Laboratory. Nintendo fans are hoping he brings the midas touch to his next project - Kid Icarus: Uprising for the 3DS.

A pseudo-sequel to the game was released under the name Meteos: Disney Magic which introduced branded graphics, the ability to move blocks sideways and the a change in screen orientation allowing for a taller play area. All changes are considered to have been for the worse, so if you’re looking to buy the game go for the original version.

Review: Vijay Singh 3D

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:52:00 +0000

It seems a long time ago when mobile phones functioned more as a phone than anything else. You could download games for them, of course, but the whole experience was hard work and underwhelming at best. In fact, you’d be forgiven for wondering why you’d even bother. And then along came Vijay Singh.

I’ve always loved golf video games, even if I have no real affinity with the sport. First there was Leader Board which gave us the first real taste of golf from the player’s viewpoint, albeit rendered to screen at a glacial pace. Still, it laid down the triple-click power and snap control mechanic that remained the default golf game control scheme for years to come.

That was more than enough for me for a while, until I read about a new golf on its way. One that offered a fully 3D world and accurate simulation of the game – multiple courses, camera angles, tournaments and your own player profile. It was Microprose Golf and it offered something truly new. It was the stuff dreams are made of, or at least it’s the stuff that keeps a family of gamers glued to a 14” portable TV for months on end. It was real golf, on your computer. More about that in a forthcoming review.

In the following years, many great golf games graced my TV screen: Mario Golf, Everybody’s Golf, Links, Tiger Woods. As arcade representations of the game they were all good games that were a lot of fun to play, but none of them captured the essence of the sport quite as much as Microprose Golf. But then along came Vijay Singh.

It came pre-installed on a Sony Ericsson phone I’d upgraded to and was, in short, all that is or ever has been great about golf games distilled into one beautiful 375kb java archive. Obviously a labour of love for it’s creators it played like a dream. It was a modern Microprose Golf in the palm of your hand. An astonishing achievement for a mobile phone of the time.

The game added some great new touches of it’s own: putting featured the now standard grid that maps the contours of the green, with the addition of small particles that flow along the grid lines showing the the direction and severity of any slope. Also (and this is the bit that really made me smile) at certain points - more often than not when you’ve landed yourself in a bit of a pickle - the game goes into TV mode. This put you in certain money making scenarios such as “our sponsors will give you $25,000 if you chip the ball in from this bunker” which, coupled with a vibration heart beat effect, really kept you on the edge of your seat. The vibration effect was also used sometimes when putting to make you that little bit more anxious as to whether or not you’ve got your angles right. I played it to completion and then hoped for downloadable courses which had been hinted at, but they sadly never materialised. And that was that…

Until, in September 2010, Gameloft released Real Golf 2011 for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. It’s a next generation incarnation of Vijay Singh in all but name and it plays like a dream. Of course, Vijay is featured in the game’s roster of real golfers. It just wouldn’t be the same without him.