rant
How Project Gotham Racing fails
I sucked at racing games for a long time, seriously *sucked*. Then I got into this gig where I was game testing games on the xbox 360 console as it was in development. Work sucked and I needed a way to make the bills get paid. Temp work, industrial work, short assignments, long ones, it didn't matter.
So it was my *job* to play games. That made it hella interesting when the only games I was interested in playing in my spare time are roll playing games (Dragon Warrior, Ultima, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, classics). Now I'm on this fucking box with a controller staring down the barrel of random shit. I mean *shiiiiit*. Azurik, Rise of Perathia? check. Bloodsport? Yup, games I could play. But Rallisport? Fucking weird shit man. Halo as well, but everyone wanted to play the first person shooter that made fps's actually playable by the masses, so I never got into that because all the copies were being played by the other fuckers in the lab.
Damn, Rallisport. Project Gotham Racing. They're well designed games, random kudos system, ability to change the type of fucking tires your racer is on, 17", 19", dirt tires, mud tires, snow tires, beauty system. I sucked at playing them.
So this was a challenge before me. and if there's anything I really like, it's the ability to try my shit and come out the next side of the trial able to pull out more, the next I need to. Man, I tried every track they had, fucked with the cars *hardcore*, with no idea of what I was doing, just *fucking* up the car I was trying to race. In the end it was the snow track that taught me what I was doing. I put on snow tires, turned on time trial and ran the race backwards for hours, learning the handling of the car. Hell I'm actually a better driver because of it, though I'm not sure if there will ever be a road that I need to drive quite like that on. The snow tracks made sense. I grew up making midnight runs to Snoqualmie pass with whoever had the gas to do doughnuts in the skiers parking lot. Dings on the frame bumping into snowbanks, getting stuck and having some weird plough dude push my friend Dustin's car out of the drift with the blade of his huge industrial snow plough, you name it. Shit went down.
So I figured out the similarities between real life driving and the game. Made it all work. Got really into it. Years later when I had an x-box of my own, I bought the games I played and rocked them. Project Gotham Racing has been a part of my repertoire the entire time.
Which brings me to the fucking bitch. The x-box, see, was the first system to have a fucking hard drive in it. Beauty idea, only 12 gigs from what I understand, but who the fuck needs that space to save a god damn video game? That's right, no one.
So the racing games started playing with the idea of the user copying CD tracks to the hard drive. I see this and start using it. I like it, hell with some of the snowboarding games, they included music that really ruled that you could copy off of the disc onto the drive.
All this is good, it starts opening up a whole new way of playing games. I figure *fuck* the days that I've spent listening to soft jazz and weather channel knock offs while I play a side scroller and defeat evil, right? (fuck you Symphony of the Night!!!) Now the gods of metal can include themselves on the scene and I'll be able to hear my dude kick the ass of everything to the tune of it.
Wrong. This system with external music and video games is so poorly thought out that it makes Winamp .09 look as complicated as a Linux 2.6 kernel. seriously. I mean, I know Winamp was still in it's development stages before 1.0, hell oldversion.com has 0.1 and that's so limited, it's hilarious. I think it only plays a single mp3 and then just stops. no queue, no playing an album, just here's the fucking track, our code can actually play something!
Copying mp3's to your hard drive? It's there. Making play-lists? Sure. applying it to games ... really fucking shitty all around.
See, you can play these fucking tracks, and there are true music tracks now in video games, but the application of them to what you're doing was assigned to a rabid howler monkey with add. The tracks only play during certain segments of the game. You finish a race? Track terminated. The select screen between races? Weather channel shit again. Play another race? Sure you can listen to your music, but, see, no fucking race has ever lasted the full length of a song, and why would it. That would be one hella long god damn race.
So you're left listening to something that, audibly, resembles the track list of a RealAudio intro freebies in 2001. ... fuck you people, did anyone actually try to do this and think it was good? When the fuck was the last time your car stopped playing a track when you got to the fucking stop sign? Or start up a whole new track after you turned a corner. Oh shit, I'd love to get off the free way to turn onto hwy 2 to go to the ski slopes, but STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN IS ONLY HALF OVER. OH SHIT, I CAN'T STOP IT FROM FUCKING UP MY GROOVE. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO FUCKING DRIVE 5 MORE EXITS UNTIL THE END OF THE TRACK, MAKE A U TURN AND THEN GO BACK TO THE HWY 2 TURNOFF. YEA, THAT'S THE SOLUTION.
What the fuck? Who the fuck designed this shit, and what's his address? I'm going to need it so I can go throw a rock through his fucking window. the next time I want to listen to music that short, I'll go back to eastern european punk and load up that weird-ass band I found that didn't have a single song over 2 minutes. Sure the band gets a pass, I've read Hardcore Zen and that guy nearly *lectures* about how a song over 30 seconds wasn't even in their repertoire. I fucking love his comments that the song was over so quickly that the bar couldn't decide if it was an auditory vomit stain blowing past them, or that it sucked and they need to throw beer bottles at the band like that scene in the blues brothers.
So, yea, Microsoft gaming division of music playing and video game integration must be run by a whole shit-ton of seriously mother fucking HARDCORE punkers. Or they're just fucking stupid beyond belief, and yanno I'm inclined to believe the latter because I've met punkers some hardcore, some not, some with a lot of other influences, and yanno what? They're not that stupid. They'd have respected the scene of music as a whole as to not inflict this idiocy upon us.
... fucking cracktards. Get off your ass and go re-develop that shit. No one is turning their fucking x-box into a fucking media center, it can't control all the other fucking devices hooked up to my tv, the twisted path you'd have to cable to your center controller and then upload all your mp3's to the damn thing is just so fucking inconvenient that no one with any sense of cool will ever use that shit. Yea, you can say that people do use, and enjoy it for that, but you know what? They're a bunch of bloody lame wankers. We've all met that sort of video game system user that turns the fucking thing on at a party, and tries to tell us that it's cool because it's got some stupid ass system of drawing pixels that responds to the music. Who the fuck has a party where everyone gathers around and enjoys a few bouncing lines that seem to nearly come close to matching one of the beat lines of the fucking song.
No body, that's who, and the user-group that does isn't going to just *appear* out of nowhere. This system is doing just one thing only. It's illuminating the faction of your friends that suck. Thanks Microsoft, now I know! I'll avoid anyone that uses this lame shit heap that you've sold. A GOLD STAR to you, I never was able to weed out these useless wastes of skin before you pulled this piece of dog-shit out of the fucking field, branded it, and sold it out to us in all it's fetid, rancid glory.
I sucked at racing games for a long time, seriously *sucked*. Then I got into this gig where I was game testing games on the xbox 360 console as it was in development. Work sucked and I needed a way to make the bills get paid. Temp work, industrial work, short assignments, long ones, it didn't matter.
So it was my *job* to play games. That made it hella interesting when the only games I was interested in playing in my spare time are roll playing games (Dragon Warrior, Ultima, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, classics). Now I'm on this fucking box with a controller staring down the barrel of random shit. I mean *shiiiiit*. Azurik, Rise of Perathia? check. Bloodsport? Yup, games I could play. But Rallisport? Fucking weird shit man. Halo as well, but everyone wanted to play the first person shooter that made fps's actually playable by the masses, so I never got into that because all the copies were being played by the other fuckers in the lab.
Damn, Rallisport. Project Gotham Racing. They're well designed games, random kudos system, ability to change the type of fucking tires your racer is on, 17", 19", dirt tires, mud tires, snow tires, beauty system. I sucked at playing them.
So this was a challenge before me. and if there's anything I really like, it's the ability to try my shit and come out the next side of the trial able to pull out more, the next I need to. Man, I tried every track they had, fucked with the cars *hardcore*, with no idea of what I was doing, just *fucking* up the car I was trying to race. In the end it was the snow track that taught me what I was doing. I put on snow tires, turned on time trial and ran the race backwards for hours, learning the handling of the car. Hell I'm actually a better driver because of it, though I'm not sure if there will ever be a road that I need to drive quite like that on. The snow tracks made sense. I grew up making midnight runs to Snoqualmie pass with whoever had the gas to do doughnuts in the skiers parking lot. Dings on the frame bumping into snowbanks, getting stuck and having some weird plough dude push my friend Dustin's car out of the drift with the blade of his huge industrial snow plough, you name it. Shit went down.
So I figured out the similarities between real life driving and the game. Made it all work. Got really into it. Years later when I had an x-box of my own, I bought the games I played and rocked them. Project Gotham Racing has been a part of my repertoire the entire time.
Which brings me to the fucking bitch. The x-box, see, was the first system to have a fucking hard drive in it. Beauty idea, only 12 gigs from what I understand, but who the fuck needs that space to save a god damn video game? That's right, no one.
So the racing games started playing with the idea of the user copying CD tracks to the hard drive. I see this and start using it. I like it, hell with some of the snowboarding games, they included music that really ruled that you could copy off of the disc onto the drive.
All this is good, it starts opening up a whole new way of playing games. I figure *fuck* the days that I've spent listening to soft jazz and weather channel knock offs while I play a side scroller and defeat evil, right? (fuck you Symphony of the Night!!!) Now the gods of metal can include themselves on the scene and I'll be able to hear my dude kick the ass of everything to the tune of it.
Wrong. This system with external music and video games is so poorly thought out that it makes Winamp .09 look as complicated as a Linux 2.6 kernel. seriously. I mean, I know Winamp was still in it's development stages before 1.0, hell oldversion.com has 0.1 and that's so limited, it's hilarious. I think it only plays a single mp3 and then just stops. no queue, no playing an album, just here's the fucking track, our code can actually play something!
Copying mp3's to your hard drive? It's there. Making play-lists? Sure. applying it to games ... really fucking shitty all around.
See, you can play these fucking tracks, and there are true music tracks now in video games, but the application of them to what you're doing was assigned to a rabid howler monkey with add. The tracks only play during certain segments of the game. You finish a race? Track terminated. The select screen between races? Weather channel shit again. Play another race? Sure you can listen to your music, but, see, no fucking race has ever lasted the full length of a song, and why would it. That would be one hella long god damn race.
So you're left listening to something that, audibly, resembles the track list of a RealAudio intro freebies in 2001. ... fuck you people, did anyone actually try to do this and think it was good? When the fuck was the last time your car stopped playing a track when you got to the fucking stop sign? Or start up a whole new track after you turned a corner. Oh shit, I'd love to get off the free way to turn onto hwy 2 to go to the ski slopes, but STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN IS ONLY HALF OVER. OH SHIT, I CAN'T STOP IT FROM FUCKING UP MY GROOVE. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO FUCKING DRIVE 5 MORE EXITS UNTIL THE END OF THE TRACK, MAKE A U TURN AND THEN GO BACK TO THE HWY 2 TURNOFF. YEA, THAT'S THE SOLUTION.
What the fuck? Who the fuck designed this shit, and what's his address? I'm going to need it so I can go throw a rock through his fucking window. the next time I want to listen to music that short, I'll go back to eastern european punk and load up that weird-ass band I found that didn't have a single song over 2 minutes. Sure the band gets a pass, I've read Hardcore Zen and that guy nearly *lectures* about how a song over 30 seconds wasn't even in their repertoire. I fucking love his comments that the song was over so quickly that the bar couldn't decide if it was an auditory vomit stain blowing past them, or that it sucked and they need to throw beer bottles at the band like that scene in the blues brothers.
So, yea, Microsoft gaming division of music playing and video game integration must be run by a whole shit-ton of seriously mother fucking HARDCORE punkers. Or they're just fucking stupid beyond belief, and yanno I'm inclined to believe the latter because I've met punkers some hardcore, some not, some with a lot of other influences, and yanno what? They're not that stupid. They'd have respected the scene of music as a whole as to not inflict this idiocy upon us.
... fucking cracktards. Get off your ass and go re-develop that shit. No one is turning their fucking x-box into a fucking media center, it can't control all the other fucking devices hooked up to my tv, the twisted path you'd have to cable to your center controller and then upload all your mp3's to the damn thing is just so fucking inconvenient that no one with any sense of cool will ever use that shit. Yea, you can say that people do use, and enjoy it for that, but you know what? They're a bunch of bloody lame wankers. We've all met that sort of video game system user that turns the fucking thing on at a party, and tries to tell us that it's cool because it's got some stupid ass system of drawing pixels that responds to the music. Who the fuck has a party where everyone gathers around and enjoys a few bouncing lines that seem to nearly come close to matching one of the beat lines of the fucking song.
No body, that's who, and the user-group that does isn't going to just *appear* out of nowhere. This system is doing just one thing only. It's illuminating the faction of your friends that suck. Thanks Microsoft, now I know! I'll avoid anyone that uses this lame shit heap that you've sold. A GOLD STAR to you, I never was able to weed out these useless wastes of skin before you pulled this piece of dog-shit out of the fucking field, branded it, and sold it out to us in all it's fetid, rancid glory.