henke on 18/12/2012 at 16:59
Seeing as it's been an entire year I'm sure everyone has played, and might want to offer up some thoughts about, whatever their Secret Santa stuck in their Steam-stocking last yuletide.
Me? I got a whole heap of racing and driving games from Al_B. :)
One of the items was the 1C Racing collection, which contained 4 games which I, being a huge driving-game fan, had been eying carefully beforehand and was curious about. I had resisted the urge to buy it for myself earlier because I had a sneaking suspicion that, although perhaps interesting, these games might well turn out to be crap. Turns out my suspicions were not unfounded. AIM Racing and Deathtracks were 2 futuristic racing games and boy were they awful. AIM was a flying game kinda like SkyDrift, except not any good. Deathtracks I can't even remember anything about it was so bland. The third game in it was Russian NFS-ripoff Streets of Moscow. It had a pretty cool comic-book-style intro, but the graphics were unspectacular and the car handling could only be descibed as "hilariously incompetent" as you try to drive a souped-up sportscar that, at best, has a flaky relationship with the surface it's traveling on. The fourth game in the pack, Rig N Roll, also offered up a few good laughs with it's terrible writing and characterisation. The physics seemed solid and the damage-modelling surprisingly good, but the gameplay itself turned out to be too fiddly and dull for me to bother long with.
Oh well, curiosity satisfied at least. On to the stuff I actually enjoyed!
Off Road Drive appealed greatly to the sim-driving nerd in me. Slow-paced careful navigation through beautifully rendered mudtracks and stormbeaten jungles. Good physics as well. Needless to say I loved it. The other game I ended up enjoying a lot was Crash Time 2. Now, this series gets a lot of flack for it's hilariously bad writing, terrible missiondesign and poor production-values. And justly so. But if you can look past that you might notice that the driving physics are great. Powersliding around corners, weaving in and out of traffic on the highway, and zooming at insane speeds down a crowded street just feel right. It hits the sweet spot between hardcore simulation and arcade racing game. I enjoyed it enough to later on buy (and finish) Crash Time 3 as well. When/if CT4 makes it onto Steam you can bet I shall be picking that one up too. CT2 was, just like the 1C Pack, also one I'd been eyeing carefully but hadn't managed to talk myself into buying before Al gifted it to me. Those are really the best gifts as far as I'm concerned. The ones you're not sure about. The one's that miiiiight be terrible, but might also turn out to be something really good that you wouldn't have bought otherwise. Thanks again Al. :)
faetal on 18/12/2012 at 17:07
Lifting mine from
(http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=137516&page=2&highlight=secret+santa) HERE.
Henke, you bought me:
Singularity (played and completed)
Frozen Synapse (played and deferred for the right mood)
Hard Reset (playing this in bite-sized chunks)
Anomaly: Warzone Earth (also playing in stints)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link DLC (not completed HR yet, but when I do...)
Puzzle Agent (played and completed)
:)
henke on 18/12/2012 at 17:27
Cool. :) Singularity is the only one of those I haven't played myself. Was it any good?
faetal on 18/12/2012 at 19:34
It has its moments. I'd put it on a par with Hard Reset. It's kind of like Bioshock meets Time Shift, but shorter and more Cold War themed.
