Out to dethrone Burnout.
You might have heard of Black Rock Studio before. These are the same guys who worked on Pure, the MotoGP franchise and also a few Hot Wheels and ATV Offroad games. If nothing else, at the very least they have a pedigree in action racing games. You might also have heard of them making a racing title for Disney back in E3. And it’s not the happy-go-lucky cart racer you might be thinking. Well, it sort of is.
The premise of the game is simple, especially if you’ve seen Death Race. In the near future, there’s a competition set by some large corporation where people race in an artificially created city. Now this is the future we’re talking about, the race exists for entertainment, and human savagery knows no bounds. However, instead of weapons to gain advantage over you opponents, and entertain the masses, you blow up the race course to find various shortcuts and destroy your opponents.
The actual mechanics are quite simple. You have to fill a bar, broken in three. You do this by drifting, drafting, shunting your opponents and overtaking them. You can use each of the first two parts of the bar to activate mini explosions set throughout the course in order to slow down or even stop your opponents. This is called a Powerplay. When initiated with all three bars, a huge explosion takes place that literally changes the course of the race. These massive explosions can’t be set off whenever and wherever though. There are certain setpieces within a course for these Powerplays, otherwise the whole thing will end up in a mess and there won’t even be a course left by the time you finish the first lap.
The ideal scenario is you initiating a full bar Powerplay, resulting in a massive explosion that destroys part of the course with almost all of your opponents crashing into each other or whatever is falling down, and you going through this whole scene of anarchy to get the lead.
In reality this can only happen two or three times in each race since every ultra Powerplay is set in two or three separate places throughout a race course. Additional Powerplays like innocent looking busses or petrol stations can instantly blow up and severely disorient your opponents, giving you the edge. Or some random container in a shipping yard can drop in or lift up, crippling your opponent or giving you a nifty shortcut. Many of these mini Powerplay attacks are peppered throughout a course, so you don’t have to rely on the ultra Powerplays.
That said, you’ll always want to initiate every ultra Powerplay in a race just to experience the spectacle. Every time one of these gets activated, the engine and background noise dies and you just hear this low rumble of something huge falling around you, destruction everywhere you see, and if you manage to get through it, your engine roars back to life and the James Bond style car chase sequence music resumes.
A lot of care has been put into making the engines sound ‘correct’. Instead of recording the audio at different RPM intervals, the Sound Director Steve Rockett, ditched the traditional crossfade model in favour of a new algorithm, Tonic Tech, which records car audio at all frequencies to get progressive engine sound. Sparing you the technical details, besides sounding more realistic, the V8s now have a more guttural thump and gearshifts give a more natural feedback. A very pleasant aural experience, especially when things are blowing up left and right.
The game looks really crisp, with a huge draw distance that brings the artificial city to life. Since it’s in pre-alpha stage, the game looks rough, with some missing textures and choppy frame rates, but Black Rock promises a 30fps lockdown. Interestingly the arcade racer doesn’t include the use of NOS or boosts of any kind. Black Rock reasons the design choice by pointing out that the player is already focusing on much more than just racing, with continuous distractions through Powerplays and course manipulations. Adding yet another variable to this equation, as it stands, would result in uncontrollable chaos (aka constant crashes).
They showed a new mode, called Nemesis, where you drive around a water canal trying to overtake big rigs that continuously throw explosive barrels out back while other AI competitors crash and roll over and around you. This Bad Boys II and Terminator 2 inspired mode requires you to keep on overtaking these trucks and your opponents, who get more aggressive after each lap, in order to see how long you will last. Think of it like the Horde mode in Gears of War where you have to keep on clearing wave after wave of enemies. Except in this case the waves are infinite. There will eventually come a time when you will lose of course, and your longest time goes onto the global leaderboards to see who will outlast your best effort.
Black Rock is also ensuring that players don’t get frustrated with the ‘rubber-banding effect’ that most racing games suffer, by working on an improved AI tech used in Pure, their previous title. They claim that their Dynamic Competitive Balancing system will ensure that if you’re in the lead, the AI will use more Powerplays and be more efficient in order to catch up to you, and if you’re behind the pack, then you’ll have more opportunities for Powerplay and the AI might use Powerplays to crash each other. The end result should be that you’re almost always in the heat of action. This was certainly the case when I tried it on the two stages they let me drive.
The Airport stage was already shown at E3 this year, when the game was announced. This time the new stage, Shipyard, was demoed at the preview event. As you might guess, a shipping port makes for an epic race track, with loose cargo cranes, dropping containers, oil tankers under maintenance and other assorted goodies. Black Rock says that the entire city will be divided into five visually distinct parts, with each part containing two to three different tracks. Designing these tracks is what will make or break the game, as decisions on Powerplay and track altering placements will be of significant importance.
When asked about their multiplayer options, Black Rock confirmed a splitscreen mode. While they were reluctant to confirm the number of online modes, they did say to expect 8 player races with full online leaderboards.
Going back to what I said earlier, the game isn’t the typical happy-go-lucky cart racer you would expect coming out from Disney, but I’ll be damned if Split/Second doesn’t put a big smile on your face! And while the offline modes look solid enough, the long term success of this game will ultimately depend on how they handle the online component. Such is the nature of competitive arcade games in today’s interconnected world.
جاءت لتهز عرش ‘بيرن أوت’
‘سبليت سكند’ لعبة بسيطة تدور أحداثها في المستقبل القريب حول سباق سيارات ترفيهي يقام في مدينة صناعية حيث تفجر أجزاء معينة من مضمار السباق لتقضي على منافسيك وتفتح لنفسك طرقا مختصرة وتمتع الجماهير، الآن وقد عرفت الهدف، دعني نطلعك على طريقة تحقيقه: ما عليك سوى الانحراف بسيارتك، وتجاوز منافسيك لملء شريط مقسم إلى 3 أجزاء، يستخدم أول جزئين منهم لإطلاق ‘حركات القوة’ Power Plays – أي تفجير شحنات متفجرة صغيرة مـُعدة في أماكن معينة بطول مضمار السباق لإبطاء منافسيك أو إقصائهم من السباق – وأما حركات القوة الفائقة باستخدام الأجزاء الثلاثة دفعة واحدة فهي أمر جلل، احذره ولا تلجأ إليه سوى في أماكن محددة من المضمار وإلا ستعم فوضى عارمة ويُـدمر المضمار تماماً بنهاية الدورة الأولى من السباق.
عادة تحدث كل واحدة من ‘حركات القوة’ الفائقة مرتين أو ثلاثة في كل سباق، ولكنك ستجد ‘حركات قوة’ إضافية على هيئة حافلات ومحطات وقود وأشياء أخرى تبدو بريئة ولكنها تنفجر فجأة وبقوة، لتشتت تركيز خصومك وتعوقهم، وربما تفتح لك طريقاً مختصرا. على أية حال، يقال أنك سترغب في استخدام ‘حركات القوة الفائقة كلها لتستمتع بالمؤثرات الصوتية التي تصاحبها، فالصمت يعـُم اللعبة، ولا تسمع سوى دمدمة سقوط شيء ضخم بالقرب منك وينتشر الدمار على مرمى بصرك، ثم يعود محرك سيارتك للهدير مرة أخرى وتعود موسيقى المطاردة على غرار أفلام ‘جيمس بوند’ – هذا إذا تمكنت من النجاة من الحطام المتساقط في كل مكان.
تقدم اللعبة نمط اللعب ‘نمسيس’ الجديد المستوحى من أفلام ‘باد بويز 2’ و‘ترمينتور 2’، حيث تخوض بسيارتك في القنوات المائية محاولا تفادي مضخة كبيرة، تقذف براميل متفجرات باستمرار، بينما تتحطم سيارات منافسيك من حولك وتتدحرج لتصدمك، وعليك الصمود لأطول فترة ممكنة ليسجل اسمك على لوحة القادة. تعدكم ‘بلاك روك’ – الشركة المطورة – بمنافسة قوية طوال الوقت، بفضل تقنيتها المحسنة الجديدة التي تضمن استخدام الذكاء الاصطناعي للمزيد من ‘حركات القوة’ للحاق بك عندما تكون في المقدمة بينما تتاح لك فرص استخدام ‘حركات القوة’ بشكل أكبر عندما تكون في المؤخرة، وهذا ما اختبرته في المرحلتين اللاتي سـُمح لي بلعبهما. تبدو أنماط اللعب (أوف لاين) واعدة ولكن نجاح هذه اللعبة وبقائها على الساحة يعتمد – في المقام الأول- على كيفية إدارتهم لمكونات اللعب الجماعي (أونلاين) وهو حال مباريات الأركيد التنافسية في عالم اليوم المتصل دائماً بالانترنت.
عـُرضت مرحلة ‘المطار‘ في معرض E3 لهذا العام، كما عرضت مرحلة ‘مرفأ السفن’ الجيدة في مؤتمر تجربة اللعبة وهي ساحة سباق رائعة تنتشر فيها الكثير من روافع الشحن والحاويات المتساقطة والعديد من المفاجآت الأخرى. تقول ‘بلاك روك’ أن المدينة تنقسم إلى 5 أجزاء في كل منها مضمارين أو ثلاثة، وعند سؤال الشركة عن خيارات اللعب الجماعي أكدت وجود نمط الشاشة المقسومة وعزفت عن تحديد عدد أنماط اللعب الجماعي، ولم تقل سوى أنها تقدم 8 سباقات بلوحات قيادة كاملة.
RT @SInformer: NEWS: Ubisoft announce R.U.S.E. for June 4th, the bluffing strategy game http://dlvr.it/94CK 
