objects
is on the opposite end of the spectrum - hitting railings, pilings, boxcars
or pretty much any obstruction with any speed to speak of can send your car flying
and your heart pounding, because if you land upside-down, you're history.
Luckily, the races usually last two minutes, max, so you never lose too much progress,
although of course it's frustrating when you finally make that crucial turn perfectly
only to get stuck and flip over in the track infrastructure five seconds further
down the road. Frustrating, but bearable, and almost masochistically enjoyable.
If anything, it seems rather old-school, and it's hard to fault the creators -
they planned it this way, or else they wouldn't have put the default restart button
so close to the default driving controls (it's Enter).
Once you've
honed your skills in the Race mode on the officially designed tracks, as I'd suggest
you do, you can move on to the Puzzle mode. You start off with a big grid, which
always has a Start point and a Finish point and sometimes has Checkpoints in between,
a finite number of pieces to place Rollercoaster Tycoon style and a goal
time. Once you get into it, it becomes obvious that this is the meat of the game
- it requires all the driving skills you picked up and all the puzzle-solving
ability you can muster working together. This is free-form problem-solving at
it's best: just you, your tools, your skills and the challenge, and it just feels
great when you find a solution that probably isn't how the ghost car did it, finishing
way before you can even see the dust the CPU is kicking up and patting yourself
on the back for finding that off-road shortcut, made possible by your single ramp-piece.
Multiplayer is also a blast, and it's very cool seeing what other people
have done with the track editor. The game supports up to eight players, and has
several different modes. And, because you're only really interacting with the
track itself and never other cars, lag isn't a problem - even when you see one
of the other cars transporting a couple feet at a time, it can't impact your own
time. When I played it, there were many more European players than American ones
(the game's actually a hit over there, I hear), and more French players than any
other flavors (they told me their forest level had problems too, when I asked
in the best French I could muster). Despite the ocean between the other racers
and me, the matches still went smoothly, and whenever a connection problem could
lead to someone somehow gaining the upper hand, the game sent a message to everyone
clarifying that that person's time for that run wouldn't count.
The sound
is spectacular, from the rumbling of the hot rod to the in-game music. Some of
the tunes sound more like adventure game tracks that racing fare, and it works
very well. The menu music is catchy and reminiscent of those old simple videogame
tunes. There's nothing not to like about how the sound in this game was done -
very high quality stuff.
The graphics are perfect for the arcadey feel
of the game - not incredibly realistic, but sharp and good-looking. The minimum
system requirements are impressively low for a game that looks like this, and,
as a bonus, you can run the game windowed if you want. My only graphical qualm
has to do with the forest world - it must be broken. I was happily running the
game full-throttle with perfect framerates on the desert and snow levels, but
as soon as the forest tileset loaded (and this even happens in the demo movie
in the intro) the FPS drop to somewhere around five. I exited the game (you can
only change graphics settings when launching) and set everything to the lowest
settings, and the world worked fine, but it's a very poor design that has you
changing game-wide settings to accommodate specific problem like that.
One of the only other annoyances I encountered (and it's a low-blow, I know) is
that the game takes about a minute and a half each time you load it to "check
the disc", presumably to ensure you're legit. It may not sound like much, but
when you're sitting down staring at your screen ready for some action, it's a
long time.
Overall: 8/10
TrackMania is an excellent idea executed superbly. Two parts Hot Wheels
Turbo Racing and one part Rollercoaster Tycoon, the game is like a
guilty pleasure from a previous game (mistreatment and fiscal irresponsibility)
turned into a respectable freestanding product, with lots of innovation and fun
to be had. If you ever enjoyed pushing the limits of little sprite-based theme-park
patrons, TrackMania is your new best friend. In fact, if you enjoy enjoying
things, take this game for a spin. Just watch out for the bumps!
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It's
been a while since Rollercoaster Tycoon was the new cool thing, but I'm
sure a lot of people fondly remember neglecting their customers and using shady
tactics to finance a ferocious beast of a rollercoaster. TrackMania is
pretty much the same thing as the coaster construction in Tycoon with an
integrated driving game (the neat thing is that it makes an equal amount of sense
to view it the other way around). 
