Just had a quick last before bed. Its as fun as I remember. No frills thrills. The city is brilliantly realised. 

I did make the mistake of taking my Gallardo out first though, which resulted in my eyeballs bleeding. The game is so fast, there's a reason it slowly builds you up to the fastest cars. 

Well up for some online fun sometime.

I checked out the custom tracks I'd made, there's a few good ones there. 

I forgot about the lobby, it's pretty neat. Like GTA and paradise, you all drive round freely until an event starts. You can offer up custom tracks etc like in Unbounded.

DiRT: Showdown - ***

The more you play the more you get the feeling it's been a little bit rushed (No surprise given that it follows almost a year after DiRT 3). There's some areas and tracks that are reused from the DiRT trilogy (The Baja track is lifted almost exactly from the first game) and yet given that the games a bit tight on locations and tracks.. Surely they could of put together a greatest hits package of stuff from the three previous games. Snow and weather are really underused.. there's one snow track lifted from DiRT 3 and that's it..

It starts off well with a nice mix of events but then they don't get developed and either repeat exactly the same or just peter out. By the last tier of events it's pretty much a mix of races and 8-ball (racing with cross overs).. and to pad it out you have to start doing 8 lap events.. bizarrely there's no option to rewind on the races either.. so if you get barged off or retired near the end.. you have to start again.

The balancing could've done with more polish and there's a couple of things you'd of thought more play testing might have noticed.. often on the last event the announcer will shout "last lap " at teh start of the race when he obviously means last race. Also the AI often struggle with the cross over races.. knock them into the wrong lane (Which happens all the time) and they don't know how to get back for a while.

It's also got a very short single player campaign.. I saw the credits roll last night after 3 or 4 hours and polished off the last couple of medals about half an hour later.. I need to get all golds .. but that's probably another hour at best.

It also does a very annoying sign into Codemaster racenet which can take ages.. If you're not on line you have to click a button to try and sign in. There's no "I'm offline" option. Get the 360 error message, go back to the game again, click the button again to proceed and then start the game. Then when you start to play it comes up with another option to sign in and you have to tell it your playing offline again. There's an option to have it not ask you again but it forgets that when you restart..

Overall you get the feeling it was going to be a downloadable snack and they've tried to pad it out.

Midnight Club was fun with friends. Webbo is the flag capture master. When people have a few more cars it can only get better. Its a fun as I remember, and I'm enjoying mopping up all the SP stuff I'd neglected. 

The city is just glorious.

FranticPea wrote:

Midnight Club was fun with friends. Webbo is the flag capture master. When people have a few more cars it can only get better. Its a fun as I remember, and I'm enjoying mopping up all the SP stuff I'd neglected. 

The city is just glorious.

You have to admire the ambition, open world, seamless sp to mp and back, dynamic light and weather, modding, soundtrack, race editor, etc. Nice level of detail in the environment and the customisation, just spent 15 minutes painting my Scirocco and slapping some rims on it whilst agonising over the instrument colour to best offset my opal interior.

Somewhere along the way this gen, this sense of adventure has been lost, most likely to do with declining sales, and we are left with the bland regurgitation of well worn game types (see Bob's DIRT review as a prime example).

Enjoyed that, they've certainly thrown everything into the mix. User created tracks are a good addition as well, I might spend some time looking at that myself.

On the negative side, Rockstar's obsession with minimal menus that you access in game instead of a start screen means that the menus are a bit shit. I'd like to be able to change much more on the fly, having to start a new lobby to change the weather, car class and time of day is a real pain. Using your career garage on-line still isn't as smart as it sounds either.

I mentioned about everything being free for me to buy. Iain was right. When you get so far you can pay $1000000 to get a share in the garage. Then all cars and mods become free. 

The track editor is pretty neat. I seem to remember I just drove round plopping checkpoints down, then went into the map editor and fine tuned it.

Beefed up my Scirocco some more but haven't won or got to the stage where I can buy cars. I've been offered a race to win a '69 Camaro but it's a little beyond my veedub's capabilities.

Police pursuits are a bit of a chore, I can often lose them to the point of them calling the chase off but they always seem to engage ESP before I can get clear.

Webbins wrote:

Beefed up my Scirocco some more but haven't won or got to the stage where I can buy cars. I've been offered a race to win a '69 Camaro but it's a little beyond my veedub's capabilities. Police pursuits are a bit of a chore, I can often lose them to the point of them calling the chase off but they always seem to engage ESP before I can get clear.

I do love it when, halfway through a particularly close race, the police appear and ramp up the stress levels. The radio chatter is great as well. 

Won't be long until you've unlocked more cars. 

Ive won 40 races in my muscle car so far and still no sign of the champ.  Guess I just need to keep going.

FranticPea wrote:

I say yay to both. I actually never got the island expansion for Paradise. Worth it?

Dude

Yeah, my stats are there.

Midnight Cub servers not available?

This game is doing nothing to help me like it...

They'd still release stuff under the Burnout name though, right? It's a strong brand

I get the idea that the Criterion NFS games are what Burnout would have evolved into anyway. I do miss crash junctions, but they don't seem to be compatible with licensed cars and the lack of them looks suicidal now.

Manual gears < the earth ... the solar system ... the milky way ... the universe > the point of Hot Pursuit.