Finally got round to checking it out and I was a little disappointed. It might be because I’ve been playing a lot of Gran Turismo PSP lately, which has a fantastic driving challenges mode and the same handling model as GT5, but the handling in R: Racing Evolution is super stiff and unsatisfying, and that’s with all the assists off. Was honestly shocked by how fast cars brake as well, you don’t need to anticipate corners much and it makes overtaking at corners a lot less fun and messy than it could be.
It is beautiful though, and the story mode has some interesting ideas, though overtaking opponents becomes a predictable affair of hovering behind them until they buckle. The event challenges mode is a bit phoned in I feel - there are loads of challenges but it could do with more careful curation.
I’ve returned to seriously looking at new GameCube games for the first time in 15 years and while the games I did play back in the day are still as fantastic as ever - Super Monkey Ball may well be my favourite title on the system - it’s been quite difficult looking for unique third party titles. Sort of highlights the stranglehold Sony had on third party development at the time.
One game that really has caught my attention is Nintendo and Eighting’s Kururin Squash, though. Kururin Paradise on Game Boy Advance was so good I felt the series had already run its course, but Squash is a lot fresher than I could have imagined. Part of it is down to the masterful use of nuanced analogue control, enabling even more devious level designs to twirl your helicopter around, but the boss fights were a particular highlight, and some of the extra abilities - like the underwater one, are superb ideas that make full use of the move to polygonal 3D visuals. It’s not perfect - some of the abilities are quite bad and serve more as distractions to the main event - but it’s a very unique and well executed score chaser.
I’m looking for more games like this - my next title will be Odama, I think. I loved Yoot Saito’s Aeroporter and this seems as whacky and multi-task-y as that title. The English language manual also seems to have received an admirable amount of attention to detail considering Nintendo must have known the game was going to flop!
Was Cubic Lode Runner any good? Granted, it’s also on PS2, but it certainly looks interesting.
I’m sorry that the game didn’t deliver more fun to you, but I warned it on my first post : it’s not good with the pad. I should insist afetr your post, sorry.
And that’s not a physics problem. Driving and gameplay are always different with a wheel and a pad on a racing game. With R : Racing this is huge, the pad control is bad, stiff and unsatsifiying like you said.
The handling model with a pad has to implement many automatisms to be playable, but lacks the expert control and techniques of a wheel. In the case of this game the automatisms are too few, and can’t deliver a fluid experience.
I spend a lot of time on GT5 with a G27 back in the days and I find the driving gameplay better on R: Racing.
With Gran Turismo games you have a very good sense of driving, till you get to the limit of the car. But that’s where a racing game must shine by opening a wide space of gameplay in this tiny moments that become gradually a bigger part of the game while you get better. That’s what good sims do like Assetto Corsa or Dirt Rally, and in their own way that’s what a good arcade driving game does too.
And in my opinion this part is fantastic in R: Racing, but you can’t reach it with a pad unfortunatly.
In GT5 when you reach that limit you are put too rapidly in the scenario where you loose the control of the car and then you have this moment where you correct that error to come back to the good driving, wish is not a pure racing moment. Or you stay under that limit and it’s not very “challenging”, fun, with a wheel, but I totally understand that here it’s a good way too make a fun game with a pad according to its limit, that’s why GT’s game are so appreciated with a pad (plus all the incredible experience that deliver the games on other parts).
For the fast brake I disagree, you can look at my lap on Suzuka vs real:
F1 and proto are relatively close, my car is more modern than the Senna F1 so I can flat out the curve at high speed close to the end, like a F1 of this era can do:
On this (fantastic) video I can check that my experience on Monaco with R: Racing gives me a very good understanding of the track.
My braking with the Lotus Elise on the video I’ve posted above must be anticipated and seems more or less on point with the real thing.
If you really like racing game I can’t more recommand to find a Logitech Gamecube force feedback wheel, they are relatively cheap (I recommand the one without pedals unless you really have the setting to install that correctly, the two L and R analog paddles are very good). You will have a blast on this game (time trial is the best place, I aggre with your other critics) and F-Zero GX wish has a surprisingly good management of the fb wheel (because of their work on the arcade version), a lot of fun and thrill !
More infos:
Don’t expect to play Mario Kart DD with it, despite official compatibility, it’s unplayable cause the game development hadn’t anticipated using the wheel. So there are all the automatisms of the pad control in your wheel commands, resulting to always be late regardless to your inputs.
You have to think about calibrate the wheel each time you run a game, but it’s very fast (~3s), no option menu required: at any time of the game you just have to turn the wheel left and right at max. I’m used to do it when the screen menu is diplayed.
So don’t expect to calibrate a very short arcade range, cause each time you go over your setting, the wheel will recalibrate, and on one side only so the center of the direction is changed etc So you have to use the max.
The ffb is suprisingly good, quite similar to a G27. On F-Zero GX this is a litlle athletic at the beginning but very precise and I like it, it’s physical ! (I have to make some videos). The controls are a little bit different of the standard one : you start drifting with the brake (!), no MTS bullshit etc. It’s based on the arcade driving engine, and with all the sensational and useful feedback informations I love it.
Interesting to hear that a wheel transforms the game! Thanks for sharing the videos.
It’s funny you mention the car correction aspect of GT taking you out of pure racing, for me that’s the most satisfying part of playing the game - the cars feel like they have weight and need to be very slightly corrected to perfect corners at speed. I’m not sure how much I’d actually enjoy that style of gameplay in long races, but the meat and potatoes of GT PSP are in these short driving challenges, so it works out really well there.
The (non race) driving events in R: Racing Evolution probably fall flat for that reason, but I’m sure the actual serious track racing is better than GT PSP!
Ah - read this one a couple of weeks ago when I was bulk ordering GC stuff. It seems Captain Toad perfected the adventure platformer with this style of level design and camera, and I even found the stilted camera controls in that game to be sub-par. I guess they wanted to create the feeling of nudging or yanking the camera rather than slowly moving it. Or maybe the Wii U sticks were just bad.
Nintendo - Wind Waker, Chibi-Robo!
Capcom - Resident Evil 4, Gotcha Force
Namco - Tales of Symphonia, Baten Kaitos
Sega - Skies of Arcadia Legends, Super Monkey Ball 2
Ubisoft - Beyond Good & Evil, Prince of Persia
Eidos Interactive - Hitman 2, Tomb Raider
LucasArts - Gladius, LEGO Star Wars II
VU Games - Metal Arms, Simpsons Hit & Run
Natsume - Harvest Moon Another Wonderful Life
Midway - Gauntlet, Freaky Flyers
Atlus - Cubivore, Go! Go! Hypergrind
Majesco - Bomberman Generation, BloodRayne
O3 Entertainment - Alien Hominid, Chaos Field
And one of the more peculiars publishers being Acclaim, publishing games like Burnout 2, Worms 3D, Crazy Taxi, and ZooCube
Played through Yoot Saito’s Odama recently, I have to say: What a fantastically involving game! Greatly exceeded my expectations in its inventiveness and how the use of pinball was as equally strategic as directing your troops with your voice. A very special game indeed.
Got my package of, erm, 16 Japanese GameCube games in the post yesterday and played a bunch of games yesterday:
What did stand out was Zelda: Four Swords+ (Adventures)…while it makes a terrible first impression due to the blurry upscaled 2D sprites juxtaposed against corny 3D graphics, I quickly found myself having a blast of a time managing the different formations and experimenting with the items you’re handed.
Played a bit of Mr Driller Drill Land which is a fantastic game with brilliant audiovisual presentation - but I have to say for once the HD Remaster is better than the original. There were no revelations here where the original game turns out to be better.
Sonic Riders on GC is very similar to PS2 - not much to write about there.
Yea, I looked at footage and the Switch version looks like a perfect 1 for 1 recreation of the original artwork in higher resolution without any sawtooth edges or blurriness. They may have used original vector drawings or something.
Yep, it’s really crisp without any nasty AI upscaling that you tend to see in modern releases. It’s also still on the original game engine, which is nice to see. It just looks and plays authentically which is the best you could hope - they even recreated all the cinematics in 16:9!
The GameCube version on a CRT sort of looks worse because you can tell they were trying to resolve more detail in the graphic design than GameCube would at 480i/480p - a lot of the art assets, especially the text inside them, are hard to read. And the sprites have a blurry upscaled look to them which surprised me. The new release looks a lot more consistent.
Been playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle recently, having skipped 3D Sonic games until now.
I’m impressed - that first level is an absolute classic as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been replaying it just for fun and finally got an A rank many plays later. The Sonic levels in general are superb and really feel like they utilise the 3D scenery to its fullest.
The rest of the game is rather inconsistent, though. The radar missions with Knuckles are rather fun and chilled searches for hidden items, but they do clash with the game’s emphasis on speed. The ticking timer at the top-left of the screen, combined with the inevitable E rank if you take your time, make them feel more stressful than they need to be. They probably should have saved the ranks for stage select mode there.
The Tails stages are fine - bit of dumb blasting action with an addictive lock on system. I really enjoyed the one set at night in the highway.
It’s an inconsistent game but that’s what I like about it, it never quite settles into a predictable rhythm. It is, however, a bit too long for its own good. I’m not sure I want to play the Dark story after finishing up with the main heroes.
The original Sonic Adventure has similar fits and starts among its playable characters but I always found that game entertaining and charming. SA2 streamlined a lot of that and yeah, it has some great 3D action levels.
People bitch and moan about Sonic games in 3D but they’re a design all their own. I enjoyed Sonic Forces recently because no one else is making anything like it.
I often think a lot of people just don’t investigate Sonic enough to actually have a valid opinion. It’s the series that everyone hates on now since they can’t drag Nintendo through the mud as easily in the 2020s.
