Leading a fairly boring life lately. Not working much, so I'm more or less broke. That does leave me more time for other things, and I hope to have some videos online in a few weeks or so.
In the meantime, I was really looking forward to the newest Need for Speed game, Hot Pursuit. It's made by the same people who made Burnout Paradise, so I figured it would be pretty cool. I liked Burnout Paradise but I never finished it. There were a lot of annoying little things that made me give it up. I hoped NFS: Hot Pursuit would have the incredibly fun driving of Burnout Paradise, with all of the annoying bits ironed out.
The main problem in Burnout Paradise is the camera. Control of your car is constantly taken away from you while they move the camera somewhere else. When another car crashes, you get a slow-mo close up of it. Cool at first, but there is a lot of crashing in this game and after the first few events I was desperately combing the settings, looking for a way to turn it off. There is no way, at least not one that I've found.
The game also insists on showing you slow motion footage of your own wrecks. Once again, cool at first, but some of those cars are made of tissue paper and wreck all too easily. And, to be a little petty, sometimes the game cuts to a slow motion shot of my car wrecking before, in my opinion, it was even a sure thing that I would be in a wreck. Sometimes I'm sure I'm only going to clip a car, or I know I can drift a bit and just barely tap a wall, but before I get the chance the game has taken over and wrecked for me. This is only a second or so before the wreck, but it happens enough that I'm sure at least some of the crashes could have been avoided.
Anyways, the reviews are in. Sounds like NFS: Hot Pursuit has a lot of problems, many of them the same as what Burnout Paradise had. Bad menus (though not as bad), control of your car taken away quite regularly, all that. Also, some people are reporting that it takes as long as thirty seconds in the menus to restart a race. Seriously?
Oh, and it's not on Steam.
Were it on Steam, I probably still would have bought it in a few weeks. The concept seems fun enough to weather most of it's annoyances. As it is, I still have Burnout Paradise in Steam, and Grid, and Blur. Why would I install another game manager for a possibly mediocre game when I have a handful of decent to good games in Steam ready to be played right now?
This exclusivity bullshit has got to end. Eventually publishers need to understand there's no shortage of good video games. We don't need their specific racer or their specific shooter. If you don't make it available to us in the way that we want, we'll just go get someone else's racer or shooter, one that is available on our platform of choice. Even if the one we end up buying is the lesser of the two games.
That's just how it is.
David
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