What a surprise
Anyone who has been on Xbox Live for long enough will remember the previous efforts to involve Doritos in game design - it wasn't pretty. What followed was a lot of folks picking up the game for free, winging through it in around an hour, collecting their 200 points, and swiftly moving on to a 'real' game, as it were.
This time around, the Doritos name is not being banded about in such a willy-nilly fashion, as this week's double-release shows us. And the two couldn't be more different...
We'll focus on Crash Course here. This title is basically Ninja Warrior / Wipeout / Total Wipeout for XBLA, and much as I do not enjoy almost any of those shows, it is extremely enjoyable to play as a game, with a decent lifespan too.
There are 15 courses in total, and your only abilities are sprint and boost. You tackle the course as best you can, and once you finish it, you move on to the next. The structure is reasonably straightforward. Where it merits celebration, however, is in the Time Trial aspect. This puts your scores up against your friends and the rest of the world, and if you earn a Gold Medal time in each course, there's a cool 40 points waiting for you. This, it must be said, is easier said than done. The courses get progressively harder, and more punishing and demanding of enlightened timing. In my pursuit of Gold Medal-ranked times, I found that often they relied on sheer good luck, as a lot of obstacles are largely out of your control, especially with regards to timing.
Visually the game looks fine, and is a case in point for good insertion of Avatars. It works very well indeed, and certainly, I feel, helps to get you involved, as it were.
My sole criticism would be that I wish it were longer. For free, I'm pretty pleased indeed.
