Awesome to see my email read about Franchitti's IndyCar accident. If anyone wants to check out some pictures of the accident and catch fencing I took of from the stands here is an Imgur album I made: http://imgur.com/a/cU9Dn
I don't understand why anyone would pick this up over Trackmania 2 for half the price. It's mostly just repackaged and remodeled content from content (other than the addition of Lagoon) from the previous game in a more restrictive shell that allows far less user creativity. The whole fun of the series for me was the ability to run custom servers with features like track rating, track voting, custom music, custom car models, and a host of other options that have been stripped to make it more 'console friendly'.
Some people, and I'd guess a vast majority of console gaming people, don't want to interface with the act of installing custom mods like, at all. They don't even have PC's that can run Trackmania to begin with, which is why they bought a console in the first place. Those people just want a fun, colorful, arcade racing game with unlocks and leaderboards.
I think every time Jeff talks about Trackmania he really oversells it as this craaazzyyy thing. It's really not. It's a racing game with custom hud elements, a pretty free-form track editor and the ability to import custom cars. It's not like halfway through a track the game turns into a first person shooter, and then there is an 8bit Zelda level you need to pass through to get nitro boost. You just drive a car through the tracks, except there is custom music blaring out your speakers and a ton of HUD shit covering most of your screen. That stuff is fun and it really speaks to the user-made multiplayer experience, but it doesn't make the actual game - i.e. racing - any more crazy.
This is an appropriately sized down to console standards, gussied up version of Trackmania. For those that want those dubstep Cher remixes the PC version is always waiting. For everyone else, Turbo is still a pretty fun arcade racer.
You don't have to install any mods on PC unless you are hosting a server. I've never done it and I've played 50+ hours of trackmania 2.
@humanity: I can very much understand the appeal of this to console users where the dumb server features in Trackmania 2 would not have worked or made any sense. My biggest complaint is that private player run servers were not even included as an option for the PC version.
I don't understand why anyone would pick this up over Trackmania 2 for half the price. It's mostly just repackaged and remodeled content from content (other than the addition of Lagoon) from the previous game in a more restrictive shell that allows far less user creativity. The whole fun of the series for me was the ability to run custom servers with features like track rating, track voting, custom music, custom car models, and a host of other options that have been stripped to make it more 'console friendly'.
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