Road to Hell
Sometimes games try too hard and do too much. What used to be elegant becomes convoluted and complicated. What used to flow becomes stilted and staccato. What used to be essential gets lost in the mix. Originality and inspiration drown in a gigantic mixed bag.
ModNation Racers (2010, Ps3) tries way too hard in my opinion. This is a kart racer enveloped in a career mode enveloped with cut scenes enveloped in a free roam multiplayer hub enveloped with content creation tools from track designers to complex kart and character skinning. Enter the world hub in your colourful little kart and you are bewildered by a vast arena with about 15 different zones to enter for the different features that the game has to offer – I still don’t have the trophy for simply visiting them all.
I have played a game called Trackmania. I played the free version on my PC. It’s a driving game. You can connect online and play user-made tracks with other players – there’s the same sort of join-the-server-then-play-and-chat feel that you get from some multiplayer shooters. You can also make tracks. Pretty much gaming perfection. I know what I’m going to get and then I play it.
Here the simple act of playing with some players online is obfuscated beyond belief. Find the right bit of the hub, search for an online game by type, sit in the holding space with some strangers, then sit for a minute or so while the track loads, get thrown about the track in a hi-octane race, and then press x to go through the process again. There’s no room to breathe, no simplicity to the process, no space to chat and no desire to do it anyway.
The extremely extended loading delays are indicative of the problems here. Presumably the multitudes of art assets have to be loaded into the system, the enormous 3D zones primed for use, but when you actually race the track it’s all a blur anyway. The irony is that if you download a user track it takes about three seconds!!! So the actual creative components of the game are tiny in proportion. The relationship is all wrong.
But the experience makes me realise what LittleBigPlanet (the same idea applied to 2D platforming) got so right. Sackboy can be coloured and dressed, but it’s an aside – in Modnation Racers the design of the karts and drivers is an overwhelming distraction. It feels like style over content – it’s like playing an RPG and never getting past the character creation screen. LittleBigPlanet keeps the areas of the game ringfenced for clarity – if you don’t want to create then just enjoy what there is. The basic operation is to pick a level and hit play – the rest of it is the smallprint.
ModNation Racers even makes me question the need for community content, because it comes at you like a barrage of effluent rather than a thing of wonder. Part of it is the simplicity of it all – I created a track in about 2 minutes using the autocomplete tools, and it looked and played well. I downloaded a few of the highest-rated community tracks, and they looked a lot like mine. I pressed the randomize button on the driver creation tools and it made a presentable character. What you end up with is a gameworld full of content that takes a minute or two to create. It’s like that nightmare where the internet becomes a morass of inane twitter posts, photograph albums of a trip to the corner shop, youtube videos of me playing frisbee in the park.
The problem might well be kart-racing. It is what it is, and I don’t even think this kart-racer handles very well. But kart-racing certainly doesn’t lend itself to majestic community creations. Decorate your kart as much as you like – it is still just a kart. I don’t think kart-racing even needs a career mode.
I’ve ended up reacting to this game with almost political misgivings. It’s a paranoid victim of the pitching process, where everything is promised and delivered, but to no particular end and with no particular aim in mind. It tries to appeal to everyone and ends up appealing to nobody. It’s created almost out of a paranoid fear of leaving people behind, rather than pushing forward. Rather than paring down for elegance it has been pared up! It’s an overblown mess of a game.
