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Garr's Excite Truck (Wii)
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| [February 3, 2007 11:50:18 PM]
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Gamelog assignment: game of choice due 2/9/07
Start Time: 8:45
End Time: 9:30
The second session of Excite Truck was slightly more fruitful in the sense that I took first place in four tracks during one session which isn’t too impressive but its better then my first game session. On the super excite difficulty the game takes much more driving to get the highest ranking of S grade. Its good that the designers added the boosted difficulty because the game is fast and easy on the excite setting. I was worried that is wasn’t anything more than a more difficult run of the same courses but apparently there is a whole new “platinum” track and another ten new trucks. Once again I see how the developers spent time perfecting what they had rather than mass quantity.
The detail in Excite truck is amazing for the computing power available to the Wii console. The amazing jumps provided me with a view of the whole environment which is huge and preloaded so that you can actually see the whole track at once if you get a high enough jump. I found that the truck models themselves are very detailed and extravagant. When I crashed into trees or other cars the impact would show a meaningful crash. For example, if the front end hit a tree on the right side, the whole side would crumple and the tire would fly off. The whole truck has great collision detection. I notice that the gameworld itself has great detail as well. When hitting a palm tree in Fiji the coconuts fall off the tree to the ground around the truck. The world is very polished, even the snowy Antarctica has it’s own friction issues.
The complexity of the game is more than a usual racing genre game. There is a turbo meter which heats up if you turbo too often but the temp goes down over time or if you drive through water. Sometimes I would go out of my way to drive through a river just to get more turbo. The scoring system is also a change in style where even if you come in first you might not win. The game relies on stars and they are accumulated by doing stunts or by crashing over players. Also, you get more stars if you come in first. The many different venues of playing makes a normal driving game into a motion censored enjoyable game.
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| [February 3, 2007 10:48:22 PM]
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Gamelog assignment: game of choice due 2/9/07
Start Time: 7:30
End Time: 8:30
Excite Truck is one of the lunch titles for the Nintendo Wii and though most lunch titles are not polished by their deadline, Excite Truck has a great feel that is not only fun but inventive. I find that most racing games do not keep my interest for long because racing involves highly repetitive game play, but excite truck has been very successful at keeping me interested for many reasons including the great control setup. I began playing the game during this session with the goal of getting the “gold” tracks unlocked which requires beating all the silver tracks with a least a B ranking. After playing the second track over twice, because I got too few stars to get a B rank, I stopped trying to complete the track and just go for high scores on smashing the CPU trucks. Its very enjoyable to speed up to another truck and hit it from behind right as its going off a jump and make it fly out of control. Even when I wasn’t preoccupied with smashing trucks I was busy going for the biggest air or long drifts. After playing for about an hour I didn’t even get through the “silver” tracks but I was still completely satisfied with the experience.
The levels in Excite Truck are well designed with every detail thought out. Though I was disappointed with the appearance of only six different levels so far I can see why they choose to polish the already made levels instead of making more that wouldn’t be finished. The levels involve running across exclamation marks in the road that morph the terrain ahead which I though was a nice way to ad in jumps but also reward player for staying on the designed track. These small power style rewards make the development by the designer more meaningful. Since a designer can plant the exclamation mark in the road and make it where you jump into the air where you see the road ahead and what short cuts are available the designer can make the player go where he/she wants the player to go by morphing the terrain. This led to event occurring such as a oil tanker crashing through the ice and hitting the players in front of me as I hit the exclamation point. These new design features added to the already enriched racing.
By far the best feature of Excite Truck is the control which is motion censored using the Wii controller. You hold the controller in your hands and tilt it to steer around turns or to tilt up or down for more air off of jumps. Not only is this kind of control more fun to play with, it also gives the arcade style feeling of having a steering wheel to drive with. The controls add in so much more enjoyment (and sometimes difficulty) to the game it takes a mediocre racing game and makes it exceptional in the genre. The controller reacts surprisingly well and gives more control (i.e control while flying) then normal racing does. The game takes racing and erases the physics and hardcore simulation and replaces it with new and innovating gameplay. I think this change by developers was an excellent move because it also makes players much more active in playing. The more active the players are the more they enjoy the game.
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Garr's Excite Truck (Wii)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 27 January, 2007
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