16th September 2010, 4:30 PM
Futuristic cars going hundreds of miles an hour on roads twisting through the sky full of bright neon colors >>>>>>> any modern-day car racing game, thematically.
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On that note, I knew I was forgetting something... the voices. The other racers say something, with those giant on-screen portraits, every single time you pass them, attack them, get attacked, etc. It gets incredibly annoying very, VERY quickly. Fortunately, in the options menu you CAN turn off the portraits, and voices have their own slider in the sound menu, so you can turn off voices by setting the volume for that low without affecting music or sound effects. That is good, and that is exactly what I've done -- turned off portraits, and turned voice volume quite low so I can barely hear it. I might not mind the voices if they were infrequent, like XGRA or something, but they're not, they're incessant and very annoying. Really I'd have preferred an option to keep them, but make them much less frequent, but lacking that, at least you can turn it off.
Oh yes, and in single player series races, there are also Rivals and Allies. It's a pretty pointless system really, but Rivals supposedly attack you more, and Allies won't attack you and supposedly attack your Rivals, in certain races anyway. Rivals are preset for each character -- each one will have specific rivals, and one or two preset allies. However while you can't add more rivals, you can add more allies. Before each race you'll get alliance requests which you can accept if you want, to reduce the number of people attacking you. However, try to avoid attacking Allies because it'll punish you a little, and when you attack an ally you automatically become un-allied.
Really the whole system could have been removed without it mattering much at all, it wasn't implemented that amazingly well (that is, to make it feel like the rivals and allies really matter), but it's there.
(emulator footage, but the only good quality video of the game I can find)
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This video is of someone using an always-full-turbo cheat. Go to 2:05 to see full 4-level turbo boost mode, it changes the colors and looks pretty awesome. :) (Without cheating, of course, using a boost uses one level of the boost meter in the lower right corner, but this guy's cheating to always have a full 4 blocks of boost available.)
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On that note, I knew I was forgetting something... the voices. The other racers say something, with those giant on-screen portraits, every single time you pass them, attack them, get attacked, etc. It gets incredibly annoying very, VERY quickly. Fortunately, in the options menu you CAN turn off the portraits, and voices have their own slider in the sound menu, so you can turn off voices by setting the volume for that low without affecting music or sound effects. That is good, and that is exactly what I've done -- turned off portraits, and turned voice volume quite low so I can barely hear it. I might not mind the voices if they were infrequent, like XGRA or something, but they're not, they're incessant and very annoying. Really I'd have preferred an option to keep them, but make them much less frequent, but lacking that, at least you can turn it off.
Oh yes, and in single player series races, there are also Rivals and Allies. It's a pretty pointless system really, but Rivals supposedly attack you more, and Allies won't attack you and supposedly attack your Rivals, in certain races anyway. Rivals are preset for each character -- each one will have specific rivals, and one or two preset allies. However while you can't add more rivals, you can add more allies. Before each race you'll get alliance requests which you can accept if you want, to reduce the number of people attacking you. However, try to avoid attacking Allies because it'll punish you a little, and when you attack an ally you automatically become un-allied.
Really the whole system could have been removed without it mattering much at all, it wasn't implemented that amazingly well (that is, to make it feel like the rivals and allies really matter), but it's there.
(emulator footage, but the only good quality video of the game I can find)
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This video is of someone using an always-full-turbo cheat. Go to 2:05 to see full 4-level turbo boost mode, it changes the colors and looks pretty awesome. :) (Without cheating, of course, using a boost uses one level of the boost meter in the lower right corner, but this guy's cheating to always have a full 4 blocks of boost available.)
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