shots
| Track Mania PC preview | |
| developer | Nadeo |
| publisher | Digital Jesters |
| author | Marcin |
| date | Nov. 3, 2003 |
Chromehounds
NA Review by Marcin
Oblivion-The First 3 Hours
PC Quicktake by walTer
Comic Quick Takes January 25, 2006
Feature by Mike
Right before the PCs came on the scene, there was a little game called Racing Destruction Set. It was novel because, in addition to being able to race various cars over various tracks, you could create those tracks yourself. Most of the fun was making the biggest jumps possible, then setting the gravity to "moon". Now TrackMania takes up the challenge with a 3D construction set that's extremely to use, an assortment of environments to race in, Internet play and single player puzzle mode.
The Puzzle Mode
The goal is simple to begin with: make it from point A to point B in a certain amount of time. You are given a set amount of track pieces to complete your track with, and it is up to you to build it for optimum time. Score points by going faster, and use those points to advance to new tracks. Repeat.
Then things get tricky. To access later tracks you'll need more and more points - and the only way to get them is to shave off precious seconds off your travel time. Your skill can only get you so far, so consider your track carefully. Tracks may become complex enough so alternate routes are possible. Pieces may become limited, or oversupplied (!), so don't feel like you have to use everything - in fact, one track in the beta requires you to go offroad to get the best time, leaving 6 or so track pieces unused!
Additional checkpoints may be added by designers - you have to hit them all, although in any order. In addition, the designers are pretty wily and setup pre-prepared pieces of track, which may not even be needed! Finally, there might be obstacles created on the track which you cannot remove, and must either go around, or attempt to leap over.
The puzzle mode gives you a ghost car to try and beat as long as you keep repeating the same track - it is of course your best time you're working against. This is a nice feature that lets you be constantly aware of how well you're doing.
Internet Play
The farther you get in puzzle mode, the more coinage you earn - coinage you use to buy game pieces. With those pieces you can start creating your own tracks on completely blank stages, and race on them. Then, you can easily set up your own server and go online - since the blocks exist on everyone's game, the upload of the track is nearly instantaneous, which is excellent news for the game's replayability. Likewise, you can hop in to anyone's premade track and play it within seconds - during my sessions I've played games in the US, Canada, France and Belgium - and the download times were comparable.
The game uses a collisionless model, as the races are purely time-based. This means that vehicles warp through one another, and tend to skip around on the course a lot (of course the bigger the ping, the worse the skippage). While a little jarring visually, this doesn't affect your gameplay at all, since you're playing the track on your own machine. Pretty cool stuff. A chat client is also built-into the game.
Some features
TrackMania will have three distinct environments; country, desert and snow - the beta only had the desert environment, but screenshots should be available soon for the others.
You can expect a staggering total of 300 different track pieces, from normal straight and level roads, to loops, spirals and twists, and even decorations like rocks or cacti. While there isn't a "moon gravity" setting, you can use "speed-up" pieces to create truly mind-boggling jumps.
All of the cars perform the same way (wouldn't be fair otherwise), and have simple gas, brake, left and right controls, accessible with the keyboard. You can choose from a set of premade skins. A small mod community seems to exist already, and a few usermade skins are available as well - judging from the variety, making a skinset is not very difficult.
Perhaps the coolest feature is how the track edit mode works. Once you're done editing, simply hit the "play" button in the lower right hand corner, and the camera zips around and deposits you in chase mode behind your car. That's right, instantly. No compile time, or switching modes from edit to race - you just hit Play and off you go. If you need to retweak the track, just hit your Esc key and you're back in the editing world. It's this simplicity and instant response that make TrackMania so fun to play with.
With a solid set of features and near-unlimited replayability (as long as users make new tracks, that is!), TrackMania seems poised to take on the new title of Racing Destruction king.