Anyone have the japanese version yet? We need first impressions
This is what I wrote on another board the night I got my import from PlayAsia, sorry for copying and pasting but I don't feel like writing the same thing over again:
Taking a break right now.
Basically the game is screaming for online multiplayer, because the festival is really teaching the player to learn the track to find the fastest route, each vehicle type has different speed and maneuverability, as well as durability, and the track is set up in a way that demands the player to take a different route for each vehicle, and sometimes it's not always the most obvious route that yields the best result, even when you're riding a bike, it doesn't mean you can't get muddy because the high road isn't always the fastest way around the track, you play it safe and all of a sudden you'll see a couple of buggies catching up to you, sometimes you might be off riding on one side and you might be going too fast when you hit a turn because there's a dip, and it might have been a better idea going in the middle.
The tracks are really huge, there are tracks that really open up at various points and have multiple routes, tons of ramps, not just on the same plane, but both high and low, it's kind of exciting when one sees a couple of buggies flying over and barely clearing one's vehicle, and sometimes there are places where you have to fight through, like narrow bridges, sometimes you want to use those places to take out your rivals. Simply AWESOME track design that you won't find in a traditional racing title or even something more arcadey like Burnout because Motorstorm is much more 3D. I know some people complained there was no two-player split-screen, but I'm not sure how well that would work because if there are only two people, once one player gets a bit too far ahead, it kind of loses the intensity because with more players, there will be potential for bumping each other into things, it's really not about smooth-riding. Another reason why I don't think split-screen would work as well is because of the multi-tiered tracks, you need to be aware of the entire track and dividing up the screen works against that.
Right now I'm not too used to using the tilt controls yet, it's actually very responsive, so sometimes I oversteer. I've been kind of learning the tilt while completing the tickets using analog controls, sometimes I find the third person camera to be preferrable, for bigger vehicles, I find the first person camera to be better, it's certainly more exciting.
The track is set up with different obstacles that one can smash through depending on your vehicle type, or it can demolish your ride, even bikes can shrug off oil drums, cars can hit a wooden cabin on the side of one of the tracks and survive, if you're in a buggy and you hit a dead tree you will see clearly in first-person mode that your hood would go flying off, while there are junk cars lying around that are potentially lethal to bikes that trucks can literally plow through without missing a beat. I have not seen any vehicles hitting those dinosaur bones yet, so I'm not sure if that can happen, maybe. The screen effects like dust and wet mud are nicely done, the wet mud dries and disappear from your screen, giving back the visibility.
I don't know how others find the game but I literally burned through four hours of playtime like it was nothing.
Visually it has the best lighting in any game out there, PERIOD. I'm not kidding. GREAT tone-mapping. Overall, it's probably the best-looking game I've seen, especially given its scale. In addition, it has amazing draw distance, you're not really stuck with much dof, the framerate is solid, and the physics and damage system are very awesome. Sometimes my ride can hit the side of a rock wall and lose a ton of stuff and still be able to soldier on with just the frame left. The vehicles are quite detailed, but the gag-system induced animations for the bikers are kind of the highlights for me. The mud really feels like mud when you're riding on the smaller vehicles, especially the bikes.
One can really tell that the game is purely intended for online multiplayer, it's not that the festival mode isn't fun, because it is, but online multiplayer is where it's at. Things like a free-roaming mode or a time-challenge mode might seem like good ideas to some but to me that's totally missing the point of the game because the tracks are just too wide-open and multi-tiered for those kind of things, you need a whole bunch of vehicles on the same track fighting each other to really make it fun, but then you end up with exactly what the festival mode and the online multiplayer offer, it's really not like Ridge where you're still going for those perfect laps or burnout where things can be a bit of a blur like controlling a rocket and not being really sure where you're going, Motorstorm is much more visceral, full-contact driving, and even with bikes I like to take out other riders, to me Burnout really doesn't feel remotely as visceral as this, in Motorstorm, you're fighting the track, fighting to stay in control and brawling with the other vehicles.
Don't get me wrong, the JPN version IS limited, no doubt about it, because the festival basically is all there is, I think the addition of online would be HUGE and it's a shame the Japanese players won't get to enjoy that. I think it's one of those games you would want to just hop online and not worry about being stuck racing for too long, it's less about no. 1 and more about just having fun mixing it up whether it's one race or whether you want to stick around for a few hours.
I take back the best-looking and best lighting, because that was written before I downloaded and played the GTHD demo (SO AWESOME
), which currently owns those two categories. I stand by my comment regarding two-player split-screen and free-roaming though, because I don't think gameplay-wise they would really add anything to the experience, any kind of splitscreen play would seem more like a poor man's version of online multiplayer.