Mortals, The Alliance of Awesome rises again! Tap-Repeatedly. Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming. Electron Dance. This week, Joel “Harbour Master” Goodwin of Electron Dance wrangles much of the Alliance’s European Contingent outside the Eurogamer Expo. Semi-drunken interviews follow. Clicky the clicky to click another thing in which the podcast lurks. Highlights: thoughts on Guild Wars 2, on Rage, on Zelda: Skyward Sword, on Skyrim, on great-looking indies, and much more. All delivered to you from the …
Review by Zach “Ravious” Best Trackmania² Canyon Developer Nadeo Publisher Ubisoft Released September 14, 2011 Available for PC Time Played 20+ hours (including full beta) Verdict: 5/5 Gold Star “As a standalone game, Trackmania² Canyon is a well polished racing game that is distinctly fun to play. It is well worth the value cost-of-entry and will provide hours of fast-driving excitement. Within the Maniaplanet system of creations and community, Trackmania² Canyon truly shines.”
Of the few forums I follow with fervor, I happened to be at the Maniaplanet Forums at exactly the right time when one of the devs started playing the dev-titled “stupid games” to give out beta keys to test Trackmania²: Canyon (“Canyon”). It was really a fluke, and as I entered the first beta round I knew I was an interloper. I have beta tested countless MMOs. This was different. I felt instantly out of my …
Back in ’03, a small French game development company, Nadeo, created a racing game within a system designed to allow people to easily build and share a plethora of community-created content. This Trackmania was a platform with so many outlets. It had fresh racing gameplay distilled down to bare essentials. It had a track editor that worked like Legos, including various brick themes. It had a car painter to paint and place stickers in real …
I’ve heard too many gamers misunderstand Trackmania. It’s a racing game, sure, but with more Hot Wheels blood than Road and Track. Many kids, including myself, carefully constructed a die-cast car track starting from the bed, going down to the floor for a loop-de-loop, and thereafter flinging the car into the unknown. That picture describes Trackmania far better than any other real world example. A good video game analogy might be that Trackmania is to racing games …