Trials is one of the few games / series, I'm actually good at. I remember spending days on the extreme tracks in Evolution, trying to get through them all without faults. Also, getting platinum medals on every track is rough.
Those extreme tracks are real fuckers. Major props if you did any of them without faults; they're tough enough to just complete. Every checkpoint that required a perfect load-spring with the squirrely bike killed a tiny portion of my soul.
Boy, this game is not at all what I hoped it would be. I know people have kinda been over this already, but that trailer everyone got excited about made this game seem like some dark, weird Kubrick/Wolfenstein story-driven thing.
Apart from the survival/crafting stuff (which I admittedly don't care for), the game just seems tonally different as well. Maybe it goes different places, but this video sure makes it look like the enemies are more goofy than creepy, which removes a good bit of what I, and many people found interesting about that 2016 E3 trailer. Even the aesthetic turned out to be more Fortnite than the Bioshock theme they showed in the E3 trailer.
And while Dan can occasionally be dismissive (see Metro QL), his criticisms here seem 100% fair. The ladder cut is lazy. Making two faces for most NPCs is weak. Guards behaving nonsensically until their narrative trigger hits is dumb. Lame stealth sections that can be sprinted through are inherently pointless. Also, the "combat" looks like an absolute trashfire.
Everything about this looks bad, so I don't have a problem with Dan calling it like he sees it. Even Vinny's unbridled optimism can't really survive this QL. You can tell he's trying to find positive things to say about it to offset Dan's negativity towards it, but he struggles to think of one. It's not for me, but I hope it makes a few people happy.
- I still don't know how Jones Soda became so popular. Sub-par drinks with some good marketing, I suppose. It was never actually good.
- Test Drive was kinda bad, but it had heart, and I still got some nostalgia from seeing it again. However, there is zero chance it holds up in any way.
- Yosemite Sam is probably the best Looney Tunes character. He's angrily hapless, and fires guns in the air to express frustration. I rest my case.
- Stuntman was both pretty good and infuriatingly difficult. I shattered a PS2 controller 100%-ing the game. Fuck that asshole director, fuck monster trucks, and fuck tuk-tuks forever.
- Buzz Burrowes sighting at 1:34:41.
- Patton Oswalt is quite funny. I don't know or care if he's not a great person IRL, but I've enjoyed his stuff overall.
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