So a little racing game called
Trackmania
Nations Forever was released on Steam back in April. I
downloaded it, (it's free) and promptly forgot about it until I
looked in my games tab and saw it again, and, on a whim, decided to
play.
Shortly thereafter I discovered that Trackmania Nations Forever is
free in much the same that the bubonic plague is free, and punches
to the face can be obtained at no cost.
To prevent any possible miscommunication, I am telling you right
now that Trackmania Nations Forever is a bad game. It is not so bad
it's good, it is so bad it's horrible. Saying that this game should
be burned is an
insult to
fire. I'm going to be mocking Trackmania Nations Forever a
lot more in the upcoming pages, but I wanted to get the point of
the post across as soon as possible.
Trackmania Nations Forever, (no, I am not going to abbriviate the
name of the game. The developers were evil (or stupid) enough to
saddle it with a idiotically long name, and I'm evil (but not
stupid) enough to continue to inflict it upon you) appropriately
enough,
looks like a good game. The graphics are
excellent, the controls are crisp and responsive and the in-game
music is surprisingly good. But this is just a thin veneer of
quality designed to obscure the black, evil heart of the game from
the player.
Now, when I said "racing game" up there, you probably thought of a
game where you race other cars in a track, and after a number of
laps, whoever leads the pack when crossing the finish line gets
first place, the person right behind him gets second place, and so
on. But no, that's way too much like a
good game for
Trackmania Nations Forever.
No, in Trackmania Nations Forever, the default, and as far as I can
tell,
only gameplay mode is "Time Attack", where whoever
gets the fastest time in a single lap heat gets the first place.
After that single lap, the course is reset, and you do it again,
and again, and again. By the way, there's no collision damage, cars
can just ghost through each other, and "respawning" to the last
checkpoint is instant and doesn't incur a time penalty.
This results in the most egregious
Do It Again,
Stupid gameplay I have ever seen in a racing game. Since
there's no collision damage, the only way to be punished for poor
driving is be knocked off the course, which happens a lot. A
whole lot.
See that jump? Better line it up perfectly, or else you land
outside of the course and have to respawn. But don't line it up too
perfectly, because then you'll fall through a
hole in the
middle of the fucking
track and have to respawn. And don't
take the jump too slow, or else you'll smack into the edge of the
landing ramp and have to respawn. But don't take the jump too
fast or else you miss the track entirely after it takes a
sharp turn right after the landing ramp. And have to respawn.
Mess up in any of a hundred ways? Do It Again, Stupid!
I played in a kind of haze of confusion, and eventually, rage; as I
screwed up in tiny, almost imperceptible ways and had to respawn
over and over again. "This game looks like someone spent
money on it! How can the gameplay be so stupendously
horrible? This has to be some sort of user-made third-party course,
the real courses can't
possibly be this terrible." This I
screamed to the uncaring heavens, and, incidentally, the chat
channel.
<bbot> Are all of the maps as bad as this?
<gc-mcwellian> no
<gc-mcwellian> some are worse
And that's by no means the end of Trackmania Nations Forever's
crimes. When creating an account you have to select your
nationality, accomplished by going through a list of nations eight
at a time, with a sizable delay after hitting the "next page"
button as it apparently requests the page from a server. Once you
do, that, you get to select your state the same way.
This is so the game can locate you on the appropriate leaderboards,
which are sorted by player rating, which presumably uses the
Elo ranking
system. Now, this is just fine, but Elo ranking is for directly
competitive games like Chess, where a large difference in player
skill results in a dramatically different game. A grandmaster can
obliterate a newbie in a couple of moves, etc. But you can't even
interact with the other players in Trackmania Nations
Forever! This has the effect of making the ranking system being
used purely for ranking, rather than for game-balancing (since
there's nothing to balance) or server matchmaking.
Just finding a server is a chore. It is the year 2008, a mere
ten years after Half Life came out; why, then, am I unable
to even
sort servers by ping? Or just by
game
mode? Why are you making me page through hundreds of servers,
without being able to filter them at all? How do you fail at even
the most
trivial task, something accomplished over and
over, without flaw, by every other multiplayer game for the last
ten fucking years?
Trackmania Nations Forever is a shitty, shitty game. Its gameplay
is fundamentally broken, the UI is a joke, the server browser is a
hate machine designed to inflict pain on anyone who touches it, and
even the
name is poorly designed and fails at the simple
task of
conveying what the game is about. There is no
aspect of this game that is without flaw, no detail not perverted
to the task of assaulting the mind of the player. I deleted the
game after playing it for twenty minutes, and now I wish it were
installed again so I could delete it again, delete it twice, delete
it three times, reformat the hard drive, and crush its platters
with the sheer force of my hatred. Trackmania Nations Forever is
the ultimate argument against the existence of a loving God, for if
He existed, surely this blight upon existence would be unmade
entirely, its component atoms wiped from the universe, and its
creators damned to Hell.