Tracks Of My Years

I love driving and I love to drive, so it should be no surprise that I am a great fan of driving games.  I’m more than willing to give any vehicle based game a fair crack of the whip until I make my mind up whether I like it or not.  This can sometimes mean that I have to play through some utterly terrible racing games to find the good ones; luckily good driving games are quite easy to come by these days.  I thoroughly enjoyed the Dirt games, have a penchant for the Need for Speed series and was driven to pleasure with Test Drive Unlimited via the way of Burnout Paradise, of course!  Throughout my gaming driving career I’ve raced on some of the latest and greatest tracks ranging from the real life to the over the top fictional settings with passing jets and balloon festivals.  As a direct result of this I find myself with an intimate knowledge of the sleek curves and bends of many, many racing circuits but I’ve never driven on some of my most wanted in game tracks.

The great consoles have featured representatons of world famous racing circuits, some in so-so detail, others in absolutely stunning life-like reality and it has been my pleasure to race round them and store the corners away in my head.  Through playing games I find it easy to remember tracks and when I watch F1 on the telly I find myself trying to predict how the tracks wind and turn through my insider gaming knowledge.  I also find it very easy to spot if any of the tracks have had adjustments made to them, I remember watching the Moto GP a few years ago in a race at Le Mans.  At the time I had been playing the GP game to death and was particularly adept at the Le Mans track, as I watched the real race I noticed that a large straight over the hill near the start finish line had been turned in to a chicane section, or was it the other way round?  I’d have never noticed that if not for the game.  It still doesn’t take away from the fact that there were tracks severely omitted from every racing game I can remember and it had to change, just as well then that a kids looking game came along!

The one glorious omission from racing games on the consoles has been, in my opinion, the one thing that could catapult a game in to the premier league of gaming… a track editor!  The last game I can remember that included a track editor was V-Rally 2 for the Playstation One, it was quite basic allowing brows and dips and not much else really, but was great fun to make a roller coaster track with.  The track I really wanted to drive on could only be achieved by the use of a track editor and it’s taken more than 10 years until I might be actually be able to fulfil my dream.  I was therefore totally delighted to hear that the Playstation 3 was to host a game that allowed you to not only customise cars and drivers but also to make your own tracks and even better still, share with others. This may be surprising but the game in question is on the surface aimed at kids, but scratch a little deeper and you’ll find a creative toolbox of joy that may be best suited to the adult brain.  The game of course, is the mostly excellent Modnation Racers, a kart based game with cute characters and a comprehensive set of tools to create your own racing world.  After a few quick races and some mucking around with customising the characters and trying to build my own unique kart, my hands were shaking and my heart was beating faster in anticipation of finally being able to drive my dream track.

I do believe I have kept you all on tenterhooks quite long enough so I’ll tell you about my track of dreams, I’m pretty sure that a great many of you will also have wanted to race this place too.  Okay, the track I wanted to build was quite simply… my road to work and around the area I stay.  It is a journey I make at least twelve times a week, mostly rather sedate and mundane, no frills or spills, just a normal commute but the chance to do it flat out with disregard for rules and regulations is just too much.  I fired up Modnation and jumped into the track editor; I was delighted to find it so easy to use and within a few short minutes I had the basic layout of the streets around my home ready for a blast, but only after I had changed gradients and the like.  In less than ten minutes I was zooming around a very basic representation of the streets I traverse every day, of course there were no buildings the same or any landmarks that made it familiar, but it was enough I was racing around my streets at long last.  Of course after a while I got annoyed at trying to fine tune everything to my fussy standards so I ended up making a roller coaster track that was huge fun to play on.  Ultimately Modnation is the closet yet I’ve come to realising my track building dream but it’s still not quite enough, I want all the correct buildings, signs, lights, everything as it is.  Alas that dream may be quite a bit away, if ever at all, so in the mean time I’m going to enjoy being able to make my own tracks and sitting back and wallowing in my genius.