Old Favourites

At the recent Ready Up team get together we spent a little time at the Trocadero center in that there London town. Watching the unwary fall to the Streetfighter might that is Walter was very amusing but my time was spent becoming re-acquainted with a game I’d forgotten how much I love – Grid.

It’s weird, and also a little personally disappointing, that I forget and move on so quickly these days. I know (or at least I hope) that it’s not my age, it’s just that ‘new’ comes so quickly and I’m voracious when it comes to consuming racing / driving games. Dropping  a couple of coins into the Grid machine and thrashing the other team members who dared to test me – it’s all true! – brought back just how much I love Grid.

Newer games have brought enhanced physics engines, dust-speck and particle lighting and other such ‘improvements’ but I realise that whenever I’m playing and reviewing these titles I’m actually comparing them to Grid in part. With other genres it’s a little more difficult, for me at least, but I think that there are a few stand-out titles which are benchmark setting, Mass Effect would be one of these and certainly Halo has to be there even though I can’t play it (FPS Sickness Syndrome).

This now has me thinking, is the perfection games developers are striving for actually one of those unmeasurable, intangible things which simply happens when the circumstances are fortuitous? When the moons align and the wind blows from the south is there a magic carried on them which imbues certain titles with that certain something?

The reality is, I think, that sometimes things just work. They click into place in a way that no amount of planning, designing or effects purifying can ever knowingly achieve.

It’s good when that happens!