Dirtbikes Have Never Been Safer!
HIGH Soaring preposterously high off a jump then landing perfectly on the roof of a moving train.
LOW Snowblindness losing me yet another race.
WTF I'm the one speeding through the mud at the front of the pack—why is dirt splatting on MY face?
There are plenty of gameplay innovations in Halo that combined to make it okay to play FPS titles on consoles—progressive health, two-weapon switching, a grenade button… for my money, though, the most vital change towards accessibility was the glut of checkpoints strewn about each level. Gamers don't mind replaying a fight until they've succeeded—the gunplay is the good stuff. The thing that irks is being forced to replay the long, uneventful walks back to the places where one has just been gunned down.
What does this have to do with strictly track-based ATV/MX off-roading game Nail'd
As helpful as this innovation is, it feels like a necessity more often than it should. Nail'd's dozen-plus tracks offer a wide variety of jumps, slaloms, and other stunt opportunities, but many of them are too densely packed with obstacles and sharp turns. No matter how many times I played certain tracks, I'd find myself constantly discovering new ways of wrecking my bike over the course of a race. It's almost as if, knowing that the fair-reset system would jack the difficulty level down a few notches, the developers didn't spend enough time tuning the tracks for playability.
Likewise, there are two glaring flaws that I can't believe made it into the finished title.
First is the vehicle modification system. Beating tracks unlocks new parts for the player's bike or ATV, but none of them are actual improvements. These parts just allow for a different distribution of a finite number of points between categories like air and ground handling or boost acceleration. They all boil down to minor tuning tweaks that affect playing style more than actual ability—and all of the options really should have been available out of the gate.
The second problem is just flat-out bizarre: when the player uses a boost, the colour drains out of the world and the contrast turns way up, washing out the screen as they rocket forward. It's a captivating visual effect… with a huge drawback. There are four maps set on a snow-covered mountain range, and the lack of colour and detail when boosting basically renders the white ground identical to the light-grey walls and boulders. Let's just say that I leaned on the reset feature a little more than usual on these tracks.
Removing the harsh consequences for simple mistakes tears down a wall of inaccessibility that can alienate people from the genre and makes Nail'd
Disclosures: This game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Xbox 360. Approximately 12 hours of play was devoted to single-player modes (completed 1 times) and 2 hours of play in multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains lyrics, mild violence. You should find this a relatively safe title. Even if your teens actually enjoy off-road racing the actions featured in the game are so over-the-top and outlandish that they defy classification as imitable behavior. While it features nothing that could be called "partial nudity", a surprising number of the female racers wear bikini tops while speeding through snow fields.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing: You won't find themselves hampered by any audio cues—this is racing at its most basic and accessible, and that includes operating solely on the basis of visual information.
Nothing relevant to this conversation, that's for sure! Because we're here to talk about (sorry, write and read about, respectively) GC_Danny!!
Since the last time he updated this bio he's had a bunch of movies that he wrote come out, so that's neat. He's also managed to build up a small YouTube channel where he talks about Girls Und Panzer, The Dark Pictures, and Hidden Object Games.
In addition to general game reviewing, he's also dabbled in more long-form work, writing some of the longest and most comprehensive game reviews of all time. Then there's his non-GameCritics blogging, where he's famous as the world's foremost expert on the TV show Criminal Minds, as well as the co-host of a weekly podcast!
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