Always Connected: Racing Games

Always Connected is a series of posts about online gameplay with today's post taking a look at my time with some racing games.

Last week I took a look at my time playing both Gears of War games online and detailed how I was disappointed in the community that surrounds the two games for generally being disrespectful and inconsiderate of you as a player. Whenever I compare that experience with the other games I have played online, specifically the various racing games, I always find myself confused and curious as to why they have been so different.

It's not always different though as bad multiplayer sessions can happen in any game. Naturally it depends on who you end up versing, something that you have no control over when using a game's matchmaking system. The racing games that come to mind when I think about my bad racing experiences are the Project Gotham Racing series. I have been playing the series online for as long as it has been offered, beginning with Project Gotham Racing 2 and finishing with the last game to be released Project Gotham Racing 4.

I can't say I am surprised when I think about the bad times I have had with the game, because the more Arcade nature of the handling system and racing means that it is easier to be an idiot and crash into people on the track, with no repercussions to penalise the players who do it. Braking for corners can result in eager players behind you smashing into you to use you as their brake, with the end result seeing you slamming into the wall while they pass for the position and carry on to do it to the next unlucky person. Racing side-by-side with someone may see them purposefully swerve into you with the aim to make you spin out. Hell, some people even drive around the track the wrong way with the sole intention to slam head-on into whoever they see first. Like Gears of War before it, it's disappointing but you have to expect it with any game really. I won't deny that across all the racing games I have played online, the PGR series has been the most prolific with bad multiplayer sessions but despite that I still firmly believe that it is one of the most fun games I have ever had the pleasure of playing against other people. With perhaps a touch of irony, I would argue that the reason is again because of the more Arcade-like nature that the game has allowing it to be more accessible to a wide variety of players with different levels of skill. Car damage is cosmetic, it doesn't affect the performance of the vehicle at all and means that if a player was to crash they wouldn't suffer too badly in a race and may only lose a few positions rather than be forced to retire. This is a good thing because it means less players get frustrated if they aren't doing so well and have a desire to press on due to the unpredictability that comes with racing. Combine that with the reward of Kudos (points) for pulling off daring maneuvers like power-sliding around the corners and getting up on two-wheels and you just have a damn fun racing game.


Another racing game I have played online heaps is Forza Motorsport 2. With it being a simulation game and therefore a more serious racer, I was expecting it to be another game where players act like fools, only worse due to the game featuring damage that can affect your car's performance to a point where a snail would be moving faster or that I would be forced to retire. Much to my surprise I found the game was fantastic to play online with the community surrounding it being open to all levels of skill and more importantly being respectful of other drivers. Apologies were offered over the in-game chat if someone caused an accident unintentionally; people helped out with car setups if players were struggling; offered tips for people who couldn't take a particular corner right and it was just generally warm and welcoming. Now I'm no slouch when it comes to racing games and didn't need the help being offered but I still observed it happening and was definitely impressed. Of course there were still some races that weren't as fun as they could be which is again due to the nature of being matched up with randoms, but my time with Forza 2 was very pleasant. I even met a group of people who I'm now friends with in the game who also happened to be on par with my skill level, something that made it even more fun for me as the racing was close, competitive and a real blast to participate in. To put it simply, there is nothing like sharing a common interest (cars, racing) with a group of people who are also on the same page as you and who are happy to race just to have a race. I can only hope that other people that are into racing games can find a similar experience to share because it has certainly influenced my opinion of playing games online.

Moving onto some other racing games, the Burnout franchise has been another great series to play online although I can't really offer any comments about playing it with anonymous people because I have only played with friends. Each of the three games that offer online play in the series (Burnout 3: Takedown, Burnout Revenge and Burnout Paradise) have been great fun to play online and each offer a different experience. The recent Midnight Club: Los Angeles is also quite fun to play online with it reminding me of an old favourite, Test Drive Unlimited. Both games allow you to just simply cruise around their locations (LA for Midnight Club, Oahu for TDU) and as you would expect that can be fun when chilling with your mates.

As you can see my time playing various racing games online has been a positive one both with friends and people I don't know. It's nice to be able to say that because anonymous people are unpredictable and I can only hope that the positive experiences continue to happen in the future. Whether it is Arcade games like Project Gotham Racing or Burnout, or a more serious racer such as Forza 2, it is nice to be able to fire up a racing game and enjoy some races online. Simbin's first console game Race Pro is next on my agenda and it comes out next week. Here's hoping that playing it online is also something I end up enjoying.

Always Connected: Gears Of War

Always Connected is a series of posts focused on online gameplay. Today I take a look at my time with Gears of War.

The Gears of War series can be great fun to play online but unfortunately also one of the worst, with a community comprised of people who are more interested in ruining your experience than playing the game for fun. A generalised view perhaps but one that I feel is necessary after the time I have spent playing the series.

Looking at the original game first, my time with Gears of War has been a mixed affair. In the first few months I was able to cooperatively beat the game's hardest difficulty setting, Insane, as well as play a lot of Warzone multiplayer matches with a group of my friends. I really like the way Gears of War plays as a multiplayer title, with the game's matches feeling much more up close and personal than a game like Halo 2. Eventually my completionist side took over though and as a result, I begun to play Ranked matches so I could work towards the multiplayer Achievements. It was there that my perception of the game changed.

At first playing the Ranked matches was okay. I was doing it with a couple of friends and it wasn't too long before we found out that there was a particular search criteria we could use to get into Australian matches and eliminate the lag. Playing with Aussies was great but then something changed and the matches against them were not fun anymore. These same Australians had a sudden change of attitude and turned into the sort of people that give a bad name to the rest of us. They became the type of people who verbally abused you if you killed them, used glitches such as the infamous Crab-Walk to make the matches unfair and just generally became arseholes. I apologise for the language but it is an apt way to describe their attitudes. It ruined the game for me and made the quest for Seriously, an Achievement obtained by killing 10,000 people in Ranked matches, much harder than it should have been.


Moving onto the second game, I found it to be a much better experience than the first. Partly because the Achievements for the new game don't require much online play but also because of the new Horde mode. Horde in Gears of War 2 is a cooperative mode where a group of up to five players get to take on an onslaught of Locust, with difficulty increasing after every wave of Locust that is defeated. It is immensely fun to play and working together with other players -- friends or randoms -- means that there is no competition between players. This suggests that cooperative play is always going to be more enjoyable than competitive, but even if that is true I still wish that playing a game like Gears of War online could be fun regardless of whether it is with friends or not.

I can only speak from my own experiences so perhaps someone else has found their time with the game's multiplayer to be more enjoyable than my own. I also had a choice to stop playing the original at any time but instead allowed my desire to complete everything take control, something that is entirely my fault. I'm aware of that but even so it disappoints me that a community of players who clearly enjoy both games can take pleasure in ruining the game for everyone else.

Always Connected: Competitive Play

Always Connected is a series of posts about online gameplay. Part one focused on cooperative gameplay and now part two is focusing on competitive play.

The obvious opposite to playing cooperatively is to instead play competitively. Playing games against one another is nothing new, with modes like Deathmatch being staples of FPS games for a very long time. Online gaming has only increased the popularity of competition with PC gamers playing against each other over the Internet for many years. With the consoles now online enabled as well, those experiences have transferred to the consoles and now it is quite easy to fire up a game of Halo, search for a match and be playing within minutes.

For someone like me, the fact that the consoles are online now means that I can actually play multiplayer games. It doesn't matter whether it is cooperatively or competitively, before online gaming I generally didn't get to play multiplayer in any game due to not having any friends that were also into gaming. This has changed in the more recent years, ironically as online gaming has become more popular, as my wonderful girlfriend is a gamer and so is our best friend. Regardless of that though, I maintain that online gaming has changed my life for the better because it provides me the choice to play something with other people if and when I want to. Don't get me wrong, I have had some multiplayer experiences in the past, with Mario Kart 64 and Perfect Dark being played a lot during my childhood but the reality is that I didn't really play games with other people until online gaming became a normal feature of the consoles.

Now that I do play games online I find myself thinking about the various things that go with it. Anonymity is the first thing that comes to mind and how the various people from around the world act and react to different situations. Using my own experiences again as an example, the first night of my Xbox Live subscription showed me two very different sides of online play and how it can be both a good and bad thing. Easing myself into the service I spent the first half of the night playing with some friends who were already used to playing online but also realised that it was new to me. These friends were patient, answered any silly questions I may have asked and also demonstrated to me that playing online can be a fun and rewarding thing to do. We raced each other in Burnout 3: Takedown, shot each other in Halo 2 and when we weren't playing anything, just chatted. Doing this showed me that while we were playing against each other, socialising and enjoying our games together was great and we all had a wonderful time that night.

Later that night the other side of online play was shown, the side that is referred to in the industry when discussing the reasons why people are put off playing online. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate much further on the issue so instead I will say that it was a surprise and I could not help but feel disappointed in the gamers out there who decide to act and react like that while playing games. Games are supposedly meant to be about fun and yet here these people are caring more about ruining the experience for others than having an enjoyable time for themselves. It comes across as sad and as has been said countless times before, really hinders any progress we hope to achieve in evolving our medium and expanding its audience. I am used to it now, but on that first night it was off-putting and like many others I was considering canceling my subscription and never playing online again. In fact the only reason I continued to play online was because of my friends and thankfully the end result has been a few new friends made and countless, memorable times online in the various games that I own. I now believe that online gaming is important and I am glad to see that it has become more popular over the recent years, but it has a long way to go yet and I really hope that the journey is improved as we near the overall destination.

To extend on the above, I can't help but compare the various online sessions that I have had and wonder why these experiences vary to the degree that they do. Without meaning to generalise, it's easy to use a FPS title (and really, take your pick) as an example of games where disappointing and perhaps even insulting online sessions can and will take place. They are arguably the games in which competition is at its most fierce and players seem to be more aggressive with their attitudes because of the competition and desire to win the match. Some out there would even argue that the violence is a factor, but that is a topic for another day. When I compare my time playing Gears of War online with say, a racing game in Forza Motorsport 2, the attitude and general manner of players is vastly different and it is something I have found myself pondering many times. Racing online in Forza has been a more laid-back affair for me, with other players being respectful of you as a driver and not biting your head off if you make a mistake and accidentally cause a crash that takes you and them out of the race. The community of people who play that game seem to be nicer, more willing to just have fun with the game and are open to other players not necessarily being as skilled as they are. It makes for a more enjoyable time and really, that is what it should be about. I will look into my times playing these games and others in future posts of the series but for now I will say that comparing them has been baffling and intriguing and no doubt something that I will continue to analyse in the future.

Competitive gaming has even seen players form careers out of the experience with big name tournaments like Major League Gaming and the now defunct Championship Gaming Series allowing players to test their skills against players all around the world for prize money, sponsorships and even a little fame. These tournaments have become more popular over the years but due to not really having direction or an identity unfortunately haven't found a way to satisfy audiences nor expand the interest of competitive gaming as a whole. As someone who wants to see the industry progress and evolve as much as it can, that is disappointing but is also quite understandable given that games are much more fun if you are playing rather than someone else.

In the end, competitive gaming is here to stay thanks to online play connecting players across the world and that looks set to continue as connection speeds increase, gaming evolves and more and more people start to play and enjoy games. Combine that with the wonderful cooperative experiences that can be had, plus who knows what to come and you have a very bright future for people who want to play with or against each other.

Always Connected: Cooperative Play

Always Connected is a series of posts I plan on doing about Online gameplay. From particular subjects related to playing games online, to personal experiences I have had and any other feelings I may have about the subject, they will be discussed within this series. Part one begins with a focus on cooperative play and how it's changing the gaming experiences of the industry as a whole.

Most games these days feature the option to play through their respective stories or campaigns cooperatively or if not that, then a separate campaign created specifically with Co-Op gameplay in mind. The fact that consoles can now connect to the Internet has played a big part in that. Multiplayer gaming of any kind is no longer relegated to sharing an experience on the couch or via a LAN in the same room and while a lot of us may miss these shared, in-person experiences, the fact that we can now play with friends in different states or even overseas is definitely a good thing for the industry as a whole.

The last couple of years has seen games with Co-Op experiences increase tenfold, with games like Gears of War, Halo 3 and more recently Left 4 Dead providing polished, enjoyable gaming experiences that are arguably more fun to play cooperatively than they are as a solo experience. These sorts of games have, in some ways, changed the perception of how games are played. Games are no longer played by the typical stereotype of a gamer in their bedroom or in the basement, alone with no communication or interaction with the outer world as they play their games. The ability to share the story of a game as an experience, or even just a particular gameplay mechanic has been welcomed with open arms by gamers and allows people to actually participate in some potentially awesome moments in these games instead of hearing about it at school or work the next day.

Of course, the ability to play these games online means that it is not just friends who you can potentially play with. There are thousands, if not millions of gamers out there who you could end up cooperatively playing with and this in turn can lead into some bad experiences. Not knowing these gamers could mean that the differing play styles that you have might clash and hinder your experience rather than help it, or that these people could choose to not help at all knowing full well that they can get away with it due to their anonymity. It could also go the other way though and you could end up working together really well while you tackle the game's obstacles and challenges. Who knows, you may even make a friend or three. Arguably, choosing to play a game cooperatively online means that you are taking a risk and that the experience can go either way. You wouldn't have made the choice though if you were not willing to take a risk and as such, one can only hope that the risk was worth it and that the participating gamers can all have a good time. Sometimes, what would be regarded as a bad experience could end up being a good one in an indirect way such as this Left 4 Dead example.

People who have been gaming for many years will always have a soft spot for playing games with their friends on the couch and would also argue that it is a better multiplayer experience than any online cooperative experience could ever be. Perhaps that is true but the general direction recent games have been taking us in by providing the opportunity to share a game's experience over the Internet is definitely a good thing for the industry and something I hope continues to be pursued in the future.

Note: I apologise for the lack of posts last week. I was sick and just couldn't focus my thoughts enough to read anything in-depth, let alone try to write anything in-depth. Thankfully I seem to be over it now and as such, posting now resumes.