Ford Street Racing: LA Duel

A-pathetic

I have a question for all you readers, why would anyone buy a new release that's worryingly already priced at budget prices when they could buy any number of older games that have dropped to that price point over time and are proven classics? It's an interesting question, and surely the answer is that no-one would, and yet companies continue to release some new games at budget prices in the apparent hope that we won't judge them as harshly due to their relative inexpensiveness compared to that week's other new games.

Luckily for you not only did I not have to pay a penny to play this game so I can judge it with no predisposed fondness for the ten quid I would have saved had I picked it over another new release, but also the fact that I played it at all means that you have absolutely no reason to.

See how nice I am to you.

There are some games that from the very moment you load them up just radiate the love and attention that has been lavished on them by a developer so in tune with the subject matter that they have slaved for months tweaking every little aspect of it till it fits into the magnificent glowing whole and creates a defining moment in gaming. Then, unfortunately, there are games like Ford Street Racing: LA Duel (FSR) that from the very moment you load them up give off an ever increasing sense of apathy and despair as if the developers really wanted to be working on something else and had no desire to do anything other than the bare minimum to get the game out of the door.

In fact the problems start even before you load it up. You know when you have a game in you PSP and you're looking in the 'Game' bit of the system menu, the screen displays a background from the game along with a little bit of video and some music and it's all quite flash and clever and even though, lets be honest, you rarely even notice it now it's still a neat little feature. Well, FSR can't be bothered with all of that, navigate to the 'Game' part of the system menu with FSR in your PSP and you just get a static picture, that's it, no video or music. That small little omission probably tells you as much about the level of love and care that went into the game as rest of this review will.

As is my way, I settled down to start playing FSR sat with a notepad and pen next to me ready for me to take notes as I played. Often this is slightly pointless as it takes a couple of hours playing time before I've got enough of a feel for a game to make any sensible notes beyond things like 'nice intro' and 'the menus are easy to navigate'. However FSR was different and I found myself stopping every few seconds during my first race to make a note of something I'd noticed. Then, when the race eventually finished, I read through what I'd written and realised that in essence my review was right there on the page, a narrative of my experiences during my first race if you will. So here, in their (almost) unedited glory, are my notes from that first race:

• The streets of LA appear to be full of lampposts and no matter how I seem to hit them they don't bend, fall over or do any more to my car than produce a slight 'clinky' noise and bounce the car slightly to one side barely losing speed! If they aren't going to have the effect lampposts should have on speeding cars then why line the damn streets with them?
• The in-game pause menu has the least options ever 'Resume' and 'Quit' only, no other options for things like camera angle, sound, restart or controls.
• There is a nice isometric map in the corner of the screen, looks like the ones you get on some sat-nav systems.
• Old cars are slow and that's just not very fun. They also appear to have lying speedometers, the game is telling me that I'm actually travelling at 112 mph in this ancient Ford, a fact not supported by the gentle hum of the engine and the LA scenery that is trundling past at a pace that wouldn't worry my Grandmother!
• The break lights don't work.
• I just hit another car and my car flashed (the completely disappeared re-appeared type of flashing) for a few seconds, no idea if that is a bug or if it's supposed to happen. No idea what it means if it's an intended thing though!
• Ahhh I think it was because I ploughed right into a lamppost at the same time as hitting that car (I've just done it again). I take back what I wrote earlier, lampposts DO do something; they make your car flash if you hit them right... Great.
• The AI is rubbish, all following a perfect racing line. And magically speeding up to keep up with you when you get ahead.
• I feel like I'm racing a milk float around a ghost town.
• That was kind of cool, I hit another car that had skidded round in front of me (for no apparent reason that I could make out) and it flipped right over. Obviously I barely slowed down and suffered no discernable damage, but hey, it looked good.
• Oh ok, I take it back, now the race is over (I won, yay me!) and the camera has spun round a bit I can see that there's what I assume are scratches on my paintwork, but it just looks like a bad texture on all honesty.

You can probably see from that just where this review is going but in the interests of professionalism I ploughed on and continued playing the game for as long as I possibly could before I started to bite my own fingers off to avoid having to sit through any more and I'm afraid to report that even though the cars do get a little nippier as you get further in, it doesn't help and all the above problems remain throughout the whole game.

For the still vaguely interested of you there are the obvious basic game modes, from single races to a career mode with loads of classic Ford cars to unlock (the one possibly bright spot would have been if they had included my current car, a Ford Puma. But I should have realised they wouldn't, the Puma is actually fairly fun to drive). An Ad-Hoc multiplayer mode which implies they did actually expect to sell at least two copies of the game is also present and correct. The one thing that FSR does have that is new, to me at least, is an interesting sounding team mode where you control two cars during a race. You're able to switch between the two at the touch of a button and the AI controls whatever car you're not currently driving at the time. The aim is to try and ensure both your cars finish as high up the leaderboard as possible and amid the rest of the dirge on display in the game stands out as a beacon of novelty. However, even this interesting idea is let down as the AI driving your other car is just as bad as the one driving your opponents so you spend most of the time flicking between cars just making up for how the AI seems to lose your hard won position as soon as you leave it in control which takes all the fun and tactics out of it, you still have to admire the idea though and it would be nice to see another game pick it up and develop it properly.

And as the sense of apathy surrounding this game is clearly catching that's about all I can be bothered to write really, there seems to be little point saying a whole lot more to be honest. The real purpose of a review is surely to give the reader some idea of if they should spend their hard earned money on a game and the, by now obvious, truth is no, in this case you really really shouldn't. The true horribleness of the game is that it leaves you questioning things you really shouldn't in a video game, such as why is LA so empty? Why is there no other traffic? How on earth would such racing get organised in a large city? Would there not be people lining the streets to watch if such a thing happened? To be honest FSR is no guiltier in ignoring these real world considerations than any other street racer out there, it's just that the rest of the game is so poor you can't help letting your mind wander...

But hey, at least it's cheap.

29%

By Paul Newcombe