PS3

PixelJunk Racers Vids

PixelJunk Racers

A new PS3 racer slipped by under most peoples’ radar at this year’s E3. It’s called PixelJunk Racers and it looks to be rather … unconventional. More puzzler than racer, you control your vehicle from an overhead view and move it between lanes on futuristic super-speedways. As you zip past the (much slower) opposition you set up combos and earn bonus points and speed boosts that you lose should you crash. It’s a bit hard to explain, but the vids below from GameVideos.com should help things make more sense.

Since you don’t really have full control over your machine it’s not really a proper racer per se, but it does look like it could be fun. Fun, that is, assuming you have an HDTV that’s large enough to make out the microscopic vehicles here. We think standard definition gamers need not apply when this one hits the PlayStation Network download store, presumably before the end of the year.

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Sega Rally Revo Official Website, New Video

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Sega Rally Revo

The time has come for Sega Rally Revo to launch its official website, and as promotional pre-release sites go, it’s a pretty good one. The site, at SegaRally.com, offers a whole raft of screenshots (most of which you’ve probably already seen), a bit of a history lesson on the Sega Rally franchise, some downloadable wallpaper, and what is looking like it’ll be a collection of short videos highlighting the game’s technology. The first video is included below (courtesy of GameVideos.com) for your viewing pleasure … assuming you can handle having the game’s muddy ruts described again.

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A Gran Turismo Retrospective

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue

Games Radar has put together a bit of a retrospective of the Gran Turismo franchise, going back to the original and tracing its progression through to what we’ve thus-far seen of Gran Turismo 5.

Comparing GT5 with the original PSone instalment is ludicrous now. Visually, Gran Turismo 5 is leading us into territory resembling the holy grail of photorealistic graphics. In fact, we’re still not entirely convinced that the top left snapshot above isn’t actually a photograph.

So, in case it’s not clear, Polyphony Digital really put their nose to the grindstone where realism is concerned. They’ve achieved some incredible visual feats. Which is why, no doubt, it’s taking so long to get GT5 out the door. Each car now has more polygons than were in the whole PSone game – multiply that by the entire GT5 garage and you’ve a hell of a lot of work.

However, what’s missing here are the various false-starts and disappointments, namely the vaporware PSP release and the aborted attempt at multiplayer in GT4.

Two NFS: ProStreet Videos

Need for Speed: ProStreet

Despite being only three months away, we really haven’t seen all that much of EA’s latest Need for Speed entry, ProStreet, in motion. Today, though, from two sources we have two different videos of the game in motion. Both show lots of, well, tire smoke primarily, but also lots of deformation of car bodies and high-speed racing.

Honestly the first video (below) is pretty reminiscent of NFS games of yore … minus the perfect looking exotics of course. The second video available here shows some rather more generic urban circuit-style racing. Could this be the first truly good NFS in a number of years? At the very least it looks like it’ll be better than our earlier assessment …

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Sega Rally Premier Class Cars Displayed

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Sega Rally Revo

IGN has managed to get the Lead Car Artist for Sega Rally Revo, Keith Burden, to personally write up the pre-release tease posts for the game; where they gradually reveal more and more cars to (hopefully) get you more and more excited about the game’s release this September (or October, depending on where you’re reading this from). He starts at the top with what they’re calling the “Premier” class of cars, starting with, what else, the Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Evo:

The first class and possibly one of the most important is the Premier Class cars. These consist of some top flight Rally fare; the Subaru Impreza WRX STi, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX, Ford Focus RS, Peugeot 206 WRC, Škoda Fabia, and Citroën Xsara Rallycross car.

The Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Evolution IX are iconic for any kind of Rally game, they are well known, cool, and possibly two of the most perfect high performance cars in the world (lots of bhp, big spoilers and enough room for the family – what more do you need?).