Hands on with ModNation Racers
A Tesla Black
At E3 when Sony blew the lid off a lot of new software titles, one that immediately stuck out was the LittleBigPlanet community-inspired kart racer, Modnation Racers. Based on the same premise as LittleBigPlanet, it’s as much a racing title as it is an engine to create things with, going with the motto “Race Create Share”. Lucky us, we got to have a go of the full game before it gets released to the masses.
Loading this title up is satisfying, as it has a very nice, bouncy way of explaining what the game is and what it does. With funky background music, a charming English gentlemans voice and graphics to match the nice vibes of this title, your introduction to what you do next couldn’t be better explained. Well, maybe if it had Stephen Fry to do a monologue.
Then the game places you in a courtyard, with some round-abouts and buildings in which to explore. This is a networked area, just like your pod in LittleBigPlanet, where other racers are zipping around, wasting time rather then actually racing. In here, there are some interesting tid-bits. First, there are display area’s showing the weeks top character creations (the Helghast, Ratchet and Mario look-a-likes have yet to be toppled from the podium) and the top three karts of that period of time. All of which are free to download and use by anyone. If you make a great creation yourself, it can’t get to a public display like this without actually “sharing” it. More on that later. A giant screen on the other side of the colourful courtyard also displays the top tracks, again, also fully downloadable as well as a list of the top racers.
A side section to this area brings you to the racing pits. A few gates exist here with one big statue of the Modnation default character in the middle. Here you can choose to race multiplayer, single race (time trial) & split screen. In our version, only the multiplayer and time trial options were available. Time trial is self explanatory, pitting your time against other Modnation Racers around the world. Multiplayer is the main draw here. There are ranked XP races, where XP will give you currency with which to buy items in the virtual shop (which during our test was not available) as well as “casual” races to play against other people. You can also host races on your own selection of self-created or downloaded tracks.
Level creation is so easy it's childsplay
Whether hosting or joining a race, the game will set you up in a game room party system, where users can join in based on the difficulty level and type of race they selected at the menu screen. In the code we had, there was no sign of creating a party of PSN friends but this seems like such an obvious thing to do that it would be madness not to include it at launch. Depending on the host settings, you can have a different number of racers going at it. Most seem to use 8 cars, and if racers don’t populate the server the host can choose to fill the empty slots with an AI car. In the lobby area pre-race you can chat to your friends or foes through mic or a text-based chatroom. On top of this, you can browse other users in the room, looking at a virtual gamer card system that shows their stats and creations – all of which you can download if the user has selected to share them.
Racing itself is fun. It’s mario kart in HD, on crack. The variety of cars and characters as well as communication makes this a bit more fun, and a more personalised experience then any kart game before it. The same rules apply as any other racing game, and balloons are strategically placed around the track (depending on who built it, of course) which unlocks weapons like electro-shock and tornado’s, or bonus skills like boost, or double-boosting. Speaking of, boost plates a-la Wipeout are in the game too, to aide you as you try to zip around the track as fast as possible. It’s worth noting that despite the variety of cars, they all pretty much travel at the same speed. It all comes down to skill and luck, just like any other karting game online.
However fun racing is, this game really kicks it up to a whole other level when it comes to the customisation. Personally, I had a wealth of ideas for LittleBigPlanet, which never got realised because the more challenging aspects of level design in that title were more difficult and time consuming then I wanted to put into it. While those tools were incredibly powerful and effective, for a cute side-scrolling level creator, I just didn’t want to invest that kind of time. I would rather go and learn how to do level design on a PC games engine, a-la Source to build Team Fortress maps. Modnation does not suffer this fate at all.
Guess who?
First, it’s worth noting that a lot of the customisation options were locked down for this demo, but there was still a lot to do and see, and nearly infinite combinations of styles to commit to. Character creation is a lot of fun. Using a default shape, you can apply textures and stickers to it, creating a cartoonish face and skin, adding clothes and “stickers” to it afterwards. My creation came out with a suit, helmet and face mask, making him look cute but with sinister headgear. I was incredibly impressed with my creation until I saw the amazing work of other creators who had built, from scratch, Mario &0 a Helghast trooper among others. Whether or not characters like Mario will remain in the full release has yet to be seen. One of the banes of the LittleBigPlanet community was parodying other titles, like Mario or Sonic, which instantly had your maps and hard work removed from their servers for fear of legal issues with the original copyright owners.
Kart creation is much the same. My Kart is a Ferrari formula 1 car. Of course, it looks like a cart but has wings and pods just like the F1 car as well as a similar paint job, featuring sponsorship and all! A lot of the karts are silly, made of cardboard with engines run on hamster wheels, including the hamster. Each engine available makes a different sound, so the starting line up can sound very interesting indeed!
Where the engine really comes alive is the creation of tracks. The tools here were limited again but the creations already available are mind blowing. When a full community with all of the tools open get their hands on this stuff it will blow this game out of the water. Creating tracks really is easy. You can change everything from the track surface, weather conditions and even the height and pitch of the ground. Seamlessly, without any odd loading times or hitches from the Playstation, and all in real time. It’s spooky how well it works. Once your track is complete you can auto-populate it with tree’s and houses surrounding the track as well as placing power-ups and boost pads…. or you can add all of that stuff yourself! Anyone with access to the beta that is currently running can find any of my tracks because I’ve tagged them with [ shoryuken.ie ]. It’s worth seeing my loop-dee-loop track that goes skywards before giving you a huge hill to drive down on… very fast.
Guess again...
Overall my experience with this title was fantastic. I was excited when I saw the developers at E3 show off their creation, but this will blow peoples minds when they see it. Once a community gets their hands on these tools it’ll be fantastic. Imagine creating a series based on the F1 tracks and drivers with friends, each week contributing to creating the next circuit? The possibilities are almost endless. Modnation Racers is definitely going to be a hit, and will definitely carry the “X Create Share” mantra into 2010.
There is no confirmed date for release, but the rumours indicate a June release for this one. We’ll keep you posted as we get news!
oh i forgot about that. remember being happy seeing it at the e3 thing
I liked the premise of this too, I downloaded the Beta and enjoyed it but it was so slow to load races and change areas, i found that a bit detracting. Hopefully that's just the BETA code being slow or perhaps I was playing on a busy day.
It has a tendency to act a little quirky here and there but that's just because it's under-developed code at the minute. There's still months of tweaking and fixing to be done.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kevin and Shoryuken, Paul. Paul said: Kevs Mod racer preview: http://shoryuken.ie/index.php/console/sony/hands-modnation-racers/ [...]
[...] I’m sure you’ve all read, I rather enjoyed ModNation Racers on the PS3 when I got to play some preview code of the game, not due till [...]
Looks awesome, we need a new Mario Kart that isn't Mario Kart haha
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