Flashy sports cars, thousands of miles of beautiful roadway, seamless online play - the preview version of Test Drive Unlimited seems to have everything we'd want in a racing game, with one exception: Where's the excitement?
Maybe it comes when you meet up with other people online. That's TDU 's true purpose - using the Internet to create car clubs and a dynamic racing environment where anybody can race anybody else at any given time. But with only about 60% of Xbox 360 owners jacked in to
Friday 9 June 2006
We've all heard of MMORPG's, surely, but Test Drive Unlimited is a new breed of hugely multiplayer game - the MOOR, or Massively Open Online Racing game. It spans over 1,000 miles of road on the real-world Hawaiian island of Oahu, meticulously replicated in-game, and enables thousands of players to tear around the gorgeous environment at the same time.
Test Drive Unlimited is massively ambitious, although the actual business of a structured race is limited to eight players.
Pulling out onto the roughly paved boulevard, the soft purr of the V8 engine thrums like a caged panther. Sunlight glints off the hood of the torch-red Ford Shelby Mustang igniting a corner of the windshield with a dazzling lens flare. Gunning the engine with a tap of the gas pedal, a canary yellow Lotus Exige surges into view - you hit him with the headlamps and the race is on.
Test Drive Unlimited seeks to sweep car nuts into an entirely new realm of exotic automobile fantasy. This game
By
Edge
posted 6 years ago
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Freedom can be a dirty word in modern games, not least because of its devilish alter ego: monotony.
It's a cruel irony that while streaming technology progresses to the point where virtual worlds can wholly justify that description, the demands of supporting elements such as textures and models increase to complicate their creation.
But a distracting world isn't necessarily the chief requisite of a game that touts freedom to roam as its prime commodity; the mode by which you roam can provide
