I do like racing games, or at least some racing games. But I feel like racing games can be broken down into two main categories and then additional sub-categories from there. There are car racing games and all other racing games. Car racing games being like the Mario Kart series, F-Zero series, Forza, and Need for Speed series, any game where a car on four wheels is your primary mode of transportation and your goal is to cross over some version of a finish line faster than everyone else; and yes I know that in Mario Kart 8 you can drive a motorcycle, and vehicles in F-Zero don't even have wheels, but you get my drift. Ugh. When I say "all other racing games," I think about the 1080° Snowboarding and Wave Race franchises, along with Excitebike and ATV Wild Ride 3D. Games where you are controlling another vehicle that is not a car, be it a snowboard, a motorcycle, a jetski, a bike, et cetera. I guess racing games where if you crash or fall off of your vehicle, the race is not over and you can get right back on and continue; this does not extend to Star Wars Episode I: Racer as I have my own issues with that game.
Without so much as publicly stating it, I think I prefer these types of games because they also tend to take place in locations that are nice to look at. In short, I would rather play a game where you snowboard through snowy peaks than on a paved cobbled road through a European city. I also like to have some semblance of realism in my racing games, hence my preference for 1080° over the SSX Tricky series. I also really like The Crew, which was a mix or racing and open-world exploration in a nearly invincible self-healing car. However, with this appeal towards non-car racing games, often comes a mode of play that I have never excelled in which in turn is probably the reason why I am not more excited by its existence.
Trick Attack, or whatever you want to call the racing mode where you perform tricks for bonus points that increase your score either as part of an accumulated score or as the sole score during a versus match. I am sure there are plenty of games that implement a combination of requirements to proceed in a Grand Prix mode where you not only have to rank in, let us say the top three, AND score above a certain threshold in order to proceed to the next heat. Or a mode where you race through the track taking jumps and performing tricks to have the highest score. Or a similar mode where you actively race against either a real person or a CPU opponent with the same goal in mind. Again, this mode just does not really interest me, or it is not a draw for me to be excited about a game, although there have been exceptions.
In ATV Wild Ride 3D, performing tricks, albeit tricks where you would just hold down one button while pushing a joystick in a particular direction, rarely pulling off more than three or four tricks per jump, was integral to winning races as they would grant speed boosts felt well integrated. It could have also been that the trick mechanic in that game was somewhat simplistic in that if you were not seated on your ATV when the vehicle landed you would crash and there was no rotating vertical and horizontal axis combined with tricks to worry about. And then in games like the 1080° series, I will occasionally pull off a trick if I feel that it will not put my position in the race into jeopardy. Or if I happen to fly off a steep cliff and there is nothing else to do but fall.
And then there are the Tony Hawk games, where the whole point of the game is to do tricks in an open area within a certain amount of time and score all the points. But those are not racing games, and I would probably be drawn to a skateboard racing game, but only under circumstances and mechanics similar to ATV Wild Ride 3D. Or you know, if the 1080° team got back together and did a skateboard racing game. Anyway, I digress. I do not know if I have made any points or clarified my position or feelings about racing games or just muddied the waters even more.
I bring all of this up because I picked up Descenders on the Switch which I will get into on Friday, which is a mountain bike game with various tricks implemented but the game is pretty vocal about completing the track how you see fit, be it actually riding down the dirt track or over the open unpaved landscape. The focus seems more on completing the track and surviving than an actual race and that is something that I am pretty excited about exploring more. So come back Friday and we will go into Descenders from Rage Squid.
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