ModNation Racers

I picked up ModNation Racers for the PS3 (beware of lame auto-play music). It's kind of hard to resist a racing game that looks like two of my other favorite racing games, Mario Kart and TrackMania, bumped uglies and had a freaky lovechild.

You can create your own kart, player, and track, and share all of these with others. When I was online last night, someone had already uploaded a FLAWLESS Mario character, and a the A-Team van! It's only a matter of time before someone makes Laguna Seca or the Suzuka Circuit.

I built a track in about 5 minutes, just to see how everything worked, and it was great! It lets you get as granular as you would like for placing everything from scenery to boost strips, and also has a really sweet auto-fill feature that populates everything for you on a barebones track.

Oh and if you haven't played TrackMania Nations Forever, go get it right fucking now. It's here, on the right-hand side of the page. It's FREE, awesome, and easily one of the best PC racers out there. We used to play this after everyone was tired of getting destroyed in Quake 3 at after-office-hours LAN parties. How 1995 to 2005 is that? LAN party. Now we play with strangers on the internet and get called names. Anyway, TrackMania, great for adults, kids, you can play it with a controller, but it's great with the keyboard too.

Seriously, someone who is more talented and has more free time, needs to make Laguna. Now.

Ginger Games of the Decade (GGOTD) - Part 2 - Gran Turismo 4

Gran Turismo 4 - 2005 - PS2

I've been playing Gran Turismo since the first day it was released on the PSOne, although in those days, we called it the PSX, because it was the nineties and we put an "X" into just about anything we could, that made it totally XTREME!!! To say it's one of my favorite games is a gross understatement; on the day it was released I was a college student, and in typical nerd-college-student fashion, after purchasing the game from Best Buy, I played it through the night, straight into morning, went to school, came home and played it until around midnight that night. Engineering Physics homework had to be put on hold, as I simply could not put it down (and ended up dropping out of college anyway (win-win!)).

The start of it all (ooooh, pixels!):

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am obsessed with cars; it's one of those childhood fascinations that I've never let go. To find out that Gran Turismo was coming out, included tons of cars I love, and tons I'd never even heard of, made me break out in a ginger fever of anticipation. When it was released, GT finally hit that butter zone that so many games before it missed, a racing simulation in the console market, and did it justice.

Once GT moved to the PS2, with GT3, I missed out, because I went with a GameCube instead of the PS2. Not a bad choice, depending on what you want to play and who you ask, but it meant that I had to fire up GT2 on my PSOne if I wanted to play a decent racing sim. I managed to hold off for years, until I bought a secondhand PS2 from a friend of mine in 2006. By then, GT4 had already been out for over a year, so the first thing I did was run out and get a used copy. I came home, hooked up the PS2, dropped in GT4 and finally began scratching the itch. Once I opened up the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife, I bought a Lotus Elise 111 (In black, thank you), kept it bone stock and began learning every single turn of that 12.9 mile masterpiece.

Weapon of choice (looking better!):

Learning the Nordschleife in GT4 was one of the most rewarding and frustrating video game experiences I have had to date. At one point, the gameplay became similar to a very long/difficult stage on a platform game, you've got certain areas down, but other areas destroy you, and you start over again.

The Lotus has always been one of my favorite cars to drive in the GT series, and I can easily say that I lost weeks of my life lapping that track. Looking forward, it should be obvious to you that I peed a little bit when it was confirmed that GT5 will contain the Nurburgring tracks (and the McLaren F1!). I better take that day off of work.

Ok, maybe a week off:

Ginger Games of the Decade - Part 1 - Portal

Hello! As an introduction, I'll post up something I started writing at the turn of the year. I put together a list of my favorite games that were released from 2000 through the end of 2009, mailed it to a couple friends of mine, and asked for their lists back. I'll put my list up over a few posts to get things rolling. The platforms I list are the ones that I played the game on.

I present to you, the Ginger Games of the Decade (GGOTD)!

Portal - 2007 - PS3 and PC

I fell in love with this game in a matter of seconds; once I heard GLadDOS's glitched out voice I was in. The first time I played it was on a PC. I spent about 4 hours getting to the beginning of level 19, then went to bed. That night, I dreamt about the game, and in the morning I woke up and finished it. I could not stop thinking about how great this game was. In the next few weeks, I casually played through it again. The emotional connection was the same, the visceral hooked-in feeling was just as great as the first time through, and it's been that way each time after that.

A first-person shooter and puzzle game. Peanut butter and ham jelly. It's a simple combination but it is packaged and executed so well, that you can't help but to fall for it.

I love this game so much that I play through it at least once a year. I'm that annoying guy that tells anyone with thumbs that they NEED to play it. It's that good. I still have a hard time when people tell me that they haven't played this game; it doesn't compute in my little ginger mind. I guess it's kind of like the gaming equivelent of Guided By Voices; if you like it, you fucking love it, and if not, then it's just not on your radar.

If you haven't played it, give it a try. Anything that spawns this kind of rabid fan following and general craftiness can't be bad.

Oh, almost forgot, the cake is a lie.