ModNation Racers (Playstation 3 exclusive)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: United Front
I’m not sure how many people have their eye on this up coming game dropping exclusively on the Playstation 3 in 2010. I know I DO!!
I had been messing around with the beta and honestly if you love Mario Kart, you’d love this game. It has the same feel of Mario Kart and would strike your creative side like that of Little Big Planet. It’s kindda like if Mario Kart and Little Big Planet got married and had a baby *queue the mood music*…you get ModNation Racers!
You’d be able to create your own avatars (you start off with a blank canvas like a mighty mugg and go to town on it), your own karts…..and create your own race tracks. The track creator is really easy to use and very intuitive. You’d be able to create a racetrack in minutes and then populate it with obstacles, booby traps, sheep (yes…sheep!) and those speed treadmill thingies that help you go faster. You can also mess around with the topography of the racetrack created. That means your track will not just be flat land, you can actually widen, narrow, lift or lower the banks of the track. You can also add terrain in your track design as well. I created my avatar, kart and even track in minutes. Of course you can spend extra time fine tuning things to your liking and imagination.
More after the Jump:
Customization is the name of the game, or like the slogan for the game says, “Play, Create, Share”. On top of that, anybody can take the track you created and “Remix” it and vice versa. Concept is like a DJ remixing a track from your favorite music artists. Whenever your track gets remixed, you still get credited for the original track used. All this can be done through the Playstation Network. You can also take pictures of your creation and share them.
**UPDATE**
During GDC 2010, I had the chance to catch up and sit down with the guys from United Front, developers of ModNation Racers. William Ho, game designer for ModNation racers, was kind enough to indulge me with short interview and tell me more about the game and what they’ve done since the Beta.
We’ll start with multiplayer aspect of the game:
- 12 players will be able to gather together and race online.
- 4 players will be able to race together via split screen.
- 2 player split screen co-op is also available.
The game also has a single player experience. This includes
- a story mode, which gives you up to about 5 hours worth of gameplay.
- a career mode
- there will be special tokens that the player can pick up along the way while playing story or career mode. These will help unlock more goodies for use when playing multiplayer and online customizing.
* The weapons picked up during the race will have a range in strength, i.e. light to strong.
According to William, the dev team is looking into the possibility of incorporating all the user created content that were churned out during the beta. He did however say that there were no promises. It was all dependent on if they would be able to figure out how to go about doing it.
It’s hard to believe that the beta that was released a while ago was only 20% of the game. It felt so complete. The game I played during GDC was a lot more polished and looks amazingly pretty. If ever Mario Kart and Little Big Planet got busy and went half on a baby, you’d want the baby to be THIS GAME……ModNation Racers!
In conjunction to the console release of ModNation racers, the PSP version of the game is dropping the same time. I had hands on experience with the PSP version and I must say, I had a blast!
Nice! Looks like a lot of fun.