Well got a call from Electronic Boutique today saying my reserved copy
of Interstate 76 had arrived and so I rushed over and picked it up.
I had about 3 hours of play with it before having to rush off to work.
First my hardware is a P166 32megs, Matrox Millenium, 8X CDROM.
EB has I-76 for $54.95, it comes with a nice *paper* manual similar to
MW2 and the game takes up 2 CD's, one CD is designated INSTALL, and the other
is designated PLAY. Looking at the dir's on the CD's the "play" cd looks like
it only contains the game data such as missions and movies, as well as the CD
music tracks. The "install" cd has all the usual data, PLUS! I noticed it
appears that they have included a mission editor to create new multi-player
missions and landscapes. I stress that I have not had time to try this
editor out, this is from looking at the .doc in the directory and from running
the executable, it looks like an editor. If so we will surely have some
new and innovative levels to race and fight in once people figure out how to
use the editor, Attaboy to the folks at activision for including the editor.
OK, on to the installation. I-76 is a Win95 product and requires DirectX3,
since I already have it installed, I didn't allow it to install the DirectX3
that comes on the CD. Install options are: Full Install 110megs, and
Minimum Install 80megs. On my 8X CDROM it went pretty quickly, and it plays
some background audio that introduces you to the I-76 storyline.
Ok game installed, I went right into instant action. At 640x480 with all the
graphics options on, including sky clouds and texture maps for ground and
objects, the game runs a bit faster than Mercs while displaying more and
better detail. This is while using the display that is a sort of virtual
***pit, where you can look down at the dashboard gauges etc. If you put
the view into fullscreen mode where it only has to draw the gauges
superimposed on the fullscreen view without drawing the car hood, then
the FPS speeds up considerably. Overall I am satisfied with the amount of
detail vs speed of the graphics, at least on my system. I ended up turning
off the sky graphics to give me the extra FPS, and it looks fast to me.
Please don't ask me how fast in FPS, it looks good to me and very playable,
but fast to me might be very fast to someone else or slow to someone else.
It is fairly fast, if you really are worried about graphics speed wait for the
demo and see for yourself.
On to the gameplay.... Right off the start let me tell you that the storyline
for I-76 is terrific and pulls you into the story off the bat
with some cutscenes that are pretty funny and makes it feel like you are
taking part in a movie like PULP FICTION. Actually the voice actor for
your buddy Taurus sounds a lot like Samuel L. Jackson, I'll have to take a
look at the credits to see if it is really him or not.
The missions themselves are fun, with lots of radio traffic going on around
you and people calling for help, as well as your buddy Taurus giving you
instructions on what to do. Missions with multiple goals and some of them have
time limits, anyone familiar with MW2 and friends will recognise the
similarities.
The driving is fun. The driving model is decent, allowing you to do spins
and slides, while still not as good as GP2 at full realism settings. It
is possible to do jumps and roll the car over, although so far it seems
that rolling the car means you die, I need more play time to see if this
is true every time though. One thing that stands out, is that the game does a
very good job of making you feel like you are actually travelling at high
speed, and there is nice scenery to look at and bounce/jump off of if you go
offroad.
There are lots of car models, equipment, and weapons modifications to do,
and you get salvage from the other vehicles after a mission. Not sure
if the salvage is scripted as in Mercs or if the game actually takes into
account what damage you did to the enemy vehicles.
The driving/shooting action is a blast, I really haven't had so much fun
with a game like this in a long time. It combines elements of Need for Speed
with games like MW2 and the DOOM/Quake type of games.
You race after cars, while shooting them up and crashing into them.
I really have got to hand it to the folks at Activision for coming up
with such a great concept for the MW2 engine, this game looks like it
will be on my harddrive for a long time. It was hard to pull myself
away from it and get ready for work.
So from the first couple of hours of play with this, I would say it is
a definite keeper and will probably be one of the best games of the year.
If you are a fan of games like Need for Speed, or MW2 or even shootem-up
games, I think you would enjoy I-76, I can hardly wait to get home tonight
and try out the Internet play, hopefully there will be others who picked this
up today and I can try my hand at driving real people off the road.
The only down side of this sim so far that I can see is that I didn't find
a "difficulty" setting in the gameplay options for making the AI cars
harder to kill. In MW2 once you went through all the missions at "normal"
difficulty, you could always crank it up to "hard" and try again. Here I did
not see that control, at least I wasn't able to find it, and it might shorten
the lifespan of the single-mission campaign.
One other bad thing is that I will now want to install a 50cal machine gun on
my real car to clear out the slow drivers from the left lane of the freeway,
now that I've seen how usefull a 50cal machinegun is on a car I want one all
the time :-)
Well, that's it for now, hope that helps some of you out there waiting to
hear reviews on this, keep in mind this is a preliminary quick review, while
I am sitting here at work, there might be errors. No I don't work for
Activision, nor do I know anyone there, and this is my opinion only..
no flames please. Gotta get back to work now :(
Cheers.
--John
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Note: my real e-mail address is below. Delete the asterisks.
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Seattle, Washington USA. | http://www.racesimcentral.net/~jsilva