Some Knowledge

I downloaded and installed a racing game last week.  It’s called Project Torque and it’s from Aeria Games.  I must have looked for an online racing game for a few days before I found this one.  I used to play Need For Speed Underground in online mode, and it was pretty fun and had decent graphics and performance even on dial up.  NFS Underground went offline in 2006, so there was no hooking up to that game anymore.  I was tired of always killing things in games and just wanted to race.

The download for Project Torque was like 571 megabytes.  It took a while to download even with high speed cable.  I installed the game, and it spent another half hour patching and updating.  I finally got the game up and running.  After chosing a screen name and setting up the slowest car in the game, that had the best handling, I was ready to practice.  It took a while to set up the controls to work with my Axis D-pad.  I got everything configured and hit the test track.

The first track was an around the block in Tokyo deal.  It was slow but it was a good introduction.  What I noticed about this game was that the graphics were pretty bad.  It reminded me of the old old old game Outrun from the arcade.  The colors were a bit better than the old 8-bit stuff, but there was little in the way of 3-D modeling and  the road surface was small and hard to focus on as you are driving around.  I tried a track that was supposed to be in England and that was part dirt and it was terrible.  The road was way too narrow and hard to see.  When I got around the track it started lagging so bad it was like watching a slide show and trying to drive with your eyes closed most of the time and just blinking open.  When I finally got off this track, which took a while because I could not figure out how to quit the practice session, I hooked up the third beginner track called the Boomerang.  This was an actual race track, not just roads.  The Boomerang ran pretty good without much lag, but was still hard to see.

The next day I hooked back up to Project Torque and tried some races against other players.  This was a disaster.  I got hit with so much lag it was like watching still pictures from a cartoon race track.  I shut down the game and decided to look into if I had the right video drivers for the game, because I got this message when the game started that my drivers were out of date.

I went to Nvidia’s website and did an auto-detect and search for drivers.  Nvidia told me to get these new drivers and install them.  After another long download and installation I had the video drivers hooked up.  I went to start the game, but it totally freaked out and gave me garbage on the display and a broken error message and in short would not run at all.  I had to get out my computer manual and read a help file on the backup CD for my computer to find out how to roll back the drivers to the previous versions that actually worked.  None of my 3-D games would play with these supposedly up to date drivers.  So, after that fiasco I hooked up the racing game again.

This time the game worked.  I set up a racing room on the game server to race seven laps around the Boomerang.  Soon, some people came to the room and I started the race.  I won the first two races, even though a stupid timer went off and ended the race before anyone could even finish all the laps.  This was just stupid.  In the last race a person driving the fastest car in the game raced against me, driving the slowest car in the game.  Even though they passed me on the last lap the game still said I won.  How bizarre.  I was unhappy with this game, because I had won a race that I was clearly losing.

I think the idea of a game where you can race other people on the Internet is a good idea.  I wish there were some decent games that developed this concept.  I might play Project Torque again, but for now it is not being used.  The graphics are too primitive, the game play is too unreliable and laggy, and the way races are won and lost makes no sense at all.  It’s a totally free game where they sell you new cars and upgrades for real cash, but still, when I invest a bunch of time in playing even a free game I expect it to work.  Project Torque could be a good game if they got their act together and came out with a reliable product.  For now, it is little more than a curiosity to me.  Maybe future upgrades will fix some of these problems and the game will be worth playing.