There's been a lot of buzz lately about Nadeo's Trackmania Nations Forever, a free PC racing game that combines the fun of driving really fast on dangerous tracks with the ability to perform stunts and other such challenges. I've been playing a lot of it this past week, working my way through the objectives with a custom Back to the Future Part II DeLorean as my vehicle of choice. The tracks start with the basic turns and straightaways, but as the difficulty increases, the game adds ramps, loops, corkscrews, and other acrobatic requirements. Winning a gold medal requires memorizing the course, remembering how to navigate past the obstacles, and keeping one's finger on the accelerator at all times.
This morning I woke up with the unusual urge to replay Sonic Adventure DX for the Nintendo GameCube. That's unusual in that Adventure wasn't all that fantastic a game when it was new, and it's sensitive controls and clunky camera haven't helped it endure over the years. Performing well in Sonic Adventure DX involves memorizing the level structure, speeding along without hitting the brakes, nailing each and every ramp jump and corkscrew loop, and navigating past the many obstacles that appear without warning. Nevertheless, I had the Sonic itch, so I sat down to scratch it and then made the connection: Trackmania is just another implementation of the Sonic Adventure model of gameplay: move fast, catch some air, dodge the hazards.
I may be the last person on Earth to make this correlation, but it honestly surprised me. As a platform game, Sonic Adventure DX just isn't very good. As a precision racing challenge, however, it shares some of the same merits that make Trackmania so enjoyable (of course, Trackmania manages to exceed in some areas, mostly in that it doesn't require fishing or searching for needles in haystacks fragments of the Master Emerald).
