I was a fan of Car Wars long ago (still have my Uncle Alberts!), and a friend just pointed this out to me.
You plot out your car’s actions, with a 30 second timer to decide each 1 second of action, after which your steering/gas/brake inputs are used by the physics engine to determine your next position. It feels a bit slower than I expected, but gives a wild ride, and makes for a very tactical racing sim – with guns! :-)
I’ve only played a few of the stock car races so far, the ones you can enter without subscribing. I am sorely tempted to subscribe though…
Wow that’s a terrible web site. At least in Firefox and Chrome it progresses like a slideshow unbidden from section to section. Other than that it sounds kinda cool but it’s just multiplayer? And they want money?
All questions I would answer myself if the web site didn’t irritate me so.
Edit: And nm, found a nice FAQ that behaves like a proper web page and doesn’t scurry off to a sibling. It has a single player component and it seems they want something like $20 for 3 months for expanded features.
Quick update. This game kicks ass! It’s exactly like car wars, but without taking so damn long.
Gendal, no it’s more than multiplayer. If you don’t pay you can enter races with other people and bots, and if you subscribe apparently there is a PvE gang building angle, plus then you can customize cars for races. I haven’t subscribed, so can’t comment on this part, but it at least sounds cool in principle.
Anyway, I’ve got a death race starting, so enough for now!
I was going to ask if you can record the races, because I had always wanted to make stop-motion movies of Car Wars sessions back in the day, and then I found the playback library. Very cool!
The web based interface is rather klunky, but it’s addictive alright. I plunked down $20 for 3 months.
I start out making some cash in stock car races, and then used that renting a car to join a posse hunting bandits in the wasteland. I managed to snag a sedan, which is now in the shop being outfitted with dual Heavy Machine Guns. :-) I plan to set up some inter town trading runs, and use the resulting cash to purchase some faster racing cars.
Yes, There were four of us vs. ~six bandits. A nice touch is that The Loot is whatever is left of their cars afterwards, so you want to be careful not to shoot them up to much, to try to convince them to bail and flee on foot, and to bring extra gunners/passengers to drive away any vehicles still intact.
There PvP action comes from Races, Death Races, and Combat events at various Arenas and Tracks scheduled constantly. These are full of rather gung ho AIs, plus whatever players register for the event. The events I’ve seen so far provide you with a stock car and give cash to the top X finishers. I believe there are also events where you can bring your own cars, but I haven’t done that yet.
Oh, and Jason, you’ll love how Ironman it is. If your characters get hurt, they’re out of action, and you need to recruit/train new ones. If they die or get maimed, they don’t recover. My gang leader lost an eye (and is still in a coma), while another of my starting 3 died before I fully grokked this… In other words, if you go out bandit hunting, there’s no guarantee you’ll make it back, and you may well be better off running!
No idea. It looks like the classic “ship resources between towns with varrying supply/demand levels”, while avoiding bandits along the way. I imagine this works as much like a real economy as it ever does, although I’ve yet to try it out.
In the starting town there is only a limited selection of cars/weapons/goods available, for example I’d have liked a Heavy Gatling Gun, but there weren’t any. There is a NPC vendor, and a player market with somewhat rarer things, often half burnt out cars. I haven’t yet been to any other town.
There’s also apparently an angle where you can setup player created “Camps”, and perhaps manufacture cars? I’ve only read about this in passing though, so am fuzzy on the details.
It’s pretty funny how detailed it is about injuries. Little speech bubble like effect boxes pop up over all the damaged cars each game-second, telling you specific injuries like “2 toes blown off”. I also like how it models driver psychology effects like whether their courage breaks and they give up, how cool they are under fire, etc.
I signed up. The site said that my account would be active within 60 minutes. That was over 2 hours ago. I never recieved anything. I try to have them send me my log in info, but nothing shows up.
I disappeared after finishing the race and wasn’t sure what to do at that point so I left the event.
This game is awesome. I just played a real deathrace and came in third, mainly because I spun out early on and ended up behind the back when everyone started firing. After that the main challenge was avoiding the dozen wrecks scattered around the track. I caught up to the fourth place car and blasted it, taking 3rd.
The physics are great. The “driving school” mode that I was in with FlyinJ was a sand track and the high speed skids around turns were a thrill to watch even in the turn based format.
I need to check out he recordings section now so I can watch that last race (sadly the recordings don’t seem to include driving school so I can’t view the multiple spins and rolls I executed before getting the hang of steering.
