Oddball Update

After sucking for so many years, it seems that the Test Drive series of driving sims is about to make a comeback. As part of their E3 media experience, Xbox Live is offering lots of upcoming Xbox game trailers and demos this week. A playable demo of Test Drive Unlimited — the next game in the infamous TD franchise that began on PCs (in four glorious colors) back in the mid ’80s — was released today, so I downloaded it and checked it out for a few minutes.

Wow, this game looks truly stunning. First of all, there’s a fully-modeled 3D cockpit that you can look around as you drive, much like with PGR3. Unlike PGR3, the game has a more open-ended feel to it, giving you the entire island of Oahu to drive around. There’s several fully-modeled houses you can purchase and store your cars in, dealerships where you can buy new cars, and of course, racing events scattered around the island that you can participate in. Finding these events is just like Need for Speed — you just tool around Oahu in a freeform fashion, see a floating event icon and drive over to it.

I mentioned both PGR3 and Need for Speed in that last paragraph. This is ironic because Test Drive Unlimited seems to fall squarely between the two. It mixes the immersive, graphics-rich gameplay of the former with the freeform and open-ended appeal of the latter, and in my opinion, it’s a win. I need to spend more time with the demo (which is stupidly limited to 15 minutes of play — hopefully that’s “per session,” not “ever”) but so far it shows great promise, which is far more than the last few TD games ever managed to do. And of course, I’m excited to see the fully-modeled cockpit of the Pontiac GTO and Solstice GXP which are rumored to be included in the full game. Ha ha!

Stay tuned to Oddball Update, where I’ll be announcing the arrival (via Xbox Live) of the Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 trailer later this week, straight from E3 2006.

Categorized as Games/Console, Games