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Chris Leyton
19/05/2004
From the creators of Micro Machines 2 comes a new racer putting emphasis squarely on fun...
Itās strange how in such a short period of time a game goes from being just another new title on a publisherās release listing to one that starts to become revered and also reaching a cult status with only a few people actually seeing the title, let alone playing it. As they say, there is no smoke without fire - Mashed is getting endless coverage and each word written accentuates the addictable game qualities, becoming one of the most eagerly awaited titles of the year. Granted there has been a lot of spin by the great PR machine whirling away behind the scenes. Empire could well have a blockbuster in the making and the most remarkable facet of it all is that we are talking about a racing game!
The development team of 12 at Supersonic has already created goodies such as Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines Military, Micro Machines ā96, Micro Machines 2 and Pong, and Mashed is not a million miles away from a few of the aforementioned titles. You could say they have honed their skills and come up with the perfect racer.
Peter Williamson, Managing Director, was on hand to talk about Mashed in more detail and reported that over the years the team, having also written three of the Micro Machines series, thought they could take the compulsive gameplay from that experience and put it in a game that appealed much better to current audiences. They also commented that Mashed is hopefully the ultimate multi-player racer, with a great single player experience too.
Mashed has a number of qualities, not forgetting its simplicity, but it is the gameās handling that is worth mentioning although you will never lose sight of the fact that this is unashamedly an arcade racer where mayhem and destruction go hand in hand!
Its addictive qualities were highlighted by Peter.
āI think Mashed is addictive for a number of reasons:
- The gameplay is very carefully balanced.
- A good multi-player is always more fun than a good single-player because of the social element. Itās much, much more fun to beat your mates than it is to beat some computer AI.
- The action is very focused and intense, meaning there are very few boring moments.ā
āThe gameplay at its heart is incredibly simple. The player must be the last man standing. He can achieve this by out-racing his opponent, or by aggressively destroying his opponent ā“ which is much more fun.ā
āA large variety of play modes and challenges revolving around this principle makes up the game as a whole. This hopefully means the single player game has plenty of depth and challenge and the multi-player game has pretty much infinite replay value.ā
With a game being so simple, one where you have to actually play to feel its qualities could be almost impossible to convey over and above all the other racers around! Itās great looking and a diverse collection of settings, along with some cool cars, may be pretty much a standard offering but the incredible amount of detail brings each location to life. Some of the circuits are devious and have an appeal with the bottom line always being the player challenge.
āThe design of the tracks is definitely one of the most important aspects of the game design. Weāve made around 3 times as many tracks as will appear in the final game. Many were abandoned at a very early stage, some quite late on. With the Micro Machines games we developed we had around 50 tracks in each game. What we found was that maybe 5 or so of these were played to death and the rest became almost fillers. We donāt want any fillers in āMashedā ā“ so weāve concentrated on making all of the tracks as good as possible.ā
Tasks - such as collecting weapons and staying in the lead - will serve you well but it is the vast list of dirty deeds that really is the icing to give that extra gratification.
The team is proud of their technology focus but it has not been one that they have become paranoid about, that goes to the little word gameplay that was mentioned time and time again!
OK, many will say Mashed is a collection of ripped off ideas and putting together a collection of simple ideas but there are a number of bigger and more prestigious developers who would like to be in the team's position presently. Getting the basics right isnāt a bad proviso and with many developers becoming overly complicated this comes as a breath of fresh air!
āDefinitely, teams are losing sight! When we started the development of Mashed we thought and hoped there might be a backlash against the current trend in games for bigger stories, bigger, more lavish settings, more complexity, etc. We thought there might again be a desire from gamers for good old fashioned fun ā“ which is what Mashed is all about.ā
āThe game was originally going to be called āToastā but we couldnāt use that as it had already been trademarked. We wanted a title that was a bit enigmatic, suggested the destructive driving nature of the game and definitely wasnāt clichéd. When we found out we couldnāt use āToastā, after many suggestions, we settled on āMashedā which hopefully has all of these qualities.ā
Vehicle deformation and AI, getting the perfect synergy, equates to the core of a great game and this is where the team come up trumps.
āThe vehicles are realistically modelled and at the base of the game is a realistic, sophisticated physics engine. The cars behave in ways that real cars canāt though. In order to get the immediacy of action and simplicity of control the cars can for instance turn very quickly, accelerate and brake very quickly, etc.ā
āThe AI is also pretty sophisticated. Mashed is very immediate and instant. Itās taken quite a bit of time to make the AI behave as intelligently as a human and even longer to make it make mistakes just like a human would. If a human drives off a cliff everyone accepts that it wasnāt deliberate, that the player was just bad. If the AI does the same everyone thinks it did it on purpose, to throw the point. Itās taken quite a bit of time to make the AI behave is such a way that this perception doesnāt occur.ā
Peter summed up the game as being the ultimate multi-player mayhem and we like to say that with so much positive coverage focused towards the game it would be stupid of us to contradict the general consensus of opinion.
