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| Excite Truck | | (And The Simple Things In Life) | | 01 June 2007 | | If Sleeping Beauty were to wake up today, she might be forgiven for wondering how it all got quite so complicated. Where once you rubbed two sticks together to make a fire, we now have to remember a three-button "combo" just to turn the oven on. Similarly with computer games. Jet-Set-Willy had up, down, left, right and jump; Halo has two multi-directional analogue sticks and an array of buttons so bewildering, we're surprised the youth of today haven't evolved extra fingers to cope.
Excite Truck, for the Nintendo Wii, is therefore something of a challenge to the current status-quo - its basic control mechanism consists of two buttons ("gas" and "more gas"), and tilting the controller left or right to steer - it is arguably one of the simplest games ever made, as witnessed by the fact that our three-year-old can play it with ease. Does this make it boring? Is Richard Dawkins a Catholic?
The simplicity of the control mechanism meant that we could pick up the controller and JUST PLAY - within minutes of the game leaving the box, we were hurtling around a dirt-track in Mexico, in an outrageously over-powered monster-truck, with a smile on our face the size of the Yucatan! And because you progress by gathering "stars" you don't even have to win every race to move onto the next challenge.
Beyond the simplicity there are subtler edges - kick-in the turbo at just the right moment for a power-booted jump, or steer sharply while flying through the air to perform a stylish "360" and win extra stars.
But at the end of the day, it is the "pick-up-and-play-ness" that makes this game a winner. Whether you're playing head-to-head with friends, or tackling the challenge mode in a spare twenty minutes on a Sunday morning, you're not trying to remember how to do things - it all comes so naturally. They say it's the simple things in life that you should really value, and when it comes to Excite Truck, they are right! |
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The point is we are all connected... through love... through loneliness... through one lamentable lapse in judgment!
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