I know, right – a 2D motorcross game that really just has you navigating a bunch of obstacle courses on a 125cc bike that sounds like a dying wasp doesn’t sound much fun, does it? That’s what I thought too. Real proper games have guns and gore and other real proper game stuff in them, not stupid motorbikes. “No,” I told my friends, when exhorted to drop everything right now and play Trials HD right now, right now. “I’m playing real proper games with guns and gore and other real proper game stuff.” But following a strange, magical series of misadventures, I ended up playing it anyway. And I totally forgot about guns and gore and all the other real proper game stuff, because Trials HD manages to be one of the most madly addictive games I’ve ever played, and it does this with the clever use of names.
The first event I tried out, of course, was the legendary Ski Jump that everyone’s been going on about. There’s a ramp, and you jettison yourself off it, and see how far you can go. Since this game is packing a pretty serious physics model, you’ve got to get all your balancing just right before jumping to maximise your forward and upward momentum. So obviously I just sort of flopped off the end of the ramp and crashed in a big, soggy, ignominious heap. And there, shining on the track ahead of me like great and terrible wardens of my own failure, were the names of all my friends, marking their Ski Jump records. This was sometime around 8pm. At 3.30am the following morning, I was still trying to pass RedTide’s almost inconceivable distance of 198.45m, with me trailing over 40m behind. That name on the track is a constant, unequivocal testament to the fact that MY SCORE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Every skill event has these. Every track event lists my friends’ times and scores at the end. Everyone knows how much I suck at Trials HD. I know how much they suck too. Game on. And it’s game on all the more conveniently because Trials HD lets me restart any event or reload a checkpoint instantaneously at the push of a button. Scraping 0.32 of a second off my track time has never been this easy. Neither has wasting my entire life.
Speaking of easy, Trials HD isn’t. And I do mean it’s really, positively, excruciatingly hard. The career mode comprises 39 courses across five difficulty levels – and by halfway through medium, you’ll already be screaming at the TV. Look forward to that.
The only reason this game doesn’t get a perfect rating is that, somewhat inscrutably, it has no hot-seat party play mode. Seriously, what’s up with that? Dear RedLynx, fix this. In the meantime, don’t let that stop you dropping everything right now, and playing Trials HD right now, right now.
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