The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Carmageddon 3 arrived in stores recently, and I was excited to see the game available so soon. I was a big fan of the first one, and was hoping they would continue the trend with this new version.

First, the good news. Because it's shorter. Much shorter.

The good news is that the cars are much much easier to drive, and the graphics are vastly improved, and take advantage decent video cards. Another good news is that the choice of cars is increased dramatically! It looked awesome.

They also added other drivers to the mix, who can get in your way, and cause a few accidents here and there. Cool.

The game appeared to come with even more multiplayer game versions than before, so I was very eager to rip it open and try them out.

The last good news is that the single player version of the game is great, with few flaws, and improvements on every aspect of the game. The maps looked fun, and after playing a couple, I was sold.

Now for the bad news.

I bought the game primarily for multiplayer gaming, because I network PCs and play games head-to-head much more often than I will alone. And this is exactly where this game fails.

The first disappointment was the choice of maps. In the original, you could play any map you wanted. In C3, you can play one set of maps for single player games, and a different, much shorter set for multiplayer (a relatively rare tactic nowadays, I may mention). But it gets worse. Each type of multiplayer game has an even shorter set of maps to play on. So if you want to play a "deathmatch" style game, you can play only on maps A, B, and C. If you want to play a "tag" style game, you can only play on D, E, and F, etc. How lame is that?

Worse than that, the original game's maps were imaginary places, but they looked real. They didn't look like Quake3 maps, for example. They were also very expansive, so drivers had time away from each other. Well, in C3 multiplayer, all the maps are arena style circles, that are very small, and lack any reality to them. I did not feel like it could a be real place even once.

The next major disappointment was the style of games was changed. Before, for example, you could play a style of game call Fox-N-The-Hounds, where one person was it, and the other drivers have to "tag" him, the object being to hold the "it" for 4 minutes. If you lost the "it", your time would freeze until you got the "it" again, at which point the counter would continue to count towards 4 minutes. Well, they changed it. Same name, but now the time is 5 minutes in length, which is no big deal, but then someone decided that the timers shouldn't freeze, that they should revert to zero after someone lost the "it". Combined with the small, arena style maps, there was no place that one could get away from his opponent (the whole point in Fox-N-The-Hounds), and literally, the game lasted forever. Neither of us could hold the "it" for 5 minutes of time, because the timers would reset each time the "it" was stolen. We literally stopped playing due to bordom, not because anyone had won.

So we tried a deathmatch. However, I quickly noticed that while in the original, it was possible to kill your opponent by ramming him, pushing him into objects and dumping him off cliffs, it is extremely hard to do so in C3. Why? Because in the original, when you were hit by another player, you didn't receive credits (money used to repair the damage you take), but in C3, apparently, the harder you are hit, the more credits you receive. I had my friend down to zero credits, and rammed him so hard into a wall, it should have wasted him. But alas, that was not to be. He drove off, and merrily commented that he then had 20,000 credits!! Of course, he only needed like 1,000 to repair his car. Bascially, much like our last game, the game took forever, and we basically gave up trying, again. Now, I must mention that there is one fix to this problem, and that is an option they made, which allows you to turn off repairs. But we know from playing C1 so long that the cars take a long time to kill, and while driving around with one wheel is possible in Carmageddon, it isn't any fun. It could take a very long time for your opponent to kill you off, thereby restoring you to full health. The driver of such a wounded vehicle finds it to be very boring to wait for your opponents to finish you off.

While I'm on the topic of options, the original game gave you much more options you could use for game play. You could control the starting positions of the cars, what cars people could pick, what variables were in the game, time limits, frag limits, the works. Now while C3 does allow you to control frag and time limits, basically there are few other options. A big disappointment.

The last, and possibly the most unnerving, change of all was the removal of pedestrians. That's right. You can run over people and animals in single player, but when you play multiplayer, they are nowhere to be found. That was one of the biggest fun factors of the original; the screaming people, the bloodshed, and cows mooing as you ran into them. What were they thinking?

There were other more minor criticisms, but to sum up, if you are planning to play this game single player, and only single player, you may enjoy it. The driving was greatly enhanced, and the graphics and game play appear to be well done (The cars in C1 seemed to have oil on them at all times, making driving, even straight, a task in itself). However, and I can't stress this enough, DO NOT buy this game for the multiplayer aspect of it, because it almost as much fun as being hit in the head with a hammer.

A decent alternative is the now aging, but still fun, I76 (not I82, which blew). A much more fun game in my opinion. Or better yet, just buy the original C1. It's dos, it's not pretty, but it sure blows away the newest incarnation in the Carmageddon series. And it's probably 1/10 the price on ebay...

Carmageddon3 for PC