BAJA: Edge of Control

One of my many lists is a list of games that have an online requirement in them. This is the list that Baja appeared on because it has the one solitary online achievement that doesn’t even require a second player, just access to an online lobby – so an internet connection. That’s the reason I decided to play it and what I found was somewhere close to hell embodied in a racing game.

Baja is an arcade racing game that centres around Baja racing, that is racing across wild rocky terrains and sandy desserts in Beach Buggies and trucks. It’s a standard racing game in that it has a career mode, custom races, online and a highly unnecessary free roam event.

The environments are really bland. The game was released in 2008 and once again, it shows its age with the brown, light brown and super brown colours. I get that this accurately represents the real-life environments that they actually race in but considering the racing itself is more arcade, they could have been a bit more creative here.

Now when I started Baja, I didn’t think I would be able to finish it because at the start, the racing is really hard. Just going off the bat on easy, it took me a while to figure out just how to win or even get close to winning. It turns out the trick is to use the clutch to gain traction and speed boosts and for those that naturally drive in manual transmission, I imagine this would have been easy but for me it was a massive adjustment. Against all my natural instructs, you have to not use the brakes unless you want to continually lose. The only way to corner is to feather the accelerator or, for the tighter corners, use the handbrake clutch coming out of it.

One thing about Baja though, is that it appears to know how difficult it is and there is some definite AI balancing in place. If you cock up massively and overdo a corner or roll, the AI appears to wait for you. This happens in every race except for the open class ones where you race against slow cars and they get head starts. Then the game wants you to lose and lose badly.

One of the quirks of some of the races that really annoyed me was that apparently, they don’t close any of the roads. When doing rallies you also have to compete with traffic. This is utterly ridiculous but I suppose it goes hand in hand with the fact you can nearly fully control your car in the air and that the AI doesn’t want you to lose 90% of the time.

Vehicle damage is another aspect of the game that doesn’t make sense. As you pick up damage, it affects the performance of your car and you can repair the car at certain pit locations during the races but the oil never seems to fix itself and the warning light comes back on almost immediately after you leave the pit. I gave up trying to work out the logic for this in the end.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Not a lot of people have completed this game and there are two reasons for this. The first is that online racing puts off a lot of people, however that’s not too much of an issue for Baja because you don’t need other people to actually complete the online achievement. You just have to be in an active race, solo, for 5 hours.

The second stage of going for the completion involves completing the career mode and this actually gets progressively easier the more it goes on. I don’t know if this is to do with me progressively getting better at the game or the fact that the faster vehicles are easier to use. But what’s really annoying is the fact that upgrading your vehicles doesn’t give you any advantage whatsoever and actually makes it harder to win the races.

I later found out that only applying certain upgrades provides some help but this isn’t needed once you get the hang of the game. Along the way through career mode, you’ll net achievements for unlocking each class. You will also need to win 5 invitational events and these are hard to see come up as you need to be in the outer menu to enter them. It’s also a pain because there’s no tracking for the individual events so you don’t know which ones you’ve done and which ones you haven’t.

It’s also necessary to get golds in all the career races and this is another error with the game in that the achievement descriptions are sometimes off. This one stated you needed to get gold in all the invitationals, which is simply ridiculous. But thankfully you don’t have to do them and it’s just the career races.

While we’re on misleading achievements, there are two achievements for driving 1,000 and 2,000 miles respectively. However, what’s not stated is that all of these miles have to be completed in career mode and despite the volume of races, it’s still not enough to get to 2,000 miles so grinding is required. It was the last achievement I unlocked.

Outside of career mode, there is a requirement to win all races with 5 laps against 5 AI opponents. What’s frustrating about this is there are loads of races that don’t meet this criteria in career mode so they need to be done again in solo play.

There is also a massively redundant free roam mode and an achievement tied to it for finding 5 strange locations in each of the maps. It takes an inordinate amount of time to complete as all the maps are so ball-numbingly generic and there is no map so navigating these is nigh on impossible.

Once all this is done, there are a few miscellaneous pieces to do, all bar one of which might be completed through normal gameplay. The one that won’t is for winning a race in manual transmission so unless you are a gear changing savant, the way to do is to select one of the shorter tracks, stick it in second gear and leave it there. With a trophy truck, it’s actually quite easy to win.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Baja: Edge of Control, for me, is another step towards completing all racing games I own. It’s a bit backwards in that it’s difficult to learn and easy to master, but this makes it a rewarding completion. That’s if you can stomach the dated and unimaginative graphics and the grindathon races.

Crash Time III: Highway Nights

The first thing that made me laugh is the way that these game titles translate on the Xbox 360 console. Crash Time 2 has a number whereas this one has roman numerals. No idea why but I’m sure it made sense to someone.

Anyway, this is the final Crash Time game of the series for me and I dived straight in after completing Crash Time 2. I even started playing it before completing Crash Time 2 due to that insufferable grind for the State of Emergency achievement.

Crash Time III puts you back in the shoes of Semir and Ben, whose American voices are now almost indistinguishable from each other, as they go on the trail of some left wing extremists who are blowing up cars in the city. It actually has a story arc where you see the end of the game in the opening cinematic and the game takes place over the seven days leading up to this opening event.

Along the way, there will be car chases – which were a little more forgiving than the previous game – and races as you go undercover to infiltrate some street racing guys… that spend all their time racing around a race track and not on the street. It’s all a bit weird but I would expect nothing less at this point in the series.

The gameplay is a lot more refined from the second game but they introduce a day and night cycle. While this adds a bit of realism, it also makes it a lot hard to see what’s going on when the sun goes down. Also, the colours used in the textual overlays were poor choices as I couldn’t see what my targets were for most missions.

While I say it’s more refined, it still suffers from the standard Crash Time bullshit of resets favouring the AI, the environment being your worst enemy and a terrible control system. It’s kind of hard to get wound up by this game as it’s so much better than Crash Time 2, despite doing most of the same things. That’s another criticism I suppose, it doesn’t really offer anything new.

Along the lines of not offering anything new, the game even makes fun of this as some point. Semir has to drive a tank and he makes a quip about the fact they pulled the same shit in the previous two games… though I can’t remember driving Crash Time’s version of a tank in the 2^nd game? Anyway, I did find this highly amusing and it endeared me to the characters a little more.

Looks wise, it hasn’t aged well either and as I’ve said, the environment interferes too much with the gameplay. Musically, it’s quality. It’s got the same soundtrack as its predecessors and it goes really well with the gameplay for the most part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

After the horror show that was Crash Time 2, we are back to a more standard list without a horrible grind. There is still a grind but nowhere near as horrible or depressing as train-gate.

The main point of concern with the list, and probably the game itself, is that two achievements are unintentionally missable due to a glitch. Around the half way point, you will be given a car list with a load of cars that need to be collected. In order to get them, you need to go into patrol mode and will randomly appear. Once they appear you need to pull them over and steal them. There are ten cars to collect and you can supposedly do this at your leisure. However, if you don’t do it before completing the last mission of the game, you will lock yourself out of the achievements for getting 100% and for unlocking all cars. The reason for this is that there is a mission that follows collecting the cars and this mission won’t appear if you have already completed the game – a glitch that will never be fixed.

Aside from these, there are a lot of samey achievements like destroying 100 cars and 1,000 objects. Driving 1,000 kilometres makes a return too. Outside of the main game, there is some mild grinding to do but at least it offers some slight variety. The first two are quite small. There is a replayable mission in patrol where you have to drive a 13-checkpoint race which awards you with discount tickets. You need to get a million discount tickets and you get 20,000 ticket points per checkpoint. Another small one is for destroying ten opponents. I only managed three by the end of the game, so I needed to grind this out playing the early training mission over and over again.

The last ones are all racing related. You must do a race on all the race tracks and in every vehicle in the game as well as winning a total of 50 races. In addition to this you must race two of the circuits for 30 laps. I am pretty sure these two need to be done in one go too.

It’s a very repetitive process and the various tracks of different lengths make the 50 wins a bit of a grind but at least the courses are varied. The 30 laps on the two circuits were the biggest pain but there is a trick – you don’t have to win the race, you can start the race up, leave it and cross the line after the AI has completed the laps and you will get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time III is probably the best game in the series but I’m not sure that’s saying much. It does offer some non-serious, light hearted amusement but not enough to warrant the monetary or time investment. It took me around 15 hours to complete the story and grinding races and I’m glad to finally be done with the series.

Crash Time 2: Autobahn Polizei

Okay, so the last two games on my sales request list are the last two games in the Crash Time series. A series I stopped playing as it got repetitive but in hindsight, I should have cracked on as the last two games were easier on paper and I also wouldn’t have had to refamiliarize myself with everything that pissed me off the first three times I played these games.

Anyway, Crash Time 2 puts us in the shoes of Semir and Ben and no one explained what happened to Chris from the first game. It’s like they just changed Chris’ name to Ben and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Story wise, I’m not even sure there is one. You just chase guys down, pull them over or smash them to bits. The aim is to complete a series of cases, which are in no way connected to each other, and once you do the last case, that’s it – game complete. At least in the ‘game’ sense.

The main issues I have with the game don’t concern the non-committal journey from A to B, but the way you get there. The first thing was working out what I had to do. You are given briefings on what your goal but when chasing after opponents, this became a bit of guess work until I managed to crack their code. You will either be required ‘stop opponent’ or ‘force opponent to stop.’ The latter means ‘use driving skill to pull them over’ but the former means ‘smash the fuck out of them until their car explodes.’ This was in no way clear from the outset, but the handy loading screen hints told me what they meant about seven hours after I had figured it out. Thanks.

Also, I think I mentioned this in previous reviews, but the reset function is total bullshit. If you reset yourself after getting stuck on some arbitrary scenery or something, you are not going to catch the guy you are chasing unless you get lucky. This is even more bullshit as it works the other way when you are tasked with destroying an opponent. Several times, I had my opponent pinned where they can’t possibly get away… but they just reset and drive off. So you lose if you reset and lose if they reset. Fuck off.

Another issue I had, which I think is ever present in these games, is the lack of functionality in switching to and from reverse gear. In most games, you just hold down the brake until the car goes backwards. In this, you have to press the brake button again after the car stops. I have no idea why they made this decision but it’s fucking annoying, especially when you need to pull off a fast change of direction. Which is all the time.

Sound wise, I have to say on a rare plus, the music is great. It’s borderline heavy metal and some of the riffs are easy listening that don’t get too repetitive over the game’s lifecycle. The dialogue is rubbish but that’s expected from the series and I also had a sound glitch for the first 25% of the game where it would just cut out. I’m not sure if this is my copy though or the game in general.

Graphically, it looks its age and it’s not going to win any prizes. In addition, I found the interactions with the environment to be clunky where some items would get stuck on you and stop you moving.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

I would say that putting up with the shit I’ve mentioned above is the biggest challenge for 90% of this list. You will get 6 achievements for completing the main story and there are no missable or difficulty specific achievements to speak off.

Outside of this, there is the standard Crash Time faire which are all really easy to do and can also be done fairly quickly. None of these are secret either so it’s also straightforward to work out where you need to go. Some of the more notable ones for this game are to drive for 50 km in manual transmission and to drive for 30 minutes on patrol without being interrupted. This second one is essentially asking you to not play the game for thirty minutes.

An exception to this is the MadCop mission where you explore the city to find car parts. These are in some ridiculous locations, but can all be found using a video guide.

Another grindy one is for winning 50 single races, but you can grind this out relatively quickly by playing the same short circuit over and over again.

Now for the annoying ones. There are two of these. One is for causing 10,000,000 damage in one race and the only way to realistically do this is to start a race on the freeway course, turn off the damage and smash into cars until you get to 10,000,000. You can double up and get the achievement for destroying 100 cars as well. It will feel like a lifetime to get this far as Crash Time manages to make crashes boring.

Now for the bitch. Once you have completed the game and done the above achievement, you will likely have caused around 40,000,000 worth of damage. To get the last achievement, you will need to cause 1,000,000,000 worth of damage. I haven’t mistyped that. The best is, the fastest way to do this is to take the most expensive car in the game and drive it onto train tracks to get hit by a train. If the train destroys your car, you will get 1,000,000 worth of damage. That’s 0.1% of the total required, meaning you will have to repeat this tedious process close to 1,000 times to get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If the last achievement wasn’t there and I didn’t get that sound glitch, I think Crash Time 2 would be my favourite game in the series. As it stands, it’s poorly made, feels rough round the edges and outstays its welcome as far as completionists will be concerned. With the last achievement, it takes around 20 hours to complete the game, which is about 6 hours more than it should be.

Import Tuner Challenge

This was a game I bought during my period of buying games that looked easy without looking at how long they would take to complete or if they were enjoyable. Essentially this boils down to Import Tuner Challenge being hugely repetitive and taking in excess of 20 hours to complete. It will feel a lot longer than this though.

Import Tuner Challenge has some kind of story where you turn up on ‘the Metro’ with the goal of becoming the ultimate street racer. It’s not really explained why but I suppose it’s something to do. You will have to race dudes and upgrade your cars until you have the ultimate showdown with King Speed. That’s pretty much it in terms of the story.

In terms of the gameplay, as I’ve mentioned above, its massively repetitive. You have to race dudes on a very linear circuit in battle races where you have to get ahead of them and stay ahead of them until their hypothetical health bar deteriorates. Once you’ve done this, you will get some money either towards a new car or upgrading your current one. You need to do this is excess of 300 times across the game and that doesn’t include races you lose.

Aside from battle races, you will also have to do a few traditional style point-to-point races. These tend to be longer than battle races but sometimes easier as once you get in front, you just have to defend your position the whole way. This won’t work in battle races as you actually have to put some distance between you and the opposition.

Aside from racing, you will have to buy new parts for your car to improve its performance. This is necessary to win all races after the first three but it doesn’t require anything special, you just need to buy parts. There is further customisation available but this isn’t necessary to complete the game but may make life easier if you know what you are doing; which I don’t.

Graphically, it hasn’t aged well at all. It’s an arcade racer that now looks dated and it even looks and feels dated compared to Forza Motorsport 2. Musically, it’s unapologetically Japanese. There’s noting wrong with this but I did get bored of the dated J-Pop after about 20 minutes.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

To get all of the achievements you will need to do three things. The first is complete quest mode and this is where the majority of time will be spent. I used a guide to try and reduce the amount of time I had to play the game, although in all honesty, I actually had to look up how to start a race as I must have missed it during the intro.

Anyway, this was kind of double-edged as the guide I used had me smashing my head against a brick wall during the middle part of the game. What it essentially boils down to is getting the Nissan Skyline and fully upgrading it. Once you’ve done this, 95% of quest mode becomes a non-event. It’s only when you get to the end game that the fun begins. You have to race these Wanderer guys of which there are 66 of them. Some of these guys will only race against specific cars and they all have a set of rules you need to obey before they will race you. This adds an element of reading that you would need to do to try and figure out how to make the Wanderers appear – just to add further to the repetition.

Once quest mode is finished, you need to complete all the time trials within a set time. The longest two involve having to race around the whole Metro and the target time is 16 minutes and 30 seconds – a long time for a time trail. Once again though, the fully upgraded Skyline makes these a formality.

That just leaves…

Multiplayer

Xbox Live races can be started with just two players which is a relief. You need to win 100 races online to bag the remaining 4 achievements. As the online is dead, this is now another boring repetitive task to add to the list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the mean things I’ve said, Import Tuner Challenge wasn’t all bad and did provide some fun for the first few hours of gameplay. It’s definitely a unique racing experience and definitely not one I’ve seen before. It hasn’t enamoured me to the arcade racing genre though and I’m firmly continuing on my quest to complete all my racing games and never buying another one. Well. Unless they are free with Games with Gold.