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Hard Core
4x4 is another one of my unsung Saturn favorites, it’s
one of those games you will pick up from your local
games exchange or at a junk sale for no more than 50p,
and I dare say allot of people stick it on a shelf with
all the other Saturn games and never give it a second
thought, well this my friends is a travesty.
Hardcore
4x4 puts you in control of a serious off road vehicle,
and challenges you on six courses of some of the most
intense terrain and offensive AI seen on the Saturn.
Every
surface on each course affects your vehicles handling,
these include Snow, Ice, Sand, Rocks, Water and Mud of
varying densities!
Graphics
wise, for an early 3rd party developed Saturn title;
Hardcore 4x4 is reasonably impressive.
The
vehicles are well modeled and mapped as is the terrain,
in fact the only gripe I have with it graphics wise is
that some of the textures make courses visually
confusing, with a few blending into each other meaning
you cant see which way you need to go.
For me
there are two main areas where hardcore 4x4 seriously
falls down, the first is the fact it’s only a single
player.
HC4x4 is
a fun game to play, but with 2 player, or dare I say 4
player via multi-tap! this game would have upgraded to
‘seriously amazing fun’.
The
second area, and the one that totally kills this game
for me is the framerate.
There are
times on HC4x4 where everything gets VERY slow indeed,
this is most evident when 5 or 6 trucks are battling it
our in close quarters, there’s such an obscene amount of
collision detection going on (which is spot on by the
way) and so much being rendered on screen, that it
becomes very obvious that the programming isn’t quite up
to par with releases like ‘Sega Rally’ which is not that
more graphically advanced.
Indeed
there are several points in the game where the framerate
drops so low it almost becomes unplayable.
A well
conceived, good looking, and extremely fun game, let
down by inefficient programming, which was probably at
the time as much SEGA’s fault (crappy development
software) as it was American Softworks’
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