Seconds don't count. A second is an eternity. It's the ticks in the middle that make the difference. Every corner in TM, every slight twitch of the controls, can potentially drop a perfect run into a searing abyss of failure and humiliation, leaving you tearing off your clothes, smearing the blood of a freshly killed sacrificial hamster across your chest, and leaping out in front of traffic in penitence for your crime. Or maybe that's just me.
Anyway. TrackMania United Forever is a free update and the re-release name for ordinary TrackMania United, adding a few things like 3D glasses support, updated graphics for the original tracks, and playing against Nations players. Ultimately, it's the same game. Why cover it again now? Put simply, it's great fun, and not enough people have played it.
Assuming you haven't, here's the important bit: it's not really a racing game. It looks like one, and it plays like one. But it's a high-score table with a racer attached. Courses tend to be short, in many cases offering only a minute or two of action, played properly. The more medals you accumulate, the more tracks you unlock, but unlocking them isn't the point.
Mastering them is. The computer will happily provide a couple of ghost cars to race against - your own performance and a pre-recorded demo of how you should be playing - but the real challenge comes trying to beat other human players, both worldwide and in your local area, online and off, shaving those few extra milliseconds off your time to be... drumroll... the best.
In addition to vanilla racing, you get three more gimmicky modes. In Stunt, impossible courses stretch high into the air and reward you not for making it through, but for making it through within a number of lives. Puzzle is a hybrid of map-builder and racer, challenging you to complete and race a half-finished course. Platform is a borderline satanic mix of deadly ramps and 'freewheeling' sections you have to navigate without the benefit of an engine. There's also a Lego-style editor for making your own sadistic, stunt-filled maps, and a car painting mode.
In every case, it's the push for perfection that drives the action. You've got to want to not only unlock maps, but be better than the 268th best player in England. Without that, the racing isn't anything special, and if you're accustomed to playing more complicated racers, the cars may as well be dodgems. With action this fast, furious, and at least one of that movie's terrible sequels, you're not going to care for long.
I won't pay for the United version, but as Trackmania Nations Forever is essentially the same game, although stripped, but even better as it costs nothing. I'll offer my thoughts on it.
TMNF is probably the most frustrating game I know. Either your brains will explode because you just hit the wall in the last corner after a perfect run, or your good time is bested by a freaking millisecond in the last possible moment making you want to smash things. I could see people becoming hulks after playing it. Also, your wrist will NOT thank you for downloading the game. Essentially, it's a four button fest, making long play sessions relatively painful for your fingers.
But to the plus sides, eh? It's quite fun, because it's easy to learn, yet hard to master. Feels good seeing your car in the first spot when the track ends. Also, it's free. A reason good enough to try any game. Although I found it far more entertaining in the past when the original TMN was released - most people were complete noobs then, there were a lot of players and it was easy to get the top times - it's fun now, too. There are a lot of servers to play on with heaps of custom tracks - you will never play through all of them.
If you haven't tested it yet, go download it. It's worth the try. Gain points and make your nation proud.
Nations Forever, free and dam enjoyable, half the fun is figuring out the cuts. If you break, lift off accelerator, are more than 1 pixel away from a wall, slide/skid any amount: you loose, simple. That and I've been on tracks with 200+ cars on them at the same time (all the other cards are like ghost cars, so no c**ks wrecking your perfect lap)
I love the game but maybe that's because I want to be the best of the best sir! Lol that's a MIB reference but the most enjoyable thing about the FREE game is that you can race some pretty sick and sweet tracks online with the aid of that cool lego editor!
Nations is not just stripped down, it's majorly stripped down as it offers only the Stadium themed tracks and one type of car. United includes several different car types which handle very differently (drift cars, rally cars, etc) and a completely different track theme with its own challenges for each of them. If you enjoy Nations so much there's really no reason not to get the full thing and support its indie developers. Racers have gotten stale and Trackmania breaths life in a unique way.
I agree completely with Mr. Trite here: great fun until your wrist melts or you come up against that impossible-to-unlock track that just...keeps...beating...you.
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