Improving Yourself with Trackmania Turbo

[Gate88]

Got Trackmania Turbo today and I’m really enjoying it. It’s scratching my F-Zero itch a bit (which hasn’t been scratched in a long time!) It’s got loops and wall runs and turbo boosts!

I think this game is sort of made for me. I get very addicted to games that involve doing quick “runs” over and over until you achieve perfection. Dustforce is still one of my top played games on Steam, clocking in at 111 hours. It’s very satisfying for me to do something repeatedly and slowly improve.

It’s a pretty nice looking game. It’s got a sort of Sega Daytona blue skies look going on. Some sections can get super busy; there are a lot of bright flashing signs and complex landscapes in the background. Often you need to pay attention to the signs, too, because it’s hard to know which way to turn without them.

There are four different environments, and each features its own car. The cars each have their own quirks and handle significantly differently. I think each of the cars is based on a variety of Trackmania 2 they released, but I’ve not played any of those to confirm.

The canyon car is a very drifty car. You can tap the brake and go into a Outrun 2006-like slide. It’s probably my favorite.

The valley car can’t turn quite as well. If you drift with it, it will lose speed very quickly but it can kind of cut around corners that way. The controls get really squirrely and sensitive when you go offroad with it. It can turn really quickly offroad.

The lagoon car has the tightest handling of the 4 cars. It really hugs the road and can make sharp turns while going extremely fast. Drifting is almost impossible. The lagoon probably has the most variety of surfaces to drive on, too. There’s a slippery boardwalk, low friction grass, unpredictable sand, sticky roads, and sort of rollercoaster loopy roads.

Finally, the stadium car has a high top speed but seems to have trouble turning while moving fast. You can drift a little but it mostly sticks to the road. You have to do a lot of braking in this car!

Is anyone else playing this or have experience with previous Trackmanias? If not, tell me about your favorite arcadey racing games! Or maybe just games you like to play to achieve perfection or highscores!

[meauxdal]

oh man i have a good story about TrackMania for Wii

I remember achieving a score that was 2nd place on the leaderboards, but by a decent margin, on a particular track that I had grinded for hours

i went online, hoping to compete on this track and school some unsuspecting player, and i somehow ran into the person holding the no.1 spot, who promptly thumped my best ever in their first run, and iterated on it positively a few times just to rub it in further during the match

[meauxdal]

in retrospect, of course the no.1 person is online, this person is dedicated

[CourierRice]

oh man, I definitely played a lot of trackmania back in highschool, the better part of a decade ago. all I had was a shitty school laptop and the other popular game was counterstrike. no way I was gonna play counterstrike on a touchpad.

I don’t think I had online capabilities for it, so I just played downloaded tracks or something and enjoyed the really satisfying car physics and absurd track design potential. Spent most of my time experimenting with how to launch my car in ridiculous directions and not actually fail a race.

I guess maybe it was an alternative to The Incredible Machine for me?

[creep]

passing by this topic caused me to forget whatever super-important thing I was planning to do, because I had to go on Youtube to look up the Rally (countryside) and Speed (desert) themes from the original.

I have poor reflexes/judgment so racing games don’t do much for me, but I enjoy a good car launch now and then

[Felix]

These games seem to lack something whenever I watch them on YouTube. I love the look of the custom tracks but playing the game always looks too solitary and too straightforward or something.

nb I played a bunch of wipeout ppsspp and sanic kart yesterday after trying the demo of this one.

[GcDiaz]

Love me some Trackmania. Been saying since the 360 days how this was the PERFECT xbox live title. Custom tracks, and painless instant reset to deal with the unknown. Granted you’d miss out on custom soundtracks from the PC version, but you could supply those yourself easy enough.

[Gate88]

Yeah, it is sort of a solitary experience. Even the online multiplayer has everyone as ghosts and you try to get the best “run” you can get in a set time limit.

The straightforward simplicity actually appeals to me; it’s me vs. the track designer. And there are no complex moves or interactions I have to learn. I just need to driver better! That said, I had the same impression as you of previous Trackmanias; this one just pulled me in more for whatever reason. There’s a really good sense of speed in this game that I’d not gotten the impression of in previous Trackmanias.

@Felix

nb I played a bunch of wipeout ppsspp and sanic kart yesterday after trying the demo of this one.

I’ve never actually played any Wipeout games, but I think I’d enjoy them. I remember being jealous when the PS3 Wipeout came out. I had already bought an Xbox in college and couldn’t afford another console.

I will agree that Sonic Kart is a super rad game!

[Felix]

PS3 wipeout is just the two PSP games mashed together with more postprocessing, but running Pure (the PSP launch title) with upscaling and all the DLC tracks is a fine substitute. let me know if you need help getting those loaded into the emulator, I did it but I forget how.

[Gate88]

I took some screenshots because I’m enjoying this game a lot!

Here’s a shot of one of the tracks in “Rollercoaster Lagoon.” Sometimes a helicopter drops you into the levels.

Here’s a standard drift wallride:

Here’s me clearly missing a jump. Notice how my car is not lined up with the track:

Here’s an attempt at a halfpipe transfer to end the level:

I’ve gotten silver or better on the first 133 tracks. It’s going to be really tough to once I need gold medals in all of them to unlock the last tier. The multi-lap tracks are especially hard, because you have to keep it together for 3+ minutes (most other tracks are somewhere between 1:00 and 1:30).

I’m starting to get to the point where not many people have played the levels on Xbox:

[CourierRice]

woah that’s way cooler than what I played! back in the day it was just the same empty stadium bleachers way in the background.

[Gate88]

Oh, I’ve never tried PSP emulation. Guess I didn’t know it was as robust as it is; I’ll definitely give this a shot at some point!

[Alexander]

I enjoy the instances in trackmania turbo when you engine shuts off and only your momentum carries you forward. I find them very calming.

[Gate88]

Yeah, until you’re trying to get a good time, and then it becomes SUPER IMPORTANT to get as much speed as you can before the engine shut off point. Even a small difference in speed translates to multiples seconds gained or lost!

Although, yeah, I guess the engine shut off is calming in my scenario still when you actually get enough speed. Everything leading up to it is stressful, though!

EDIT: They do a cute thing with the music in this game where it gets louder the faster your’re going. As you go through checkpoints, the game will add in different instruments/tracks to the music. If you stop or hit a wall or something the music cuts out abruptly.

Each music track has its own version of the song when the engine cuts out, too. Sometimes they’re just quieter or have less tracks playing (which is serene feeling) and sometimes they sound like an engine turning over or the tone a car makes when you leave the keys in it after parking.

[B_coma]

Yeah it reminds me a bit of SSX 3’s dynamic music way back when, except it’s a lot better implemented these days.

[Gate88]

Looks like I completed 11 tracks tonight! They’re certainly getting harder. Made a few videos (although Xbox video compression sucks and I think youtube is still processing the better resolutions at time of posting).

This first video is an example of a couple engine off sections. In the later tracks they like to put them right after turns so you need take the turn in a way that loses the least amount of speed possible.

This second video is the end of a near-perfect run of a later lagoon track. The boardwalk sections are fun because they’re really slippery!

[Alexander]

Switching to first person view while doing a halfpipe transfer feels absolutely magical to me (and it helps setting up the landing too!). They also do the aforementioned ssx thing with cutting out the music on a big transfer, so you only hear the wind and the engine, and letting it kick back in while you land.
Most of the tracks are so good, that i’m tron between wanting to play more and taking my time, to take it all in.

[Gate88]

Well, I got to the part where the requirements for unlocking new levels changed from silver to gold medals.

The level select screen now only lights up levels that I have at least gold on. I guess the real game starts here!

I think I have been getting more consistent, though. I got a lot of golds in the 141-150 block (which is the last block I’ve attempted). It could just be that I’m good at the lagoon environment too. I also learned there is a tier of medals beyond gold called “trackmaster”. That’s why the 147 level is lit up green, I guess!

[nettle]

I’ve played a lot of Trackmania 2 Valley, perhaps on average every other day for 2 years. I still feel like i’m doing well if i can get within 1 second of the best players over a 45 second track. I find it kind of amazing that i could keep getting better for 2 years, i don’t know how you create a game with that kind of depth.

I really appreciate the “pureness” of the game - one car with no setup, and very quick restarts when you mess up. Most of the time while you play you are actually making a difference to the outcome. It doesn’t matter so much how good you are as you can compete against your own times.

Turbo looks more arcadey, lots of flashing signs and people talking in your ear. It’s kind of weird because the valley scenery looks very similar but then the courses look a lot more rollercoasterish. I’m not a big fan of “stunt parts”, loops and wall drives and jumps and things probably because i’m quite bad at them in Valley. Essentially you go fast in Valley by not skidding, so the handling sounds similar in Turbo’s valley sections.

Does Turbo have track constuction stuff? i guess they wouldn’t discard that… the constant stream of new tracks definitely helped keep my interest, i really love driving a new track for the first time. I get quite bored of the prevalent style of player-made tracks though - fast, flowing, difficult tracks, generally with very little braking. I guess i like novelty more than “flow”.

[Gate88]

Yeah, it still has a track editor and a rather bad random level generator too.

As I understand it, this game is sort of divisive amoung Trackmania fans. In some respects it’s better, because it unifies the Trackmania 2 environments that were split across 3 games – canyon, valley, & stadium – and adds lagoon, a fourth previously unreleased environment.

But in the process of moving the game to consoles, they sort of sterilized the experience. Trackmania has always supported crazy server mods that allow you do all sort of weird things with scripting, including making new modes, putting a bunch of weird UI shit on the screen, playing background music, etc. I guess Nadeo didn’t think that would fly on consoles, so now they host all the servers. To be fair, you can still create your own instance of a room with the tracks you want (including custom tracks) in the (pre-built) mode you want, but it’s nowhere near as customizable as previous iterations.

Since I’ve been mostly playing alone and haven’t really experienced that side of the game in previous Trackmanias, this hasn’t bothered me much. But I can see how that’s a deal breaker for some people.

I think the gameplay is almost unchanged between Trackmania 2 environments and this game. They seem to have spruced up the visuals a bit and added lots of signs and doodads as you noticed. There are definitely a good number of valley maps without “stunt parts”. There are some really brutal all-offroad tracks. As the game increases in difficulty they tend to add more stunts, but in general I think the valley environment is one of the most “grounded”. That’s obviously relative, though.

The game comes with 200 “campaign” tracks (50 per environment in 5 tiers of difficulty). There are a lot of neat ideas in these tracks and I often find them pretty novel, although I’m sure they’re less so if you’ve played a lot of Trackmania 2.