Blood Drive

What do you get when you cross Carmageddon with Terror Is Reality? 

Blood Drive!

It's a game show with Mad Max style cars and drivers competing against eachother in a post apocalyptic zombie wasteland. There are only six levels which is lame, a handful of different drivers to choose from and a handful of different events to compete in.

Checkpoint rallies are the worst events. It's just a race between checkpoints that appear places in the level. The levels are NOT linear road courses. They are large free roam arenas and bombed out city neighborhoods. Whoever has the most checkpoints when the timer runs out, wins. You might start out good. You might even hold the lead for most of the race. But something will happen. You will run into something or zoom past the practically invisible alley that you're supposed to turn down or the next checkpoint will appear somewhere that you can't figure out how to get to. Now you're in last, making all of the work that you did, worthless. Whenever I have to do one of these rallies, I just say fuck it from square one and go explore, looking for hidden tokens and jumps.

Speaking of the jumps, they suck. They are needlessly difficult mostly thanks to the terrible physics of the cars. If you're in a competition in the heat of the moment and happen upon some kind of fun-looking ramp, you'll be lucky to get half way up it without spinning out or flipping over for no apparent reason. It feels less like a fun integrated Motocross race jump and more like a single heavily orchestrated Evel Knievel stunt that requires several tedious dry runs and will never be attempted in any serious competition. If you do achieve liftoff, you get a slow-mo wide shot of your vehicle flying through the air. But the event timer is still running in real time. So while you're floating slowly through the air in some kind of hyperbolic time pocket, everyone else is in real time, catching up with you by doing whatever. Remember back in the old days of Beetle Adventure Racing and San Francisco Rush? Remember how jumps were usually hidden but more or less on the course and took you somewhere cool and then ended up being a shortcut? Well in Blood Drive they go the opposite route and just outright penalize you for even thinking about it. If you're not wasting time flying slowly through the air, you're wasting time spinning out and getting stuck on a ramp or wasting time going out of your way to line up carefully with the jump.     

Checkpoint elimination events are just like checkpoint rallies except the disaterous mistake you make occurs at the beginning of the race as opposed to the end so that you can still get last.  I like checkpoint elimination events better though as they waste much less of my time. Once you're eliminated, the event ends. 

Zombie Roadkill: Kill zombies

Roadkill elimination: Kill zombies

Total destruction: Kill zombies

Demolition derby: Kill cars. The thing that makes this extra special is that as you beat up another car and get them close to death, some other car will come in at the last second to deliver the final blow and steal the kill. Or a zombie will kill them or they'll kill themselves accidentally. You probably get credit for about 60% of the kills you make because of these things. When you get up close and personal with the other cars all you ever seem to do is turn around. They drive past you and you try to turn around and they try to turn around and you're both turning around and not seeing eachother and the turning radius for every car is literally around 30 fucking yards wide unless you're drifting which requires a significant amount of speed.

King of the skull. It's like tag only the objective is to be IT for as long as possible. You chase whoever has the skull and try to kill or ram them to take it. When you finally track them down and jump into the giant clusterfuck of other drivers who want it, one of them gets it and takes off past you going the opposite direction. So turn around and track them down. When you get there, someone else takes off with it again or you die and respawn five miles away somewhere and on it goes until the timer runs out. You're constantly where the action's not.

The zombies in this game are unrealistically powerful. (You know, compared to real zombies.) Ramming the muscly ones kills you instantly and does no damage to them. No matter how big the discrepancy in size to your vehicle or even the fact that both of you are hardly moving, you die. Running into the fat ones hurts you but at least kills them. The extremely innocuous-looking projectiles they throw at you which seem to do nothing actually ,do significant damage. Even the weakest zombies can roll a parked bus just by running into it! You know that scene in Fist of the North Star where Kenshiro walks through an entire skyscraper side to side and it gives probably less resistance than walking through a swimming pool of water? Well it's like that. Okay, that's really just a testament to the game's shitty physics engine. That being said though, A handful of them can still kill you in under five seconds. Yes, in that amount of time, a few ordinary zombies can tear apart a giant tow truck. Bullshit.
 

Superstar is an asshole. He's practically default first place which proves that the game is not balanced. You never see Kelley in the top three EVER. Even Superstar's special ability is annoying. It blinds all nearby drivers so they can't see where they're going. It makes me want to play as him just so I don't have to compete against him. If I'm not playing as him, I go out of my way to harass the hell out of him to try and kick his Bobobo Don Kanonji ass off of the podium.

Bedlam is by a wide margin the worst driver in the game. His weapon and special attack are both about second from the bottom in effectiveness. His vehicle explodes if you so much as brush past a butterfly. It has the worst control, causing you to flip and get hung up on everything. Your car automatically flips right side up if you roll it. If you're Bedlam, you're car has a tendency to get stuck flipping over and over in place like it was trapped in a fucking rock tumbler. If you want to feel like you're piloting an empty cardboard box through a tornado, then pick Bedlam.

I wanted to try this game out in multiplayer but of course the online community is dead. It's a three year old game and what little community there was is pretty much gone now. I hate it when that happens but what are you going to do? What is inexcusable and really pisses me off though is that you can't just get a second controller and play with someone in the same room. This has been a huge problem with games this generation. (With ACTUAL games. Not party or sports games.) What the hell happened to local multiplayer? Why are we only allowed to play with people we can't see? If the game has online multiplayer then just have OFFLINE multiplayer too. ALL online multiplayer communities (that aren't for MMOs) will die and vanish eventually which leaves you with what for an alternative? Fucking nothing. 

I just did a little census of only my PS3 games to confirm and yeah; Out of 21 titles with multiplayer components, 12 of them were strictly multiplayer online. So, over half. For comparison let's look at the prior generation. Out of 24 PS2 titles I own with multiplayer components, only 1 was strictly online. That was Resident Evil: Outbreak. Weird... It was a rare occurrence to say the least. Now to be fair, only 8 of those 24 games even had online play. Consoles had much more limited online capabilities then. That explains why fewer games had online. But it DOESN'T explain why they got rid of offline.

I've already gone on about this for too long but in short; what are the chances that 20 years from now two people who own Blood Drive Will find eachother on PSN or XBox Live and start up a game? It's zero for many many reasons. In fact if you look on the internet, it's almost as if the game doesn't exist. I couldn't even find a strategy guide for it. Now what are the chances that 20 years from now someone will be digging through a closet and go "Hey look, Blood Drive. I remember this. Here, come play it with me." Small yes but not zero.