Post by aweberman on Dec 8, 2011 20:45:47 GMT -5
Rather than resurrect a stale thread, I decided to start a new one to share a range of thoughts that I have on this game. (Note: I haven't played these games religiously in nearly a decade, and haven't played them at all in maybe 4 years. Though that will change soon ... I intend to take a crack at some of those records.
I still consider Jet Moto 1 to be my favorite video game of all time. At the time of its release (about 15 years ago, now), it had a racing mechanic that was pretty unique: the competition of the other racers.
In most racing games of the era (take F-Zero and Wipeout, for examples), the field mainly serves as markers to check your progress. You generally start in the back, you work your way forward over the course of the race, and you try to hold on to first place through the last lap as the guy in 2nd suddenly gets a lot better.
Jet Moto didn't do this. Instead, each racer was as competitive as they could be all the way through. It was possible to take 1st place and keep it all the way through; more often (until mastering the game, anyway) you found yourself in the pack, scrambling for the finish and not typically winning every race.
Which is the first thing that thrilled me about this game. One of the huge gripes I had with games like the SNES Super Mario Kart was the fact that you had to finish in the top 3 or 4 to progress to the next race, whereas none of the computer competition had to do anything of the sort. But in Jet Moto, you could finish dead last in every single race and still get to do every race of the season. This was revolutionary at the time. (I don't know how many of these things are still true about driving games; the newest console I have is the Wii.)
The other beautiful thing about the competition was that it really felt like you were in a racing season, with different results each time. And not only did you not have to finish near the top to race the whole season, but you didn't even have to finish first AT ALL to win the season. (Theoretically. Usually you still had to take at least one win to be in contention, but this wasn't mandatory.)
Only when I became capable of destroying the competition on Master difficulty in JM1 did I start to see the flaws in the AI of the computer. But I remember reading an interview at the time with one of the Singletrac developers that the Master difficulty was just thrown in almost as an afterthought; these guys couldn't consistently beat it on Professional, but they figured others would get good enough to do so, so they jacked up the difficulty in an "educated guess" sort of way. They managed to come pretty close for most of the tracks.
Well, but this is a JM2 thread, so I guess I'd better talk about that.
JM2 (and 3) retained this dynamic season approach to racing, which was great. However, considering how much I loved JM1 -- and considering that the games came out only about a year apart -- it seems obvious that JM2 would be a disappointment. And yet, I think it stands up to be almost as good as the original.
A couple of reasons why JM2 falls short (and I'm talking gameplay here; the visuals are better, but they're still not great):
- The field is halved. I was in disbelief when I started the first race and saw only 10 racers out there. 10! What? This fundamental shift in philosophy really subtracts a lot from the game. The tracks feel emptier as you go through them, and the amount of jostling that takes place (anywhere but The Shaft) is minimal compared to JM1. It's a shame, but it could have been worse (and was -- a lot worse -- with JM3 and its cavernous, sterile racing).
- The AI is way out of whack. Again, this doesn't really become noticeable until you start acing Master difficulty. But they threw in that Insane difficulty, apparently made some more educated guesses about how well people would do ... and then didn't guess as well. In my prime, I progressed to the point where only Insane offered enough competition for me; Master was simply too easy. But Insane is just messed up.
The first obvious problem is that the computer just flat outperforms you. You literally cannot compete with the speed of your competition. It's still possible to win, of course. But it's weird the way it works out.
If I can score any points in the first 2 races, I'm pleased. If I can score as many as 5, I'm doing pretty phenomenally good. Because basically you get hammered in those 2 races. As I said, you literally cannot compete.
Although, oddly enough, I've found that if you can just stay with the leaders in these first few tracks, they don't run away and hide. But if you make one single mistake, they are gone and you won't catch them. I have always monitored my times, compiling my own records. I have seen it happen on Slickrock Gorge, in particular, where I will stay with the pack and finish 4th in one go-round, then get a better time the next season and finish last, because I didn't stay with the pack. Hot Shot is another one that is terrible about this.
This was incredibly frustrating the first few times, until I realized the trick to winning on Insane: you have to bring home the trophy in the second half of the season. If you can pick up 10-15 points in the first half of the season, that's probably enough.
Because once it becomes possible to fall off the track a lot, the AI racers will do so. You ought to be able to consistently win at least 2 or 3 races in the second half of the season, which, when combined with the spotty performance of the AI racers, can get you the win.
For a long time I noticed this was true without ever really thinking about the underlying cause of this. Of course, it's pretty simple and obvious: The developers simply raised the top speeds of the competition. This has the twin effect of making them very tough on flat, safe courses, and very easy to beat on tracks that are easy to fall off of; if I remember correctly, the average times on Nebulous on Insane are worse than on Master difficulty.
So, that's a pretty significant flaw to me. But once I learned to cope with it without throwing my controller across the room, I still was able to enjoy the game. Although I never managed to get that "1st in every race" trophy on Insane. If anybody has, I'd be interested to know how.
That trophy case, though, was a really nice touch, even if there's that one missing pin that is impossible to get for some reason. And the track design is pretty great; this game feels, no question, like a sequel to JM1.
JM3, on the other hand ... Well, that's a topic for another day.
I also appreciated the variety in the bikes. Each one really felt different from the others, to a much greater degree than was true in JM1, where you basically had 3 kinds of bikes (light, medium, heavy) with only very minor tweaks between different bikes in the same class.
While I'm here, I wanted to share my own personal best times on each track. I played JM2 a lot, but not as much as JM1; I actually wrote a FAQ about JM1 (still up at GameFAQs) after I had simulated an entire season by racing every single track with every single racer (in practice mode). Yeah, that took awhile. But I got to know the tracks on a detailed level that I never gained while playing JM2.
This shows up in my best times.
The largest disparity between my 1st and 5th best times in JM1 was 6.8 seconds on Nightmare. The early tracks have spreads of as little as 1.4 seconds (for Hammerhead). But I have one in JM2 (Mach Schnell) where my best time is fully 10 seconds better than my 2nd best. A good race, I guess.
One other note: These times all assume no cheat codes, 3 laps, turbos on, and other normal racing. I will compare these times with the world records from the forum here, though I acknowledge that I can't prove that I actually recorded these; I didn't have the equipment in 1998 to do so.
Track____________My time_____________Record time
-----____________-------_____________-----------
Slickrock Gorge__2.49.0 (Bomber)_____2.29.5
Meltdown_________2.23.1 (The Max)____2.04.4
Aftershock_______2.51.2 (The Max)____2.33.2
Arctic Blast_____2.52.0 (Technician)_2.31.2
Hot Shot_________3.09.4 (Wild Ride)__2.48.8
The Shaft________3.33.5 (The Max)____2.50.6
Rollercide_______3.59.2 (Gadget)_____3.27.6
Ka-Ma-Te_________2.40.4 (Gadget)_____2.16.8
Mach Schnell_____3.32.7 (The Max)____2.57.2
Nebulous_________4.45.6 (Vampeera)___4.02.6
(Eh. The formatting took out all of my spaces.)
Just glancing at these records, I gotta wonder: How is this "bear" guy getting such crazy times? Maybe somebody could clue me in. And if he can beat me by 30+ seconds on most of these tracks, why not on Aftershockor Mach Schnell? (I misread my own time on Mach Schnell; which puts bear squarely back in the 30+ seconds better on that one.)
Anyway. Glad to have found this board. I have more to say, at another time.
I still consider Jet Moto 1 to be my favorite video game of all time. At the time of its release (about 15 years ago, now), it had a racing mechanic that was pretty unique: the competition of the other racers.
In most racing games of the era (take F-Zero and Wipeout, for examples), the field mainly serves as markers to check your progress. You generally start in the back, you work your way forward over the course of the race, and you try to hold on to first place through the last lap as the guy in 2nd suddenly gets a lot better.
Jet Moto didn't do this. Instead, each racer was as competitive as they could be all the way through. It was possible to take 1st place and keep it all the way through; more often (until mastering the game, anyway) you found yourself in the pack, scrambling for the finish and not typically winning every race.
Which is the first thing that thrilled me about this game. One of the huge gripes I had with games like the SNES Super Mario Kart was the fact that you had to finish in the top 3 or 4 to progress to the next race, whereas none of the computer competition had to do anything of the sort. But in Jet Moto, you could finish dead last in every single race and still get to do every race of the season. This was revolutionary at the time. (I don't know how many of these things are still true about driving games; the newest console I have is the Wii.)
The other beautiful thing about the competition was that it really felt like you were in a racing season, with different results each time. And not only did you not have to finish near the top to race the whole season, but you didn't even have to finish first AT ALL to win the season. (Theoretically. Usually you still had to take at least one win to be in contention, but this wasn't mandatory.)
Only when I became capable of destroying the competition on Master difficulty in JM1 did I start to see the flaws in the AI of the computer. But I remember reading an interview at the time with one of the Singletrac developers that the Master difficulty was just thrown in almost as an afterthought; these guys couldn't consistently beat it on Professional, but they figured others would get good enough to do so, so they jacked up the difficulty in an "educated guess" sort of way. They managed to come pretty close for most of the tracks.
Well, but this is a JM2 thread, so I guess I'd better talk about that.
JM2 (and 3) retained this dynamic season approach to racing, which was great. However, considering how much I loved JM1 -- and considering that the games came out only about a year apart -- it seems obvious that JM2 would be a disappointment. And yet, I think it stands up to be almost as good as the original.
A couple of reasons why JM2 falls short (and I'm talking gameplay here; the visuals are better, but they're still not great):
- The field is halved. I was in disbelief when I started the first race and saw only 10 racers out there. 10! What? This fundamental shift in philosophy really subtracts a lot from the game. The tracks feel emptier as you go through them, and the amount of jostling that takes place (anywhere but The Shaft) is minimal compared to JM1. It's a shame, but it could have been worse (and was -- a lot worse -- with JM3 and its cavernous, sterile racing).
- The AI is way out of whack. Again, this doesn't really become noticeable until you start acing Master difficulty. But they threw in that Insane difficulty, apparently made some more educated guesses about how well people would do ... and then didn't guess as well. In my prime, I progressed to the point where only Insane offered enough competition for me; Master was simply too easy. But Insane is just messed up.
The first obvious problem is that the computer just flat outperforms you. You literally cannot compete with the speed of your competition. It's still possible to win, of course. But it's weird the way it works out.
If I can score any points in the first 2 races, I'm pleased. If I can score as many as 5, I'm doing pretty phenomenally good. Because basically you get hammered in those 2 races. As I said, you literally cannot compete.
Although, oddly enough, I've found that if you can just stay with the leaders in these first few tracks, they don't run away and hide. But if you make one single mistake, they are gone and you won't catch them. I have always monitored my times, compiling my own records. I have seen it happen on Slickrock Gorge, in particular, where I will stay with the pack and finish 4th in one go-round, then get a better time the next season and finish last, because I didn't stay with the pack. Hot Shot is another one that is terrible about this.
This was incredibly frustrating the first few times, until I realized the trick to winning on Insane: you have to bring home the trophy in the second half of the season. If you can pick up 10-15 points in the first half of the season, that's probably enough.
Because once it becomes possible to fall off the track a lot, the AI racers will do so. You ought to be able to consistently win at least 2 or 3 races in the second half of the season, which, when combined with the spotty performance of the AI racers, can get you the win.
For a long time I noticed this was true without ever really thinking about the underlying cause of this. Of course, it's pretty simple and obvious: The developers simply raised the top speeds of the competition. This has the twin effect of making them very tough on flat, safe courses, and very easy to beat on tracks that are easy to fall off of; if I remember correctly, the average times on Nebulous on Insane are worse than on Master difficulty.
So, that's a pretty significant flaw to me. But once I learned to cope with it without throwing my controller across the room, I still was able to enjoy the game. Although I never managed to get that "1st in every race" trophy on Insane. If anybody has, I'd be interested to know how.
That trophy case, though, was a really nice touch, even if there's that one missing pin that is impossible to get for some reason. And the track design is pretty great; this game feels, no question, like a sequel to JM1.
JM3, on the other hand ... Well, that's a topic for another day.
I also appreciated the variety in the bikes. Each one really felt different from the others, to a much greater degree than was true in JM1, where you basically had 3 kinds of bikes (light, medium, heavy) with only very minor tweaks between different bikes in the same class.
While I'm here, I wanted to share my own personal best times on each track. I played JM2 a lot, but not as much as JM1; I actually wrote a FAQ about JM1 (still up at GameFAQs) after I had simulated an entire season by racing every single track with every single racer (in practice mode). Yeah, that took awhile. But I got to know the tracks on a detailed level that I never gained while playing JM2.
This shows up in my best times.
The largest disparity between my 1st and 5th best times in JM1 was 6.8 seconds on Nightmare. The early tracks have spreads of as little as 1.4 seconds (for Hammerhead). But I have one in JM2 (Mach Schnell) where my best time is fully 10 seconds better than my 2nd best. A good race, I guess.
One other note: These times all assume no cheat codes, 3 laps, turbos on, and other normal racing. I will compare these times with the world records from the forum here, though I acknowledge that I can't prove that I actually recorded these; I didn't have the equipment in 1998 to do so.
Track____________My time_____________Record time
-----____________-------_____________-----------
Slickrock Gorge__2.49.0 (Bomber)_____2.29.5
Meltdown_________2.23.1 (The Max)____2.04.4
Aftershock_______2.51.2 (The Max)____2.33.2
Arctic Blast_____2.52.0 (Technician)_2.31.2
Hot Shot_________3.09.4 (Wild Ride)__2.48.8
The Shaft________3.33.5 (The Max)____2.50.6
Rollercide_______3.59.2 (Gadget)_____3.27.6
Ka-Ma-Te_________2.40.4 (Gadget)_____2.16.8
Mach Schnell_____3.32.7 (The Max)____2.57.2
Nebulous_________4.45.6 (Vampeera)___4.02.6
(Eh. The formatting took out all of my spaces.)
Just glancing at these records, I gotta wonder: How is this "bear" guy getting such crazy times? Maybe somebody could clue me in. And if he can beat me by 30+ seconds on most of these tracks, why not on Aftershock
Anyway. Glad to have found this board. I have more to say, at another time.