Destruction Derby 3

[112]

Anyone looking forward to this?, had a sample of this and its actually quite playable. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.

112

[mid]

Having made the mistake of subjecting myself to DD2 last week (it was bundled with the glory that is wip3out:SE), I can't say I hold any hope for it. The first one was fun at the time, though, so we'll see. Most of the problems I had with 2 should be fixable.

[Neverness]

"Having made the mistake of subjecting myself to DD2 last week"

Strange, I always remember prefering DD2 over DD even though it was less solid...

[Afterbirth]

This game looks really cool from the Demo i saw.
Destructable scenery, real world tracks (against dedicated courses) and some bloody good crashes. I personally can't wait for this.

As for DD2, it had jumps, hills and faster race tracks, and completely blew away DD2 from a great height. DD1 was only good because there was no game like it, in 3D, at the time.

[mid]

I'll try to be quick in my justification, as this is a DD3 thread not DD2.

Firstly, the game really, really could do with a training mode, a la Burnout 2's "Offensive Driving 101" or the first level of Driver (to use a more contemporary reference to the game). The way the score is designed just makes little sense to me, with its over-emphasis on making the cars spin rather than either driving fast or even just smacking the other cars into barriers.

Secondly, after an hour's playing I had yet to make the top half of the field on the first track of the easiest difficulty. I know I'm not the best gamer in the world, but something might want to be done about difficulty levels here. Even at this lowest difficulty you won't be doing much catching up unless the other cars make a dumb mistake (which never seems to happen unless they are on screen), and so wasting time trying to hit things isn't going to get you anywhere near the front of the grid.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, the game's handling seems completely unsuited to the game. On the one hand, the game's emphasis is almost entirely on smashing the other cars about. On the other, you've got this twitchy monster of a half-arsed digital control. I'll excuse the fact that it offers analogue via Neg-Con but not Dualshock as a historical artifact, but plenty of other games managed digital controls perfectly fine. Ramming another car sent me into a spin myself half the time, so I just ended up concentrating on getting round the track in one piece.

Little things like a draw distance worse than Saturn Daytona, because they've seemingly thrown all the polys at overblown lens flares and translucent smoke are a product of their time, and I'll ignore them, but the gameplay flaws were painful.

[Afterbirth]

I really feel that you wouldn't have thought that when it came out. Your right of course, but theres a lot of cars moving about.
BTT...

DD3 does look very nice with same great tracks, and it looks as though it will breath some more life into the genre.

[mid]

Indeed, provided they get it some decent playtesting its entirely possible that DD3 will turn out really good fun.

Reflections had a nice handling model in Driver, and analogue sticks are as standard now, so that should be perfectly possible to fix up. The PS2 has enough graphical might to solve the draw distance problem (which was enough for me to mess up turns, since they were coming out of nowhere), and Stuntman showed that they know how to make things look flash (I hope they don't have similiar loading times, but there you go).

And tuning the difficulty is something that shouldn't be a problem at all; I can't remember seeing a big PS2 game that didn't at least start out simple enough. As I said before, everything I found wrong with DD2 should be fairly simple to fix for them, so there is a good chance for three.

[Doc]

Mid, was the Wipeout SE DD2 combo the same as this one?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009ME9D/ref=sr_aps_videogames_1_3/202-3413985-0535057

Even though it only says "Wipeout 3". Or have they changed it? Please reply!

[Doc]

Does anyone know the answer to the above question?

[mid]

Yep, thats the one. Since they aren't even offering a single penny under the list price and don't have any in stock, you might want to try the nearest shop instead, though. My local video shop had it to buy (Choices), for example. Mind you, they've also got Serious Sam and Quantum Redshift in their XBox "2 for ?30" section, so they can't be all bad.

[Doc]

Cheers mid!

I've checked all the local shops for SE but to no avail

I find it strange that they dont specify that it's "Special Edition" whereas amazon.de do.

[Molloy]

Didn't they already have a DD3? I remember playing a third one on the PSOne.

I used like DD2 quite alot. The masses of cars, big jumps and pileups were alot of fun.

[2097]

there was a DD3 on psone that came out in 2000.

Its called Destruction Derby:Raw and was created by Studio 33, the people behind the DD:Arena's game thats out soon, they also made: newman haas racing, psygnosis' F1 99, sony's F1 2000, sony's F1 2001 (the psone version) and F1 arcade.

DD:Raw I thought was easily the best in the series. It had a lot more tracks, nice graphics for the psone, too many game modes to actually play, the points & tricks system actually worked & made sense, it wasnt full of bugs and it had a really nice rusty/muddy industrial theme to it all.. it also sold about 3 copies worldwide and was completely ignored ft: