A Motorcyclist's Eye View on Driveclub Bikes

Games are expensive, and I'm a man of limited means and an enormous backlog. Which is why I've only just caved in and bought Driveclub Bikes, thanks to the January PSN sale. But anyway, I like it and I thought I'd get my impressions of the game from a motorcyclist's perspective onto the page. So without further ado, here are some thoughts:


First of all, there's some really precious metal on display. From Honda's seminal Fireblade to Kawasaki's insane, supercharged H2. Coolest of all, to me at least, is the inclusion of Ducati's unspeakably exotic Desmosedici. A limited production firebreathing MotoGP bike with headlights. However, it's sad to see the Suzuki's GSXR1000 (the hooligan's No.1) and Aprilia's RSV4 Factory missing from the roster. Especially when bankrupt also-ran EBR got their bike onto the list.


Away from the metal, I'm really impressed with the attention to detail. It's visible right from the moment your rider swings a leg over the saddle, kicks up the sidestand with their heel and then rocks the bike from side to side to get a feel for it. It's as if Evolution have secretly been watching me when I roll my Daytona out of the garage for a Sunday Morning ride.


The detailing carries on from there. There are flashes of biker bling everywhere. Ohlins gold, Brembo red, bare carbon fibre weave on the bodywork of Bimota's hand built BB3. There's grain in the rider's leathers. The bikes' revs rise when you lean off the outside circumference of the tyre. It all looks so good that I wouldn't be surprised to find Renthal logos on the sprockets and Pirelli written on the sides of the tyres. It feels like the details even extend to rider aids.


Modern Superbikes are very difficult for a regular human being to get the best out of. They weigh around 200KG and force somewhere in the region of 190BHP, as much power as a fairly hot hatchback, through a tyre contact patch the size of credit card into the road. In the wrong hands, that's a recipe for third gear wheelspin at full lean, slides and almost certain disaster. It's undoubtedly part of the appeal, but it's also why modern superbikes are festooned with rider aids. We're looking at stuff like ABS, lean angle sensitive traction control, wheelie control, launch control, slipper clutches, active engine braking management and quickshifters for clutchless gearchanges. The most exotic bikes come with semi active suspension too.


That's a lot of tech, and while I'm not saying Driveclub Bikes models all of it, you can see signs of some of those aids in the game. First of all, you can't lock the wheels at all, a sure sign of ABS. The game also seems to allow you to hold a certain level of rear wheel spin and slide before stopping you going any further and highsiding, just like the best traction control systems are purported to do. The most obvious sign that Driveclub is modeling a rider aid or two is the way the revs fall to bring the front wheel back to the ground when the bike wheelies off a crest - wheelie control. Which is what started me thinking about all that.


Other nice touches include the best stoppie animations I've ever seen and the way the bikes really buck about when you're reaching the limits. Just like when you see the best racers in the world wrestling with their machines in the MotoGP. The bikes all sound appropriately angry too.
Despite all this, Driveclub Bikes is not a simulation. For a start, there's a massive surfeit of grip, particularly in the rain, which allows you to brake really hard at full lean. Something you don't want to do on a real bike if you want to stay on the back of it. There are a couple of other gripes too, like how the AI seems to be quite slow, and I can't find a way to adjust their difficulty to speed them up. It's really easy to just ride away from the pack. Also, it's next to impossible to fall off unless something goes really wrong. Most annoying of all is how it's possible to go all the way down the gearbox, through first and accidentally into neutral. Something that is almost physically impossible to do on a real bike unless something is horribly broken. The biggest issue though is that the bikes all feel a bit samey, which I believe is down to the handling model.


For all it's faults as an actual racing game Tourist Trophy on the PS2 is still probably the best approximation of real bike handling in gaming. This is because Polyphony understood that real bikes steer not because you move the bars, but because the rider shifts their weight in the direction they want to turn. TT's handling emulates this, and it feels like you control the rider rather than directly controlling the bike. Weird though it may sound, my thought processes when I'm riding my Daytona feel very similar to when I'm playing TT. Tourist Trophy's handling model makes it's bikes turn gradually and look more natural than Driveclub's bikes, which tend to look and feel like they're just flopping left and right. Driveclub isn't the only bike game to feel like this, but I was hoping we could have moved past that by now, if only because it looks a bit naff. It's much more difficult to ride the kind of smooth lines that make good laptimes with Drivclub's bikes than it is with Tourist Trophy.


Still, Driveclub Bikes is a straight up arcade racer and when you take it at face value as one, it's excellent. The bikes are outrageously fast, and when you're scything through a complex of corners, inches away from the walls, it makes you feel like a road racing god, cast white hot from the mould of Guy Martin, Ian Hutchinson or Michael Dunlop. When the elements come together like that, all of the gripes fall away and you're left with an exhilirating ride. Just like the very best real world superbikes. Driveclub always felt like the natural heir to Project Gotham 4's arcade racing crown, and with the arrival of the superbikes, that feeling has never been stronger. Driveclub Bikes isn't quite the Bike racing sim I was expecting, but it turns out that it's an excellent Bike racing game. I like it a lot.


It's not quite as good as Road Rash II though...

The Return of Point & Click

I am on a Point & Click bender.

When I think about it, it all started last year when I finally managed to play Discworld Noir. I originally started it as a sort of project in Discworld completionism. It's one of the only Discworld stories not covered in one of the novels, so I was playing it for that, rather than to sate a need for point & click gameplay. So imagine my surprise when I found myself not just enjoying the story (which was pretty much a given) but also the game itself as well.

Yes, the game is archaic, and on the PS1 at least, adorably low resolution and crashy, but it's also well written, well acted and truly brain testing. I'm not ashamed to admit I used a walkthrough in places. Once I had finished it, fond memories of the Broken Sword series, the only other Point & Click adventures I've played, began to surface. I waxed lyrical about them for a while and then moved on to the next game.

Those memories probably would have stayed just that if it hadn't been for the remastering and rerelease of Grim Fandango. A game many consider to be Tim Schafer's magnum opus that was sadly overlooked, and until now, practically unplayable on modern hardware. It's a game I've been curious about since I first played Psychonauts way back when it was first released. So when I spotted Grim on sale on the PlayStation Store I bought it. Then shamefully, I didn't play it. Disgraceful.

My redemption arrived in the form of Broken Age on PlayStation Plus. Another one of those games that I was curious about but never played. Mostly in this case because of an old laptop that was incapable of playing it. And now here it was for (sort of) free for my  console. I started it straight away, then didn't really touch another game til I'd finished it. I enjoyed it that much. Broken Age is charming, funny, pretty, well written, well voiced and everything you expect a good game to be. But it also harked back to the brain bending old days of Point & Click that I'd experienced with Discworld and Broken Sword and I liked it for that too.

The floodgates opened when the Steam Sale arrived. Armed with a new and moderately powered laptop, I wound up buying Machinarium and Broken Sword 4 & 5. I've spent the best part of the last week playing Broken Sword 4, and whilst it's ropey and doesn't really work too well on modern hardware I'm still happy with the time I spent with it. It kind of ended abruptly, but the story was still better than 99% of what other games have to offer. And if I'm being honest, the stories are what are attracting me to these games. Plus it's Broken Sword! Few genres can tell a story as well as Point & Click can and the Broken Sword games are shining examples of that. I went straight into Broken Sword 5 as soon as I finished it.

I use the word gorgeous to describe games a lot, but Broken Sword 5 is the real deal. After two games of industry trend dictated (and pretty rubbish if we're honest) polygons, Revolution Software have gone back to glorious hand drawn 2D roots. Every single background is a work of art comparable to any cel animated film. The advent of high definition has really bought 2D back. The high resolutions let highly detailed and colourful backdrops burst from the screen. Games like Broken Sword 5, Ori and Dean Dodrill's excellent Dust really make me think that we're in a new golden age of 2D at the moment.

I finished it yesterday, and I can safely say that Broken Sword 5 is every inch a proper Broken Sword game. I particularly love it's very English sense of humour and the callbacks to the rest of the series. Once I've finished it, I plan to give my mouse hand a rest so that I can finish the bundle of papery joy that is Tearaway, and then I'll finally get started on Grim Fandango. And after that: Machinarium.

The pointing and the clicking won't stop there though. PSPlus has given me Kings Quest to have a crack at, and I've added Monkey Islands 1 & 2 to my steam wishlist. Then there's the remasters of Full Throttle and the seminal Day of the Tentacle on the horizon too.

What a time to get back into the genre,

An ode to the genius of Terry Pratchett and the Discworld

Last year saw the release of almost certainly the final Discworld book from the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “wasn’t The Shepherd’s Crown the last Discworld book?”

As it happens, no, it wasn’t. The Shepherd’s Crown is the last Discworld novel, which is a very different thing. Sir Terry was working on one final project with his erstwhile co-conspirators at the Discworld Emporium before his untimely death, and the fruits of that project have been released as The Compleat Discworld Atlas.

The Discworld, as we all know, is a flat world, supported on the back of four elephants who themselves are perched upon the back of a ten-thousand mile long turtle. So far, so imaginary. But it has blossomed into so much more than that. Over the course of forty-one novels, Terry Pratchett’s imaginary world has become perhaps the realest of all of fantasy fiction’s unreal worlds.

Let me show you what I mean.

Discworld is far from the first fantasy world to have been mapped, and a map doesn’t necessarily make an imaginary place any more real. What sets the Discworld apart is the level of thought that has gone into creating it. In the process of pulling the Disc from Pratchett’s mind and putting it onto paper, entire landmasses and topographical features were shuffled around to make sure that, with as few loopholes as possible, the world worked. In one extreme case an entire desert had to be moved because it had been placed in the rain shadow of a mountain range that that would have turned it into a swamp.

The Compleat Discworld Atlas and its companion, The Compleat Ankh-Morpork are in every sense of the word, Real Maps, just not maps of a real place.  They are printed on paper that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Ordnance Survey guide. They are meticulously researched and illustrated. They are properly grid referenced and are even folded in the way you’d expect an O/S map to be. To add to this, the maps are accompanied by beautiful hardback books as comprehensive as any atlas or Lonely Planet Guide. The Atlas describes in detail the governments, religions, cultures and economies of the Disc’s myriad imaginary nations. The Compleat Ankh-Morpork is more granular, covering the entirety of the Disc’s largest city, sometimes on a street by street level. It’s packed to the gills with essential travel information, ads for imaginary businesses, tips on getting around, places to stay and amazingly, walking tours. There’s even a directory of wells and pumps, so that you may quench the imaginary thirst you worked up on your imaginary walking tour.

This is all down to the way Sir Terry thought about his creation. He liked the things that appeared in his world to work, and had a lot of fun with making fantasy tropes pay at least lip service to the laws of physics, or failing that, common sense. This had the fortunate side-effect of injecting the Discworld with a palpable sense of substance.

The maps aren’t the only artefacts to arrive here from the Discworld. There are children’s books by Discworldian authors, a farmer’s almanac, a cookbook, advertising posters and most recently, a railway guide as comprehensive as any edition of Bradshaw’s. Ever wanted to know which trains you need to take to travel from Quirm to Uberwald? Now you can find out. Ever fancied trying dwarf bread? Nanny Ogg has the recipe. You can even get an Ankh Morpork passport.

My own personal favourite bit of Discworld is the collection of stamps that came with the hardback of Going Postal. They are real stamps, printed on a real stamp press, on real stamp paper, because Sir Terry said, “If we’re doing this, we’re going to do it properly.” So they did, and made real stamps for an imaginary postal service. If you ever have the good fortune to meet the folks at the Discworld Emporium, ask them about the stamps. It’s a great story.

All of this would count for nothing if you couldn’t identify with the people who live on this flat imaginary world. Middle Earth for example has thousands of years of written history, several beautiful hand drawn maps and a grand narrative to tie them together. I would argue however that The Lord of the Rings can sometimes be a somewhat impersonal story of Dark Lords and Great Heroes. This is the point at which Middle Earth’s halo slips a little for me. I can’t really empathise with Dark Lords and Great Heroes, so the world feels less real to me as a result.

One of Pratchett’s solutions to this was to set his stories in an era of sweeping social change. The Dark Lords and Great Heroes are thus recast as old men left behind by the unstoppable march of progress. They become stubborn geriatrics battling arthritis and false teeth, too set in their ways to change, reminiscing about the good old days around a campfire on the steppes. The Dark Lords and Great Heroes suddenly become relatable. Who hasn’t looked around and felt like this sometimes?
Pratchett’s other stroke of genius was to inject a degree of recognisable normality into the lives of his characters. The denizens of the Disc have lives that go on even when they’re not featuring in a book. They grow and develop over the course of the series and often pass by in the background of other characters’ stories, getting on with their lives away from the metaphorical camera.

Discworld is often thought of as a series of funny fantasy books, which of course, it is. But it is also more than that. Pratchett always dealt with serious issues in his fiction, but he liked to have some fun with those issues along the way. To quote Neil Gaiman on Sir Terry, “The opposite of funny isn’t serious. The opposite of funny is not-funny.” You can be serious about something and laugh at its absurdity at the same time. Pratchett was a very funny man, but he understood that humour alone isn’t enough to carry a narrative. You need to have an irritant to create a pearl.

Sir Terry knew that just because a world is imaginary, it doesn’t mean its people wouldn’t have to deal with the kinds of things that we’d have to deal with in our own lives. Throughout Discworld’s forty-one novels, Pratchett’s characters have had to contend with problems as diverse as their first job, gender inequality, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, survivor’s guilt, incompetent management, rock n roll, new parenthood and the coming of the railways. And that’s just the small stuff. Sir Terry picked apart a lot of very big issues and delicately threaded them with stories featuring people that you could identify with and root for, whatever their shape. He weaved tales around themes of cultural identity, religious fundamentalism, racism, toxic nationalism, institutionalised religion, the futility of war, social justice, statesmanship, diplomacy, corrupt business, industrial revolution, football and what it means to be human. And that’s just scratching the surface.

It is this iron core of the real world around which the un-reality of the Discworld is formed. It is what ensures that the Discworld will continue to exist for myself and millions of fans around the world, even though Sir Terry Pratchett is gone. It is what makes the Disc feel not like an imaginary world, but a foreign country you can take an all-inclusive holiday to for the price of a paperback.

If you’ve never visited, why not take a trip? I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.

This piece was first published on the Waterstones.com blog and is saved here for posterity. All of the books I have mentioned and many more are available on the website and in store.