Sometimes corporate intrigue in the form of takeovers and shifting alliances ultimately benefits the consumer. This winter, you'll have two choices for whiling away the time in front of the television as you wait for the snow to clear: ATV Offroad Fury 3 and MX vs. ATV Unleashed. Try to stay with me as I tread the corporate video-game waters.
Rainbow Studios produced both ATV Offroad Fury and ATVOF2 for Sony in the early days of PlayStation 2. Needless to say, the company did a bang-up job of it and created two classic games, ones that are still fun to this day (Fury 2 even more than the original). In 2003, THQ acquired Rainbow Studios, in part, because it liked the video-game "engine" on which the Fury titles are based and wanted it for MX Unleashed.
MX Unleashed (a strictly two-wheeler game) bucked several trends in the video-game market in that it was a bona fide success. No other motocross game had broken the 500,000-unit barrier before (a best-seller was good for 300K or so), and it was mostly due to the realistic play from the Rainbow game engine, along with all the fun extras the Rainbow crew put into their games (in Fury 2 these included hockey, tag, king of the hill and the like).
It was time for Sony to release another title in the even-more wildly successful ATV Offroad Fury franchise (each has gone into Sony's Greatest Hits library, meaning sales of more than 1 million), but it had no developer. In came Climax. Maker of a forgettable ATV game, ATV: Quad Power Racing (and ATVQPR2), the company was, however, the only developer that wouldn't be starting from scratch. Sources tell us that to build a game engine from scratch can take about two years, thus it would have been way too long before a new installment in the series was released.
Note: We tried out both games in their prerelease states, so what we report on here may be slightly (or significantly) different from the final version.
ATV Offroad Fury 3 Switching developers in a successful series is done all the time in the video-game world, but the trick is to make it work. In many ways, the version of ATVOF3 that we previewed falls short of even Fury 2.
For the third rendition of the Fury series, someone thought it would be a good idea to get away from real-life ATVs and make fully customizable quads that can take a huge array of aftermarket accessories. The result is ATVs that look realistic but less than authentic. The same goes for the gear; while sporting logos of some of the big makers, the gear is far less detailed or accurate compared with Fury 2.
The overall graphics of ATVOF3 are strong, and large, pretty landscapes are at your disposal; the sound is also detailed and realistic. But game play is a bit slow, something the producer said is being worked on for the final version. One improvement over Fury 2 is that the human player no longer has a huge cornering advantage over the computer. In ATVOF2 all you really had to do to beat a computer player around a corner was push the stick in that direction, while now there is a new "slide" button. If you get into a corner hot and simply turn, you'll drift out (or flip over), kinda like what happens in real life ... that is, until you hit the slide button, which gets the machine drifting and squares off the corner a bit. It is not the most-instinctual thing to use, but it does make cornering require some skill at least.
Most of the rest of the controls will feel familiar to veterans of Fury 2: Preloading is the same action, and tricks are pulled in a similar manner. My four-year-old son accompanied me to the introduction, and he adapted very quickly and was pulling Disco Cans before we knew what hit us. Online play also returns for Fury 3.