Bargain/Bin

With no Scotland in Focus available this week due to technical problems our boys Brian and Phil feverishly worked through the night to get a fresh new Bargain/Bin ready for your delectation.

If you've not read Bargain/Bin before we find games for under a fiver and tell you whether, in leaner times, you should part with your cash.

This month we go back to driving games and found some "gems".

Motor Mayhem

Future sports games come in many forms and functions and Motor Mayhem enters you into Vehicle Combat League, a game show style league set on a huge spaceship because in the future you can afford such fripperies.
Named characters with "a past" and their machines take part in awesome motorised combat.

Groan of groans these characters have badly written complex histories explaining how they all interrelate. Did you really need to know that Incubus used to be a close friend of Corvalis during the Düvo War until Incubus was court marshalled for reasons that remain classified? Well did you? We know what classified means in these games: it means the developers ran out of ideas.

You may also have wondered why driving games were never combined with beat ‘em ups and, trust us, Motor Mayhem will teach you. Let's start with movement and ask whoever decided to map left, right, accelerate and reverse onto the same stick. Then you can use these plus other button to pull off combos. Somewhere, someone should write the big book of developers faux pas as mixing genres has rarely worked.

In gameplay as well dull is layered on dull as badly moving machines mash round massive arenas trying to find targets and winners are probably chosen by those who stayed awake due to coffee intake, which we needed to review this. Yes we have a variety of secondary weapons and other pick ups to "enjoy" but the whole vehicle and world seems to merely merge into a splurge of garish colour.

Yes colourful in that way all games trying to emulate pointless future sports were then Motor Mayhem drives directly for the...

Bin

Disney Pixar Cars

Love it or hate it Cars was a box office smash and a game came as no real surprise. It's a driving game too - again no problems here. For a late outing for the PS2 you expect something fabulous which also has opportunities for younger hands to get on the steering wheel when dad has gone to fix himself a chip butty.

A nice feature would be a game mode for younger players then and Cars has this, the main gameplay still being directed towards junior drivers. Any Racedriver: Grid fans looking for a further challenge best hop off as the child friendly colourful graphics, happy go lucky music and voices from the film take hold.

Film conversions tend to be a little hit or miss but Cars has many elements that make it adorable. There are good tutorials littered around a fairly vast map and lots of variety in mission types with some being completed on the way and others being something to hunt for whilst playing the rest of the game. Even though the mass of screen is basically desert yellow or sky blue the simple added scenery shows differing paths and shortcuts clearly aiding younger drivers.

The plot follows on nicely from the film too with all the main characters returning. After completing the first few races play moves on to the next Piston Cup. Here you have concerns like tyre wear and pit stops to consider but they add some fun.

It is good, but anyone older than their shoe size will find this driving game a surprisingly pedestrian affair. So this is one for the kids then, indeed any child old enough to hold down the X button will be entertained by Lightning McQueen bouncing around the scenery and we were too.

Bargain

Monster Jam: Maximum Destruction

As we greedily wrenched the game from the box we realised that Maximum Destruction had never been played yet it was still under £5. Remembering the last classic to achieve this status, Captain Scarlet, we sat with baited breath. The intro video showing real monster trucks didn't do anything to assuage our fears... Were they not happy to show the game engine in all its glory?

We started by choosing one of the funky/dumb monster trucks, some of which feature the names and colour schemes of Marvel comic characters! We tried to select one by looking at their stats but they seemed to say that each truck was basically the same so we just went with Wolverine to start with and tried a number of others as we played through the fascinating mode options.

OK possibly not that fascinating as loads of different modes attempt to make up for the lack of variety in vehicles. Modes include break as much stuff as you can in the time limit by crashing into it or collect as much stuff as you can in the time limit by driving into it and of course blow up as many Trucks up as you can by crashing into them first... in a time limit of course! Surprisingly it all started to feel a little samey.

There was a brief moment of hilarity where we reversed slowly and all the rest of the trucks drove off the map to let us win but it was brief.

The arenas try their best to keep things interesting with badly hidden passages linking all the big square rooms and weapons strewn around which you can pick up. On top of that there's little more to say.

Monster Jam is fun if you like dull and repetitive. We guess you don't?

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