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 What is this? Split/Second (also known in Europe as Split/Second: Velocity) is a 2010 action driving game developed by the now-defunct Black Rock Studio, who also developed 2008’s ATV-based Pure and a few of the ATV Offroad Fury games before it (as Climax Racing). Both of BRS’s games were published by Disney Interactive Studios for PS3 and 360, and received technically solid PC ports. Split/Second is a lot of things, but subtle and poised it is not. It draws you into a circus of mangled steel and fire in a way that a lot of the games of the time didn’t: with an original soundtrack and some excellent art direction. It’s loud, tasteless, and a great deal of fun for a game that’s all about things exploding, and I’d like to show it off to you. Who are you?  Diacorn: Drives on a combination of adrenaline and heartache. Knows how a sequential turbo works. Voted Most Likely to Careen Off Dead Man’s Curve in high school. Turtlicious: Mostly here to fill dead air. Has probably never been inside a car.Latest Episode     Latest Cars   What’s this LP going to look like? Split/Second is arranged into a remarkably LP-friendly set of 12 Episodes of the in-game Split/Second TV show. Each update will show off one Episode, which comes out to around 30 to 40 minutes of footage per update. As is tradition among LPers who are way better than me, I’ll be offering dual commentary, because not everyone wants to hear us talk over explosions. During the game, we’ll also unlock new cars, which I’ll include in the update. Every nice car needs a fresh coat of paint, though, so I’ll also put a set of swatches for each vehicle next to it so the thread can vote on what color each car looks best in. What’s your update schedule like? I’m aiming for, on average, two updates every three weeks, posted alternately on Sundays and the Wednesday of the week thereafter. Updates will happen in the evenings, Eastern time. This update schedule, while unusual, will hopefully give us more time in the thread to vote on our favorite paint jobs, and will provide some breathing room when the back half of the game becomes more challenging. Videos              Playlists   Body Count              Soundtracks! (Banners WIP) Official OST Fan-compiled OST Discord! (Also WIP) diacorn fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Feb 4, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2017 00:55
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Weirdly, Split/Second starts off slowly with a five-minute tutorial route designed to slowly introduce you to the driving mechanics and the premise of the game: we're trying out for the world's biggest game show in a dystopian future where the lucky participate in vehicle-based blood sport. These intrepid hopefuls race through the abandoned old world for the entertainment of billions. Among the empty bridges and skyscrapers, there is only death. diacorn fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 01:43
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Looks fun! Reminds me of an old game called Power Slide without the wall-running and better explosions.
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Sep 25, 2017 01:55
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New Cars          Body Count We get into the game proper! By the end of the episode, we've acquired a small stable of cars from all three of the game's fictional manufacturers, which I'll outline here.  Ryback is the game's American manufacturer, and is analoguous to the real-life Big Three: GM (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick), Ford (Lincoln, Mercury), and Chrysler (Dodge, RAM, and now Fiat since the merger in 2014). Like the Big Three, they produce a lot of loud, mean-looking modern muscle cars with two doors and large-displacement engines, but Ryback's lineup also includes several sports trucks. Ryback's sports cars tend to have solid all-around stats and are usually decently fast in a straight line, but their grip and handling can leave a lot to be desired. They take their time around corners, and they don't break loose as readily as you might expect given a tap or two on the brakes. That said, once you do get them to start drifting, they drift admirably. The Brawler and Mohawk both exemplify this type of handling. The manufacturer's trucks are somewhat similar, but they're bigger and they can shake off explosions and Power Plays like nothing else in the game, which makes them great for holding a lead. They also tend to have good top speeds, even if they take a while to get there. Cobretti is an Italian manufacturer, but their offerings draw from many other storied institutions of European motorsport. We start in the 455 GT, a light, thoroughbred sports coupe with a hydraulic wing and a bad attitude. In general, Cobrettis tend to put more emphasis on high-speed control than Rybacks do, and getting the most out of these cars means learning how to power out of your drifts and follow a good racing line. Hanzo is the last manufacturer, and represents the Japanese pantheon. Hanzos show up a little less frequently than Rybacks or Cobrettis do. Like a lot of Japanese vehicles from the Seventies onward, Hanzos get their horsepower from forced induction setups rather than raw displacement. This means that when you pilot a Hanzo, you need to be mindful of how much speed you're scrubbing off navigating turns and dodging explosions-- since turbo power generation tends to skew toward high RPMs, you need to keep the car in the power band. If you don't, you'll find it hard to get back up to race pace. That said, Hanzos are usually exceedingly well-balanced-- when you aren't drifting, these cars grip like nobody's business, meaning dodges and sudden condition changes are a lot easier to handle.
diacorn fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 02:11
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The main thing I remember about Split/Second is that this came out the same time as Blur, another arcade racer with power ups, which I liked more than this. I couldn't really explain why.
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Sep 25, 2017 03:34
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A Perfect Twist posted:Looks fun! Reminds me of an old game called Power Slide without the wall-running and better explosions. Unreal_One posted:The main thing I remember about Split/Second is that this came out the same time as Blur, another arcade racer with power ups, which I liked more than this. I couldn't really explain why. I would say that Split/Second has a more satisfying driving model (in that drifting wasn't worthwhile or fun at all in Blur unless you could Nitro out of the drift), but that Blur's powerup game was better balanced and more inventive.
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Sep 25, 2017 04:02
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Somebody start a body count  I'd definitely play more racing games if they were like this!
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Sep 25, 2017 05:56
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CommissarMega posted:Somebody start a body count
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Sep 25, 2017 06:05
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Nice! More racing LPs. If you want the thread tag changed to something else let me know, by the way.
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Sep 25, 2017 07:01
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nine-gear crow posted:Nice! More racing LPs.  , I'd appreciate it!
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Sep 25, 2017 07:09
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diacorn posted:I knew there was something I forgot to do. If you could change it to Done.
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Sep 25, 2017 07:17
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diacorn posted:I'll now be including a body count at the end of every update. I hope you're proud of yourself. Ahahaha yesss  How did this game not do better? Were there any super notable games being released at the time? Or was 2010 just not a good year for racing games?
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Sep 25, 2017 07:19
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nine-gear crow posted:Done. CommissarMega posted:How did this game not do better? Were there any super notable games being released at the time? Or was 2010 just not a good year for racing games? None of these games, however, held a candle to November's Hot Wheels Track Attack. diacorn fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 07:34
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diacorn posted:None of these games, however, held a candle to November's Hot Wheels Track Attack. That game certainly looks... promising I remember playing a different hot wheels game as a kid and it being pretty good
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Sep 25, 2017 09:55
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This game is glorious. And coming from the schmuck doing Carmageddeon, this makes me want a combo game now!
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Sep 25, 2017 18:02
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Dance Officer posted:I remember playing a different hot wheels game as a kid and it being pretty good berryjon posted:This game is glorious.
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Sep 26, 2017 01:43
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I don't remember there ever being a good hotwheels game, though I think real life cars should look more like Hotwheels.
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Oct 2, 2017 02:19
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Turtlicious posted:I don't remember there ever being a good hotwheels game, though I think real life cars should look more like Hotwheels. But then that would just be real life Mad Max.
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Oct 2, 2017 03:43
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Iiiii remember this game. It's pretty rad at first but halfway through you've seen and done every track and some of the later challenges are a bit obnoxiously difficult, so I never totally finished the game, just got right to the end. Might go back and try and finish it if I have time, maybe. E: Also Disney Interactive Studios made a few odd independent video games. For the most part they just made Disney tie-ins over the years, as you'd expect (with some notable ones like Aladdin and Tron 2.0), but around 2007-2010 they had this weird stretch of unrelated titles. They made a quadbike racing game, Pure, before Split/Second here, along with the Spectrobes series, which was basically Pokemon Archaeology In Space (and which I've been tempted to LP on occasion - it's surprisingly pretty good). And they made 2008's Turok, of all things, under the name Touchstone Games. ...But they haven't done that lately, I guess since none of these titles really made it big. The last major things they did were the Epic Mickey games, and Disney Infinity, their Skylanders-alike which tried to thrive in what's turned out to be a stretched-out fad more than anything. They laid off a quarter of their staff back in 2014, and restructured in 2016, and now most of what Disney Interactive does is various multimedia and web service stuff, they don't have any major video game projects in the pipeline as far as I can tell. Kind of unfortunate, they clearly had some talent and ambition going on ten years ago. Gyra_Solune fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 04:49
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VolticSurge posted:But then that would just be real life Mad Max. Don't be ridiculous. There would be an insufficient amount of skulls and spikes and really decorations that would make said vehicle look more at home on the cover of a heavy metal album.
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Oct 2, 2017 04:55
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Dr. Snark posted:Don't be ridiculous. There would be an insufficient amount of skulls and spikes and really decorations that would make said vehicle look more at home on the cover of a heavy metal album. No Doofwagon, no good.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:50
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I don't understand why racing sims exist when you could have games like Split Second with realistic-ish (haha not really but let's pretend) cars and constant giant explosions.
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Oct 3, 2017 07:59
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bewilderment posted:I don't understand why racing sims exist when you could have games like Split Second with realistic-ish (haha not really but let's pretend) cars and constant giant explosions. Racing sims probably exist for the same reason things like farming simulator, truck simulator, train simulator and forklift simulator exist. Which is to say who the hell even knows.
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Oct 3, 2017 08:43
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I'm just saying NASCAR would be infinitely more watchable if they had to run through loops like they're running through a stage in Sonic Mania.
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Oct 3, 2017 10:11
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New Cars   Body Count We take a wet and wild trip to the new dockyard set. The competition is starting to get fierce, which means that your opponents will be challenging you for every meter of these narrow roads. Fortunately the docks give you plenty of opportunities for mayhem, and even give you control of a few cranes in addition to the standard explosion fare. We're also finally starting to get some faster cars, as you can see by the swanky new reveal images. Both of these cars can be real workhorses at this stage of the season. In a sense, they're polar opposites, and the upcoming races will let us show how both of them can shine. The new Ryback Bandit is tough as nails and good in a straight line, given some time to warm up. It can cruise with the best, but it doesn't take well to rear-wheel-drive wrangling. On the other hand, the Cobretti GT RS absolutely does. It drifts like your typical Cobretti, fast and wide, but since the engine's in the back over the drive wheels, this one can actually grip and swerve like a Hanzo. I'm a huge fan of it. diacorn fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 02:54
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Talking about Sonic 06 is the little-known Level 3 Power Play that derails not only other racers, but the entire episode temporarily.
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Oct 5, 2017 22:22
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Everything about this second episode is good My only gripe is that they didn't include that mode where everything explodes- they will put those back in, right? Preferably alongside the Apache? Please say they do!
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Oct 6, 2017 01:53
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Dr. Snark posted:Don't be ridiculous. There would be an insufficient amount of skulls and spikes and really decorations that would make said vehicle look more at home on the cover of a heavy metal album.  Not all metal albums with cars have them done up in post-apocalyptic fashion. bewilderment posted:I don't understand why racing sims exist when you could have games like Split Second with realistic-ish (haha not really but let's pretend) cars and constant giant explosions. Split/Second is a great game by itself, but it's definitely not Your Dad's Racing Sim. Your Dad's Racing Sim was probably made by Simbin, and games of its type are targeted very clearly toward people who think Forza, Gran Turismo, and Project CARS are too casual. I've played several sims myself and have enjoyed them. In particular, I think Forza is just hardcore enough to have been challenging and engaging for me. That said, Forza had more to it that drew me in and kept me hooked. In particular, I did a lot of work with the graphical editor and enjoyed selling my wraps and liveries, as well as my tunes. I also ran with the drifting crowd during Forza 3. I think in an alternate universe where I didn't need explosions to keep the reptilian brain engaged, I'd probably be drawn to racing sims for the same reasons I'm drawn to driving light, responsive cars in the real world: the satisfaction of flawlessly performing a practiced mechanical skill. I also just like cars in general as amazing machines and reflections of the times and the people who drive them, and in that sense, I really don't care whether I get my car fix on the arcade or sim side of the racing-game spectrum. Turtlicious posted:I'm just saying NASCAR would be infinitely more watchable if they had to run through loops like they're running through a stage in Sonic Mania. MarquiseMindfang posted:Talking about Sonic 06 is the little-known Level 3 Power Play that derails not only other racers, but the entire episode temporarily. CommissarMega posted:Everything about this second episode is good There are plenty of Detonator events in the game, though, and you'll get to see me do all of them!
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Oct 6, 2017 03:03
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diacorn posted:The Apache is never able to set off Power Plays on track. Something tells me BRS probably made this decision after some internal trial-and-error. Well gently caress. I was hoping for that, or Apache/Detonator events. That said,  at more explosions in the future!
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Oct 6, 2017 04:07
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Sorry, catching up on the videos. It's Stig who has the Mohawk car. And just keep on blowing things up. Please!
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Oct 6, 2017 07:40
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berryjon posted:Sorry, catching up on the videos. I pledge to continue blowing stuff up for the LP forum. 
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Oct 8, 2017 16:49
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Fair enough. My interpretation of 'mohawk' is more 'spiky' than 'ridge'. But we are all correct. Therefore, on with the explosions!
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Oct 8, 2017 18:27
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I'll be honest, I'm not really feeling this game's over the top nature as much as other games I've played/seen. I'm enjoying your LP of it, don't get me wrong but the game itself seems like explosions are all it has and explosions can only get so big before they plateau. I generally prefer games that escalate in different directions like Driver: San Francisco (my favourite driving game). If I'd seen this first I'd probably have bought and enjoyed it, but I think Driver spoiled me on insanity in driving games because when that game went crazy it went crazy in all aspects while still remaining coherent. Still it's early days so maybe later levels will use the explosions in more interesting ways than just dropping the level on someone, although the shortcuts/track changes are really good and cleverly done. It may just be that I was never big on racing games in general though.
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Oct 8, 2017 20:49
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BioEnchanted posted:I'll be honest, I'm not really feeling this game's over the top nature as much as other games I've played/seen. I'm enjoying your LP of it, don't get me wrong but the game itself seems like explosions are all it has and explosions can only get so big before they plateau. I generally prefer games that escalate in different directions like Driver: San Francisco (my favourite driving game). If I'd seen this first I'd probably have bought and enjoyed it, but I think Driver spoiled me on insanity in driving games because when that game went crazy it went crazy in all aspects while still remaining coherent. Still it's early days so maybe later levels will use the explosions in more interesting ways than just dropping the level on someone, although the shortcuts/track changes are really good and cleverly done. I loved D:SF, but I also think that comparing it to Split/Second is apples-to-oranges. My experience with D:SF may have been a positive one, but I found that I had issues coming to grips with the main mechanic of the game because of the generality of its application. The game gave me broad objectives, but because I didn't get a lot of exposure to any particular use case of my car-jacking superpower, I never became especially proficient and comfortable with it. For example, it took me a long time to learn what sorts of spots were good to use oncoming traffic to wreck rivals at during team race events, or how to deal with the large black cars trying to blow up the armored truck I was trying to protect in the defense activities. Because S/S is such a simple game, I became instantly comfortable with it, and I've found it a lot easier to just drive well in S/S compared to D:SF. I actually considered doing a D:SF LP as well, but I have several concerns about that project:
diacorn fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Oct 9, 2017 |
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Oct 9, 2017 01:41
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New Cars   Body Count We introduce a new game mode and pop off to a new set! In this episode, we wreck a lot of stuff and pick up a "secret" badge. These badges are sort of like hidden achievements, in that you don't see the criteria for obtaining them until after you've done it. Most of these are tied to using certain Power Plays or doing other Really Cool Stuff. You can tell who knows their way around the game by seeing what decals they have on their cars in this way. Fortunately, we've gotten our hands on a couple new cars that will set us up well for the coming challenges. The Cobretti Nero GT400's in-game blurb describes it as a Euro muscle car, which is about right. However, it handles less like a Ryback muscle car and more like a Ryback truck, because it's all-wheel-drive and sticks. AWD means it doesn't drift so much as it does shallow power-slide, which tend to correct themselves if you don't do anything. Also, we've unlocked the Cobretti Vortex, which is totally not a Lamborghini. This is the first car we've gotten that's ridiculously easy to drift, which comes partly from the speed and acceleration. Even if you took those away, however, it would still slide around like it's on ice, which makes it good for wider tracks like Construction Site where you can keep it going in a relatively straight line. A couple corrections to make in this video:
diacorn fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 15, 2017 22:15
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1. Bass-the-fish rhymes with 'rear end'. 2. Porsche has only one syllable ('porsh'), not two. 
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Oct 15, 2017 23:19
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Aerdan posted:2. Porsche has only one syllable ('porsh'), not two. True, if you don't know how to pronounce German words. 
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Oct 16, 2017 00:23
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God Almighty, but that was an awesome episode  That triple kill with the yacht was magnificent!
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Oct 16, 2017 15:04
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Port Bridge is absolutely my favourite track. The yacht is an amazing power play and that final corner is so goddamn satifsying to drift.
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Oct 17, 2017 00:52
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Dropping by to say this game rules and perfects its absurd aesthetic. The escalating soundtrack courtesy of Marc Canham and Richard Aitkin is a favourite feature of mine as well, and you can get it on Soundcloud pretty easily if you want to hear it. Though the thing I am looking most forward to is fighting back against helicopters. Keep up the delightful LP!
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Oct 18, 2017 02:31
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