There's a platter of free stuff going at Ubisoft this weekend. Post-apocalyptic online shooter The Division [official site], winter sports sim Steep [official site] and two-wheeling platformer Trials Fusion [official site] all available to play for diddly squat until 8pm on Sunday (UK time) through Ubisoft's Uplay client.
Now, I know some of these games are getting long in the tooth but there are probably some of you out there that, like me, have been meaning to play at least one of them but have never got round to it.
]]>Ubisoft surprise announced, then immediately surprise released, a new game last night: Trials Of The Blood Dragon [official site]. Combining Red Lynx’s long-running motorbike stunt platformer with their half-idea standalone Far Cry: Blood Dragon is a bold choice. And having played this towering turd all day, one I can understand their wanting to keep a secret for as long as possible. I’m a little surprised they acknowledged it after release. Here’s wot I think:
]]>Eagle-eyed database watchers have spotted traces of an Ubisoft game named Trials of the Blood Dragon listed by the Taiwanese software rating board. The listings have been pulled, but did reveal a logo and single screenshot which seemed to show, yep, a Trials game with the neon lighting of Far Cry 3's expandalone Blood Dragon. That's it. If it's real and happening, I'd expect more tricky Trials physics-based motorbike stunting but with neon lights. That's the news. If you want news, no need to read on.
Now let's gasbag about Turbo Kid and this fake '80s aesthetic we see so much of.
]]>My calendar tells me we're now over halfway through April. The Met Office tells me astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere started on March 20. Yet the weatherman told me yesterday that I can expect highs of a whopping nine degrees centigrade here in Glasgow this weekend. I'd swear it was still winter had the annual Uplay Spring Sale not kicked off this week, with big discounts on the likes of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 4, among others. Which others, you say? Find out after the drop.
]]>One of the more colourful highlights of the Ubisoft E3 press conference, amid all the brown and grey Tom Clancy titles, was a curious video that raised and dashed my hopes several times over before the end. It eventually turned out to be the announcement trailer for an upcoming expansion to Trials Fusion [official site], titled Awesome Level Mix. In which you play a gun-toting cat on the back of a fire-breathing unicorn. Obviously.
]]>Being in a motorbike accident is, I've been told, terrifying and awful, just awful, the pits, ugh, frightful, I really don't think you'd like it. Yet watching a motorbike accident is, I've seen on You've Been Framed, a rib-tickling barrel of laughs. Tempering the horror of the first with the joy of the second, Trials Fusion now has online multiplayer to go with its local play. Nine months after the game came out, you and seven other folks can finally zip, flip, and shatter your hips together.
]]>Ubisoft has released a bunch of info about multiplayer changes to its bikestravaganza, Trials Fusion. The update promises to add online multiplayer and to up the number of racers from four to eight.
Currently there's asynchronous leaderboardy business which has been part of Trials since the first game. There's also a local multiplayer option for four people. I gave it a bash at a preview event shortly before its release in April. and although fun it had a few problems, not least that if you were at the far end of the bank of racers everyone else would be obscuring your view.
]]>Motorbikes are pretty cool, right? I'd love to learn to ride, but two things give me pause: a story from a family friend about scraping scraps his own skin out his bike leathers after an accident, and the terrifying physics of video game motorbikes suggesting that I'd quickly end up there myself, knife in hand. Trials games probably haven't given the most realistic understanding of riding, mind.
As if competing with the tracks themselves, let alone on leaderboards, weren't already challenge enough, RedLynx have added a new mode to Trials Fusion. Tournaments returned from older games in a patch yesterday, with whole sets of tracks to compete across.
]]>I was ready to love Trials Fusion. Trials Evolution Gold Edition turned out to be the perfect game to play when I didn't have much time or didn't know what to play. It filled in the holes of a busy day or fixed a boring evening. I didn't care that it was only on Uplay, and I didn't suffer any the bugs that bogged it down a little in John's review. It's so good, so willing to be completely OTT, that it charmed the backwheel off me. Can Trials Fusion pull off the same trick? Here's wot I think.
]]>Aw, Redlynx and Ubisoft, you really shouldn't have. I know we've had our ups and downs (and loopty loops and explosions) in the past, but now you're releasing Trials Fusion the day before my birthday? You really didn't have to do that. One small quibble, though: you failed to include any mention of Nathan Grayson's Rad Birthday™ or the accompanying Impossibly Sexy Karaoke Partython anywhere in your trailer. No, no, calm down. I'm not angry with you. Everyone makes mistakes.
]]>Well, Caligula is that is indeed John Hurt on narration duties, and not a Hurtalike doing the whole gravel-voiced 'ooh, I was in Aliens and I, Claudius and The Elephant Man, and most recently I turned up as a possibly evil [REDACTED]' thing. I hope so, I quite like the idea of John Merrick intoning out of my monitor. Hurt, or Hurtalike, is applying his sandpapered tones to this footage of the latest in the Trials stunt bike/sado-masochism series, now called Fusion and taking itself to a futuristic city-in-the-sky setting. Apparently falling a couple of dozen feet into a gravel surface at 60MPH wasn't brutal enough - now we'll be plummeting about 100 stories.
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