Format: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Release date: 2000 – present day
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
The series peaked when the game exploded onto the Xbox Live Arcade, first with Trials HD, then Trials Evolution, my personal favourite of them all. Evolution introduced 4-player competitive modes, an excellent level editor and an online marketplace to download and share custom maps. It all worked seamlessly. Itbecame a favourite at the flat in Baldock, where my friends and I wiled away hours, taking turns to complete levels and strive to hoover up as many gold medals as we could. It usually fell to me to get the best scores, as for whatever reason I had spent the longest time playing it and seemed to have a knack for it that my friends didn’t. But I’m no match for some of the online masters. I couldn’t really finish any of the Extreme levels. My favourites are always in the ‘medium’ section. Big swooping ramps and giant leaps that flow smoothly into each other.
My friends created me a level, using the built in editor, to test my skill. I remember it fondly because they had spent an entire weekend building it. It started out with an infuriating bit Robbie nicknamed “Ride the Bomb”, because you spawned directly on top of a falling bomb and had to quickly accelerate and lean in the right way to flick the bomb away from you. Had we ever uploaded that map to the marketplace, people would have downvoted it instantly, because you would die at least 10 times before you figured out the method. But I loved that map, because my mates made it for me.
Also, Trials is one of the few games that I’ve enjoyed playing with my brother, Sam. He doesn’t play games but he is very much into extreme sports and whatnot, so he appreciated Trials, mostly coz of the accurate, if still ‘gamey’ physics. He was a natural at the game, thanks to his real-life understanding of bike physics, and it was fun for me to see him pick it up very quickly.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
Every so often, a film comes along that defines a generation – the original Star Wars trilogy amazed audiences back in the 70’s/early 80’s, Peter Jackson brought the Lord of the Rings books to life in ways nobody thought possible at the time, and James Cameron has created the biggest movie in the history of cinema in the form of Avatar. At the time of writing, according to IMDB, the film, which had a budget of around $300 million, has made nearly $3 billion profit making it easily the highest grossing movie of all time (Titanic, also directed by Cameron, is in second place with $1.8 billion). Say what you will of his storytelling, but the man knows how to make a groundbreaking sci-fi action masterpiece. I have now seen it three times – at the IMAX in 3D, at a regular cinema also in 3D, and I went and got the blu-ray last week and have just watched it in the comfort of my living room.
You may remember that a few months back, a little game called ‘Portal 2’ was released. It was no big deal or anything, just a sequel to an enormous cult success of a side-project game, which was only very slightly hyped up before release, so that a handful of people would be aware of it and maybe buy it later on. Of course – in true GLaDOS spirit – I’m lying, and it was one of the most cleverly hyped up games I have ever committed my wallet to. So naturally, when we finished that game, we did a review-thingy of the robotty co-op mode. Now, several months later, we’ve got round to trying out the brand new – and free! – Peer Review DLC, and spent roughly three hours completing the brain-melting puzzles that came with it.
Wow, this is a nice surprise! Valve just announced that on Monday we’ll be getting a new game – for free! Alien Swarm was originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and it was bloody fantastic. Featuring 4 player co-op, it was a top-down 3rd person shooter, in which teamwork was the only way to survive through the campaign. As the title suggests, the meat of the game was in fending off waves of nasty beasties with sharp claws, but there were also objectives to complete and a story to fight your way through. I have fond memories of being scared shitless trying to hack through a door while my friends shouted “they’re coming! oh god theres THOUSANDS!” down their mic’s.
Copyright © 2010 - 2026
Site designed and hosted by Tekamutt Media