Archive for July 2011
July 11, 2011 | 
Author I was in the store here the other day to buy a new game, and the clerk asked me if I would buy 1 year insurance for $2 dollars. I told her that I don’t need one as I’m always careful handling my games, then she told me one thing I didn’t know and that was that the xbox itself can destroy the disc/game.
I came home, looked it up on the Internet and there it was… a lot of people have actually come across this issue, so the more I read about this, the more I came to realise what usually make this happened.
How to notice if this has happened: First of all, the game won’t work when the disc reader come to a certain point on the disc, as it has burned a perfect circle in it (Usually in the middle).
How this happened:
There are at least 3 known ways that this will happen.
- Your xbox are standing vertical.
- You move the xbox with a disc inside.
- The xbox are standing on a shaky ground (like a carpet or something like that).
If this happens to a game that is less than 1 year old, Microsoft will most likely give you a refund for it. But don’t worry if it’s older than that, you can always try to use some fine car polish if you’re confident enough on you polishing skills, as you have to be very careful doing so. Or you can take it to your game shop for repair, the cost for this is about $2 bucks and up.
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Well, this is the most boring game I’ve tried and it feels like I’ve wasted a couple of days that I won’t get back again. I got to admit that I’m not a huge fan of cycling in general, but this doesn’t matter as the game itself are so bad that it shouldn’t even get to be an arcade game.
The tutorial is just a description of what the different meters are and so on, just like what they should have in the handbook anyway. In the options, there are only 3 options and it’s all about the sound, what about brightness and video options??? In the races the bicycle run on its own, that means that you only have make the decision if you should give more effort, attack/sprint and so on. This makes you loose the feeling of the game and it makes it less interesting to play. It’s like playing a racing game with cars like Forza for instance, and the cars just drive on their own and the only thing you can control is whether you should brake or not.
Well in Tour de France you don’t even have to think about steering the bike as it does that on it’s own as well, but you might fall off the bike if you get too far out on the side with high speed, unfortunately you can’t go off track. Oh, by the way, you can also use your team and give team orders if you’re not too far from them.
During the stages there are some simulation intervals and you can only sit and watch as it progress to the next “short stint” you can play, this means that you can’t play the whole stage. When you get to play again you’re either in the front or right back in the middle of the field again. No matter what your position was before the simulation took over.
The graphics are the one thing I can actually give Cyanide Studios credit for, well at least for the riders and the main visual effects. For instance the look of your opponents when their around you with fast pace can you see a kind of fast paced graphics as their kind of blurry around the riders to give you the impression of fast speed, the same also goes for the surroundings.
The music is a bit annoying and I had to turn it off pretty early in the game.
This would probably be a game that will suit those who have the interest for Tour de France or the bicycle sport in general, but it is not a game I can recommend to just anybody. The only thing that saved the game from a 1/10 rating was the graphics.
Rating: 2/10